by Timothy Egan
The vigilantes suspected Plummer was stealing from coaches carrying gold dust. They had no hard evidence of this. Just rumors. People said things. Also, he’d deputized men known to be outlaws. But none of this was presented before a jury, or subject to a trial, or even explained to Sheriff Plummer before his neck was snapped. After forming the Vigilance Committee, two dozen men swore out an oath: “We the undersigned uniting ourselves in a party for the laudable purpos of arresting thievs & murderers & recovering stollen property do pledge ourselves upon our sacred honor each to all others & solemnly swear that we will reveal no secrets, violate no laws of right & never desert each other or our standard of justice so help us God as our witness our hand & seal this 23rd of December 1863.”
The “laws of right” weren’t written down. Right was what the Vigilance Committee, meeting in secret, judged to be right. Their ranks included a banker, a storekeeper, a few merchants, at least one lawyer and assorted pioneers, but no speller, apparently. The committee had formed after one man had been hanged without legal trial—sent to his ignoble grave with the authoritative words, “Men, do your duty.” Sheriff Plummer was the third victim. On a day when the temperature dropped to thirty below zero, Plummer was dragged from a cabin, bound and marched to an execution site. Wilbur Sanders, an attorney, the leading voice of the Vigilance Committee, joined the abductors at the moment of the killing. Stone-faced, he addressed the sheriff. “It is useless for you to beg for your life,” he said. “You are to be hanged. You cannot feel harder about it than I do, but I cannot help it if I could.” Plummer still begged. Just a year or so earlier, he’d opened his home and his town to Sanders and Edgerton, given them Thanksgiving dinner. What were the charges? He had the right to a trial. At the gallows, the rope was tied around Plummer’s neck and pulled tight. The doomed man asked for a good drop.
Killing the sheriff seemed to whet the appetite of the vigilantes for more summary executions. A few hours later, they decided to murder José Pizanthia, called “the Greaser.” His crime? He was a Mexican, unlikable, with a temper and no friends and bad intentions. Everyone said so. When the righteous mob tried to break into Pizanthia’s little cabin, he fought back in self-defense, firing at the home invaders. Two men were wounded. The commotion attracted a bigger crowd; they went to the house of Sidney Edgerton to fetch a small howitzer. With the big gun, the men blew open the Mexican’s shack. Storming inside, they found Pizanthia on the floor and filled him with bullets. His body was dragged across the ground outside and strung up for all to see. But they weren’t done yet. People were invited to take shots at the dangling corpse, while others burned his house down. Another suggestion followed. “A proposition to burn the Mexican was received with a shout of exultation,” wrote an early chronicler of the vigilantes. When the fire was stoked to a high blaze, Pizanthia’s body was thrown atop it and charred to a crisp. By the end of that month, twenty people had been killed after being targeted by the Vigilance Committee.
Meagher knew nothing of these citizen-sanctioned murders. He had only just arrived in the territory. But here, meet one of the good men. Governor Edgerton introduced him to his nephew, Wilbur Sanders—the same Wilbur Sanders who was the guiding voice and moral authority behind the wave of hangings, burnings and assorted homicides committed under the cover of do-it-yourself justice. He’d been the nominal prosecutor, and it was he who commanded, “Men, do your duty.” San-ders, like his uncle, was a radical Republican—favoring revenge and repression against the conquered Confederacy, taking a much harsher view than Lincoln had. He expected that the new territorial secretary would be a political fellow traveler; after all, Meagher had broken with his party and his fellow Irish to support the former president. Montana was full of Democrats, Sanders explained. They were all “rebels and traitors,” as he called them, “unfit to exercise the right of self-government.” And given that Meagher had made headlines a few months earlier by supporting the one thing that many Democrats feared most—granting ex-slaves full citizenship and the right to vote—Meagher was urged to keep his distance from the opposition. That is, if he wanted to govern effectively.
