Montana: Stories of the Land
Companion Website and Online Teacher's Guide
Chapter 6 - Montana's Gold and Silver Boom, 1862-1893
Chapter 1 - Montana: Where the Land Writes History
Chapter 2 - People of the Dog Days
Chapter 3 - From Dog Days to Horse Warriors
Chapter 4 - Newcomers Explore the Region
Chapter 5 - Beaver, Bison, and Black Robes
Chapter 6 - Montana's Gold and Silver Boom
Chapter 7 - Two Worlds Collide
Chapter 8 - Livestock and the Open Range
Chapter 9 - Railroads Link Montana to the Nation
Chapter 10 - Politics and the Copper Kings
Chapter 11 - The Early Reservation Years
Chapter 12 - Logging in the "High Lonesome"
Chapter 13 - Homesteading This Dry Land
Chapter 14 - Towns Have Lives, Too
Chapter 15 - Progressive Montana
Chapter 16 - Montana and World War I
Chapter 17 - Montanans on the Move
Chapter 18 - The Great Depression Transforms Montana
Chapter 19 - World War II in Montana
Chapter 20 - Building a New Montana
Chapter 21 - A People's Constitution
Chapter 22 - Living in a New Montana
More on Vigilantes/Vigilantism
Vigilantes in the nineteenth-century American West formed self-appointed groups, or committees, to seize the duties of law enforcement and judicial authority in situations when citizens found law enforcement lacking or inadequate. These groups acted outside the normal structure of frontier government. Many such groups formed at different times and places in Montana. Committees targeted men suspected of threatening citizens' life and property. Vigilante groups held mock trials of the accused followed quickly by hanging or banishment. An effective vigilante group usually caused more criminals to flee than it hanged and left the community safer and more orderly.
Most mainstream historians make a distinction between the vigilantes who organized in the early 1860s and vigilante groups who were active in the 1880s after the territory had developed more extensive law-enforcement infrastructure. In addition, over the last twenty years, a group of historians known as "Revisionists" have challenged the motives of the Montana vigilantes that operated in Bannack-Virginia City between 1862 and 1863. R. E. Mather and F. E. Boswell's Hanging the Sheriff: A Biography of Henry Plummer (Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1987) was the first of several works to explore this idea. The Revisionists key much of their argument on the innocence of Bannack's Sheriff Henry Plummer, hanged by vigilantes in January 1863. Revisionists charge that the vigilantes used their power to eliminate their own political enemies. Traditionalists (mainstream historians) charge that Revisionist history is highly subjective and ignores pertinent information and historical research practices. Among recent "traditionalist" scholarship is A Decent, Orderly Lynching: The Montana Vigilantes, by Frederick Allen (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004).
