THE VIGILANTES OF MONTANA

Hardback. Facsimile Reprint. One of the Classics of the Old West Series. In 1863, the year in which the author's book begins, justice around Virginia City was dubious at best. Thousands of dollars a day in gold were being taken out of the ground, and the region swarmed with miners, gamblers, saloonkeepers, dance-hall girls and out-and-out criminals. It often seemed the criminals were better organised than the law-abiding citizens. Henry Plummer, a thief and murderer with a gaudy criminal record elsewhere in the country, moved into the mining area on the heels of the gold strikes. He saw his opportunity, organised a gang of highway robbers - or "road agents," as they were then called - and soon got himself elected sheriff. A series of particularly offensive crimes against life and property, all unpunished, goaded the honest citizens into forming a Vigilance Committee. In less than a month, from two days before Christmas, 1863, to mid-January, 1864, all of the most notorious members of Plummer's gang, including Plummer himself, had been captured, tried and hanged. A few months' follow-up work made Virginia City one of the safest spots in the mining states and territories. In this book, the author tells how the road agents were organised, and how the vigilantes disposed of them. He minces no words - certainly not when describing what the well-equipped vigilante should carry: "a pair of revolvers, a rifle or shotgun, blankets and some rope." The author became superintendent of public instruction in Montana and editor of the state's first important newspaper. This was the first book published in the Montana Territory. Shortly after its appearance in 1866, the author died, aged 35. That such a "gentle, kind-hearted Christian man," as the rancher Granville Stuart eulogised him, should have left behind so vivid a record of the brutalities of frontier justice and criminality is one of the many paradoxes of the Wild West at its wildest. From the library of true crime writer, Wilfred Gregg, with his personal b/plate. Leather-bound volume, aeg with ribbon bookmark. F. - dw. not required.