Govern? Yes, Edgerton had more news, more jarring: he would be leaving on the very stage that had brought Meagher into town. He was taking his family east, away to school for his daughter. Did President Johnson know about this? Was the leave authorized? No. Edgerton was fleeing the territory without permission. And fleeing in haste. But for how long? Would he be returning? He offered no assurances. And one more thing: finances. There were none. No money from the federal government, yet, for building roads. No money for erecting public buildings. No money for raising a militia or bargaining with the Indians. And no money for salaries, Meagher’s included. With that, Edgerton handed Meagher a sheaf of official documents, wished him the best of luck and disappeared. He would not return for twenty-five years. Meagher, then, would be governor of Montana Territory, an Irish fugitive overseeing an area twice as large as England. Acting Governor Thomas Francis Meagher, as of, oh . . . now.
With the formal papers of the territory packed into his saddlebag, Meagher rode to the new capital of Virginia City, seventy-five miles to the east. Over eleven hours, he crossed Rattlesnake Creek, trotted over khaki-colored foothills and fields, then went on to Stinkingwater River, named for the sulfuric hot springs that bubbled up at its edge. Anyone settling in New Ireland would have to get used to brown shock, as the summer sun bleached green from the land. When the skies weren’t threatening snow, the temperature could climb to a hundred degrees. Down Stinkingwater, he angled toward Alder Gulch and Virginia City. There he was met with another shock, this one unrelated to color. The gulch no longer had any alder trees; it was cluttered with garbage, toilet pits, soiled bits of clothing and blankets, ramshackle sheds and broken picks. The ground had been clawed open, as if by a village of vision-impaired prairie dogs, and never resealed. The “city” was thrown together on high ground, 5,761 feet above sea level, like dice on an uneven table that tilted down toward the gulch. A drunk could roll, unassisted, from the center of the main street to the gulch. Many did. Flies buzzed around manure piles. Rats scurried under the planks of boardwalks, the main reason that a cat was a prized commodity, a single animal selling for $100. Buildings were in various stages of rising and falling, some painted, most not. A saloon owner had recently burned his bar down to get at the gold dust that had filtered through the floorboards.
After a year of relative quiet, the vigilantes had issued another spree of death sentences in the days leading up to Meagher’s arrival, even though a new federal judge, Hezekiah Hosmer, had tried to dissuade them. “Let us inflict no more midnight executions,” the judge scolded the settlers, after reassuring them that all prior extrajudicial killings would be forgiven. But establishing the rule of law in a lawless territory was much harder than proclaiming it. The mayor of Virginia City, Paris Pfouts, the man who’d laid out the town, was also president of the Vigilance Committee. On September 15, an unfortunate traveler named Jack Howard was hanged, with a sign pinned to his body: “Robber.” On September 18, Tommy Cooke was strung from a tree in Helena, to the north. “Pickpocket” was the label placed on his body. Pickpocket! Not even England hanged a pickpocket. And on September 27, the day before Meagher rode into town, a pair of men were executed in Virginia City. James Miller noted the ghastly scene in his diary:
“Two men found hanging in the air this morning up the gulch a little bit with a card on their backs on which were the words ‘Hung by the Vigilance Committee for being road agents.’”
The executions were approvingly recorded in the pages of Thomas Dimsdale’s Montana Post. He would soon be serializing a history of the vigilantes, painting them not as murderers or lawbreakers, but as heroes. To those who objected to a secretive clutch of men deciding who could live and who could die in a territory under the flag of a constitutional republic, Dimsdale explained that the vigilantes were justified “even if the sun of every morning should rise upon the morbid
picture of a malefactor dangling in the air.”
The editor welcomed Meagher to Virginia City, the prickly and fastidious Englishman trying to co-opt the Irish revolutionary. Just don’t make any waves. As for home, Meagher would eventually settle into a log cabin, about 500 square feet of pine patched with mud and clay, slightly off plumb, dark inside but for a few small windows, a block from the main street—the governor’s mansion, formerly a butcher shop. Most of the animal blood and viscera had been scrubbed from the floor and walls. But before Libby arrived in the spring, he would have to do something about the mice.
