Bannack, Montana: The Gold Camp That Hanged Its Sheriff

01Gold on Grasshopper Creek

In the summer of 1862, a prospector named John White and his companions found gold in the gravels of Grasshopper Creek, in what is now Beaverhead County. Others soon made similar finds. By winter about 400 people had gathered at the diggings. By the spring of 1863 there were roughly 3,000. Granville Stuart, who would become one of Montana's best-known pioneers, thought Bannack was the place to be. That April, James Sheehan loaded his family into a wagon and set out for the new "diggings in Bannack." His daughter Mary later wrote about the journey in her memoir, Girl from the Gulches.

The camp took its name from the Bannock people, though the spelling never settled. When the post office name was submitted on November 21, 1863, the "O" was mistakenly changed to an "A." The confusion did not end there. A mining town called Bannock City in Idaho shared the name, and letters meant for one often went to the other.

Bannack was more than a cluster of tents and sluice boxes. At its height it had three hotels, three bakeries, three blacksmith shops, two stables, two meat markets, a grocery, a restaurant, a brewery, a billiard hall and four saloons. When Congress created Montana Territory on May 26, 1864, Bannack became its first capital. The honor did not last. A richer strike at Alder Gulch, about 70 miles to the east, was already drawing miners away, and James Sheehan hauled the first wagonload of freight there. By February 1865 the capital had moved to Virginia City.

02How Did Bannack's Sheriff End Up on the Gallows?

Henry Plummer's story in Bannack begins with a killing. On January 14, 1863, in the saloon of the Goodrich Hotel, Plummer faced Jack Cleveland, a man described as his old enemy. Cleveland was drunk, and many in camp suspected him of robbing and killing a young man named George Evans. According to historians Mather and Boswell, Plummer first fired into the ceiling. Cleveland drew, and Plummer was faster. As Cleveland lay wounded, he reportedly asked, "You won't shoot me when I'm down?" He died about three hours later in the home of Hank Crawford, a butcher, who arranged his burial. A miners' jury acquitted Plummer.

Crawford feared Plummer believed Cleveland had told him secrets before he died. The two men soon became rivals for the office of sheriff. Then a shot from hiding shattered Plummer's right elbow, forearm and wrist. Crawford left Bannack and was never heard from again. From then on, Plummer walked the town's streets with a double-barreled shotgun cradled over his left forearm.

Plummer won election as sheriff in 1863. On June 20 of that year he married Electa Bryan in the Sun River country. Electa had wanted to wait for a Reverend Reed, but Plummer was anxious to get back to Bannack, so Father Minatre performed the ceremony. Her sister, Martha Vail, had never liked him. The marriage did not last. Some said Plummer sent Electa away, and others said she left because he was cruel.

By the end of 1863, Plummer stood accused of leading a band of road agents who robbed and killed miners carrying gold. Early accounts blamed his gang for more than a hundred murders, though historians have documented only about eight. A Vigilance Committee formed to act, and among its members was Nathaniel Pitt Langford. On the night of January 9, 1864, the vigilantes arrested Plummer. The next evening they hanged him on the gallows he had built. Thomas Dimsdale's chronicle of the period records the executions plainly: "Henry Plummer, Ned Ray and Buck Stinson, Bannack City, January 10th, 1864." By February, the vigilantes had hanged 22 men.

03Dredges, Floods of Panic and Private Grief

Bannack outlived its first boom. Placer mining revived in the spring of 1866, when ditches brought water to the gravels. In 1877, panicked settlers barricaded themselves in the courthouse for a week, "barricaded and fortified," amid unfounded rumors of a Nez Perce attack. In the spring of 1895 the first electric dredge began working Grasshopper Creek, and five dredges eventually chewed through the creek bed. By 1905 the district had produced about $4 million, 63 percent of it from placers. The Apex Cyanide Mill followed in 1914, and electricity reached the town in 1930.

Dr. John Singleton Meade turned the vacant courthouse into the Hotel Meade, and his family paid dearly for its life in Bannack. On August 18, 1895, his son Perry went to work at the Eugene Mine, "promising his wife that this would be his last shift underground." Mud filled the south drift and suffocated him. A year later, Perry's small son died in a measles epidemic, and the Meades moved to California.

Rufe Mathews and his wife Montana later managed the hotel, where their daughter Bertie spent much of her childhood. In August 1916, Bertie's best friend, a teenager named Dorothy Dunn, went wading in a pond near Bannack with her cousin and a friend. None of them could swim, and Dorothy drowned. The Mathews family suffered other losses as well. When Bertie's sister Hazel Jaggers and her husband Roy died of influenza, the family took in their two children. Bannack shrank with every passing decade. By 1950 it was effectively empty, and the last residents left in the 1970s.

04What Remains of Bannack Today

Efforts to save the town began as early as 1947. In the 1950s the Beaverhead County Museum Association bought buildings, and Ray Herseth, park manager from 1972 to 1984, credited association board member Elfreda Woodside as the town's chief champion. In 1954 Bannack passed to the state with the condition that it remain a ghost town, so it would not compete with Virginia City. On July 4, 1961, it was designated a National Historic Landmark.

Bannack State Park now keeps more than 60 structures along the old main street. They include log cabins, the Hotel Meade, the Masonic Lodge, a schoolhouse and the jail. The buildings are held in "arrested decay," which means they are maintained but not restored. Visitors walk through rooms with peeling wallpaper and sagging floors that look much as they did when the last families left. Each year on the third weekend of July, Bannack Days fills the street again with reenactments, gold panning and period music.