The Outlaw of the Mountains--_The Gold Stampedes of the '60's_--_Armed
Bandits of the Mountain Mining Camps_.
The greatest of American gold stampedes, and perhaps the greatest of the
world, not even excepting that of Australia, was that following upon the
discovery of gold in California. For twenty years all the West was mad
for gold. No other way would serve but the digging of wealth directly
from the soil. Agriculture was too slow, commerce too tame, to satisfy
the bold population of the frontier. The history of the first struggle
for mining claims in California--one stampede after another, as this,
that and the other "strike" was reported in new localities--was repeated
all over the vast region of the auriferous mountain lands lying between
the plains and California, which were swiftly prospected by men who had
now learned well the prospector's trade. The gold-hunters lapped back on
their own trails, and, no longer content with California, began to
prospect lower Oregon, upper Idaho, and Western Montana. Walla Walla was
a supply point for a time. Florence was a great mountain market, and
Lewiston. One district after another sprang into prominence, to fade
away after a year or two of feverish life. The placers near Bannack
caught a wild set of men, who surged back from California. Oro Fino was
a temporary capital; then the fabulously rich placer which made Alder
Gulch one of the quickly perished but still unforgotten diggings.
The flat valley of this latter gulch housed several "towns," but was
really for a dozen miles a continuous string of miners' cabins. The city
of Helena is built on the tailings of these placer washings, and its
streets are literally paved with gold even to-day. Here in 1863, while
the great conflict between North and South was raging, a great community
of wild men, not organized into anything fit to be called society,
divided and fought bitterly for control of the apparently exhaustless
wealth which came pouring from the virgin mines. These clashing
factions repeated, in intensified form, the history of California. They
were even more utterly cut off from all the world. Letters and papers
from the states had to reach the mountains by way of California, via the
Horn or the Isthmus. Touch with the older civilization was utterly lost;
of law there was none.
Upon the social horizon now appeared the sinister figure of the trained
desperado, the professional bad man. The business of outlawry was turned
into a profession, one highly organized, relatively safe and extremely
lucrative. There was wealth to be had for the asking or the taking. Each
miner had his buckskin purse filled with native gold. This dust was like
all other dust. It could not be traced nor identified; and the old
saying, "'Twas mine, 'tis his," might here of all places in the world
most easily become true. Checks, drafts, currency as we know it now, all
the means by which civilized men keep record of their property
transactions, were unknown. The gold-scales established the only
currency, and each man was his own banker, obliged to be his own peace
officer, and the defender of his own property.
Now our desperado appeared, the man who had killed his man, or, more
likely, several men, and who had not been held sternly to an accounting
for his acts; the man with the six-shooter and the skill to use it more
swiftly and accurately than the average man; the man with the mind which
did not scruple at murder. He found much to encourage him, little to
oppose him. "The crowd from both East and West had now arrived. The town
was full of gold-hunters. Expectation lighted up the countenance of
every new-comer. Few had yet realized the utter despair of failure in a
mining camp. In the presence of vice in all its forms, men who were
staid and exemplary at home laid aside their morality like a useless
garment, and yielded to the seductive influences spread for their ruin.
The gambling-shops and hurdy-gurdy saloons--beheld for the first time by
many of these fortune-seekers--lured them on step by step, until many of
them abandoned all thought of the object they had in pursuit for lives
of shameful and criminal indulgence. The condition of society thus
produced was fatal to all attempts at organization, either for
protection or good order."
Yet the same condition made opportunity for those who did not wish to
see a society established. Wherever the law-abiding did not organize,
the bandits did; and the strength of their party, the breadth and
boldness of its operations, and the length of time it carried on its
unmolested operations, form one of the most extraordinary incidents in
American history. They killed, robbed, and terrorized over hundreds of
miles of mountain country, for years setting at defiance all attempts at
their restraint. They recognized no command except that of their
"chief," whose title was always open to contest, and who gained his own
position only by being more skilful, more bloodthirsty, and more
unscrupulous than his fellows.
Henry Plummer, the most important captain of these cutthroats of the
mountains, had a hundred or more men in his widely scattered criminal
confederacy. More than one hundred murders were committed by these
banditti in the space of three years. Many others were, without doubt,
committed and never traced. Dead bodies were common in those hills, and
often were unidentified. The wanderer from the States usually kept his
own counsel. None knew who his family might be; and that family,
missing a member who disappeared into the maw of the great West of that
day of danger, might never know the fate of the one mysteriously
vanished.
These robbers had their confederates scattered in all ranks of life.
Plummer himself was sheriff of his county, and had confederates in
deputies or city marshals. This was a strange feature of this old
desperadoism in the West--it paraded often in the guise of the law. We
shall find further instances of this same phenomenon. Employés, friends,
officials--there was none that one might trust. The organization of the
robbers even extended to the stage lines, and a regular system of
communication existed by which the allies advised each other when and
where such and such a passenger was going, with such and such an amount
of gold upon him. The holding up of the stage was something regularly
expected, and the traveler who had any money or valuables drew a long
breath when he reached a region where there was really a protecting law.
Men were shot down in the streets on little or no provocation, and the
murderer boasted of his crime and defied punishment. The dance-halls
were run day and night. The drinking of whiskey, and, moreover, bad
whiskey, was a thing universal. Vice was everywhere and virtue was not.
Those few who had an aim and an ambition in life were long in the
minority and, in the welter of a general license, they might not
recognize each other and join hands. Murder and pillage ruled, until at
length the spirit of law and order, born anew of necessity, grew and
gained power as it did in most early communities of the West. How these
things in time took place may best be seen by reference to the bloody
biographies of some of the most reckless desperadoes ever seen in any
land.