When word spread that the new man in charge of the territory had hitched his horse to a Virginia City post, Irish miners, laborers and servants popped out of the gold diggings and dingy kitchens to greet the orator. His fame had grown since the surrender of the Confederacy, even as his soul sagged. The Irish Brigade, it was said on both sides of the conflict, had been one of the best fighting units in the war. In a long interview, Robert E. Lee singled out the Irish warriors and gave particular praise to General Meagher. Lee recalled the slaughter of immigrants trying to overtake the rebel line behind the rock wall above Fredericksburg. The Confederates mowed them down, and yet they kept coming, Lee marveled. “Never were men so brave,” he said. “Their brilliant and hopeless assaults upon our lines excited the hearty applause of my officers and soldiers, and General Hill exclaimed, ‘There are those damned green flags again.’” Hearty applause? Meagher had a different set of emotional memories of Fredericksburg, not of high-minded military gallantry. Still, his name was starting to be burnished into legend.
Meagher’s cabin in Virginia City, Montana, which he and his wife jestingly called the “gubernatorial mansion.” Meagher intended to find his fortune in the territory but was drawn into another cause, against the vigilante forces who opposed him there.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
To Meagher’s surprise, there were Fenians in this tumbledown town tucked in a crease of the mighty Rockies. Dozens of them, and very open about hatred of their country’s oppressor. Also, the Irish of the territory counted among their ranks a world-class boxer, Hugh O’Neil. Earlier in the year, he was in the ring for the biggest cultural event in the territory, taking on an oversized saloon owner. A promoter charged $10 a seat to watch the brawl; it drew people from hundreds of miles around. Twice, O’Neil knocked his opponent down. Still, after 185 rounds, the referee called it a draw. Fenians and prizefighters—the foundations of New Ireland. They organized a welcome party. In a torchlight parade punctuated by songs in defiance of England and love of the old country, the Fenians walked from one end of Alder Gulch to the other, finishing with a grand assembly in town. They carried banners that marked the year of the Young Ireland uprising. The general was touched. He gave them a taste of his oratorical skills—rusty after months out of the public eye—and pledged to govern in a fair way. The editor, Dimsdale, frowned on the Fenians in his midst, questioning their patriotism and telling his readers that the rebellion of 1848 was, in fact, a miserable failure.
As the days grew shorter, Virginia City became ever more claustrophobic. It was crowded with gossip and intrigue, grim-faced gamblers trying to fool prospectors in all-night games of three-card monte and walls holding the smell of stale cigar smoke. The town could not have been more isolated, pinned in by mountains and weather, without a telegraph connection or regular stagecoach. Earlier in the year, in the desolation of late winter, Virginia City had run out of food. A mob stormed a dry goods store and made off with sacks of flour, gunfire at their rear. Fending off loneliness and fears that he had removed himself from anyplace that mattered, Meagher threw himself into governing. With his goose quill pen in perpetual motion, he fired off letters and orders on stationery stamped “Executive Office, Montana Territory.” He made plans for public schools free of religious bias, angering Dimsdale, who doubled as the superintendent of education, and had insisted that the King James Bible be part of a child’s curriculum. Dutifully at first, and then less frequently, Meagher consulted with the right-thinking citizens. A cultural crack grew to a chasm. The most prominent vigilantes and Republican leaders were also Freemasons. Their leader, Wilbur Sanders, was the Right Worshipful Grand Master of Virginia City’s Masonic Lodge. The Masons and vigilantes were coconspirators in a raft of executions. The Masons had taken a sacred oath. “We knew each other by outward signs and met each other as brothers,” wrote a founder of Montana’s Freemasons. Their stated goal was “the protection, improvement and purification of our little society.” In practice, that translated to meetings that were boiler room hot with anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant rhetorical steam.
In Montana, the biggest question of the day was whether to convene a territorial legislature. The acting governor was urged by Sanders not to call a session or a convention that might lead to statehood, because it would be dominated by Democrats. At first Meagher agreed with the right-thinkers. Then he changed his mind, which infuriated them. He further aggravated the territorial elite by taking a strong position against granting monopolies to a handful of businessmen (including vigilantes) for steamboat navigation and ownership of wagon trails. Roads and riverways belonged to all the people, Meagher insisted.
Viewed with suspicion when he arrived, Meagher was, by midfall, an enemy of the secretive syndicate that had been running Montana by terror. They started a smear campaign, planting rumors of the acting governor as a besotted whoremonger. “On his arrival in Virginia City he became intoxicated and remained so for a number of days in his room polluting his bed and person in the most indecent and disgusting manner,” one Republican attorney, William Chumaserro, claimed in letter to an influential U.S. senator. The Irishman, he wrote, “is beastly and filthy in the extreme,” exhibiting all “the natural proclivities of the people from whom he sprang.” Neutral observers saw a different Thomas Meagher—a drinker, yes, but a bon vivant and man of words who brought a dollop of elegance to a debauched town. In this latest chance to make a mark and build a life, Meagher’s love of argument and a good fight was revived. But Chumaserro’s opinion counted: he was the brother-in-law of Wilbur Sanders. In no time, Meagher’s enemies wore him down.
Nature restored him. The sky overhead, especially at night, was an antidote to the indoor assaults on his character. Through the fall, stands of aspen trees glowed during weeks of balmy days. There was frost on the ground in the morning, the air cutting and crisp, but the afternoons warmed to shirt-sleeve weather. The land itself beckoned possibility, with views from the territorial capital that stretched to the Ruby Range in one direction, the summits of the Madison in the other. On long rides to inspect the province under his authority, Meagher reveled in the hurried rituals of the natural world at the curtain-time of the year—rivers snap-happy with fat trout, herds of elk gorging on stiff grass, nimble-limbed pronghorn springing over fields, an osprey alighting on the bundled branches of a nest. Falling asleep at night as winter approached, wrapped in animal fur, Meagher could stare up at jolting flashes of fluorescent green—the aurora borealis. “Nothing delights me so much as being on horseback,” he wrote.
In late November, Meagher and a party of five set out to visit Jesuit missions, en route to Fort Benton on the Missouri. They followed the Madison north, camping one night not far from where three rivers formed the big artery that would feed into the Father of Waters. In fresh-hatched Helena, Meagher was amused by the tent town of shacks and groggeries that were staked to Last Chance Gulch. “Every collection of log huts is called a city in this ambitious country,” he wrote, recounting the journey in a long letter to Father De Smet, the much-traveled Jesuit of the West. As he rode north of Helena, the sky darkened and the temperature plunged. Meagher was exuberant, in constant patter even as snow started to fall. At dusk, the travelers found the log home of Paul Vermet, a former trapper. He threw together a stew of mountain sheep meat and brewed up pots of coffee. The wind raged, throwing snow against the cabin walls. The drama outside stirred Meagher�
�s need for interior drama. Their host had a tattered book of Shakespeare. Lucky man, Meagher pronounced himself. He bundled up in his bison robe, with a saddle for a pillow, and read The Tempest deep into the night. Montana was starting to grow on him.
“It is a perfectly beautiful and delightful country, singularly rich and singularly grand,” he wrote his friend George Pepper, the Irish Protestant minister from Ulster, now living in Ohio. “We have too great a preponderance of Yankee blood out here. I want to see a strong infusion of the rich, red, generous royal Celtic blood to counteract the acidity and poverty of the other.” In the West a man could start clean, and find his self-respect in a patch of ground to call his own. “Come out to Montana—take up and fence in your one hundred and sixty acres, under the Homestead Act, in one of our wonderfully fertile, abundantly-watered, and well-timbered valleys . . . You will feel yourself a new man, and an American citizen in full.” The last sentence was as much a self-description as a recruitment pitch.
More wonders lay ahead. Near the end of the Fort Benton journey, Meagher’s party spent three days waiting out a snowstorm under the big tent of Father Xavier Kuppens, a tall, charismatic Belgian Jesuit who’d been working with the Blackfeet. The priest cooked up dinners of prairie hen and rabbit, his coffee laced with eau de vie. From the Indians, the priest had heard about a place with towering geysers, steep, gold-plated canyons and white crystalized formations that looked like wedding cakes the size of buildings—Yellowstone. He then saw it with his own eyes. Nothing in Europe could compare. “I spoke to [Meagher] about the wonders of Yellowstone,” the priest recalled. “His interest was greatly aroused by my recital.” The acting governor was eager to see such a thing. If true, he told Father Kuppens, he would do everything in his power to ensure that this American spectacle of fire and steam would become a park.