Distinctly Montana Magazine

68 D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A M A G A Z I N E • FA L L 2 0 2 4 the Vigilance Committee, and in some instances the bonds of one may have helped the other." Nevertheless, Dillon points out, "The Vigilance Committee was nevertheless a separate organization and by no means the arm of the Masonic Lodge." Even so, it has to be pointed out, as Dillon does, that "by the time Paris Pfouts [the president of the vigilantes, and a Mason] left Montana in 1867 for St. Louis, he had become High Priest and Captain of Hosts of the Royal Arch Masons Chapter, Prelate of the Knights Templar, and Conductor of the Council of Roy- al and Select Masters." Freemasonry, it seems, had done well enough for him. The specifics of those original vigilante killings and their Vir- ginia City sequel have been explored elsewhere in more detail than we could manage here, and the reader is invited to seek out one of the many excellent books written about those events, in- cluding Langford's own Vigilante Days and Ways. George Brown and "Erastus Red" Yeager were captured and compelled to name their accomplices before being hanged. Sheriff Henry Plummer, among those named, went to his reward. Not long thereafter the unrepentant cannibal Boone Helm, local bootmaker and alleged outlaw Clubfoot Georg, and four of their alleged friends were dispatched. "Greaser Joe" Pizanthia expired after three shells of artillery blew apart his house and gravely wounded him, but not until the posse of vigilantes shot him again. The vigilantes continued to Hell Gate, where they rounded up three men, gave them two trials between them, and hanged them all. The next day, they caught up with two more suspected road agents; they tried them and hanged them. The next day they cornered Whiskey Bill Graves, arrested him, and hanged him the day after. And so on. Still later, in the 1870s, another series of extra-legal hangings were performed in the name of so-called "vigilance." In this cli- mate, 3-7-77 first became associated with viligantism, employed as a grave warning by none other than Montana Supreme Court Justice Lew Callaway (a Freemason) in 1890s Virginia City. In- tended to scare off some rough vagrants who had made their way to the town, its wording seems redolent with the kind of in- stitutionalized clandestineness that characterized both Mason- ry and the vigilantes: "3-7-77 ATTENTION A meeting will be held at the usual House and Place, Sunday evening. As Business of Importance has arisen, a full Attendance is Requested." Eventually, the escalating violence, particularly in Helena, where a hanging tree was long employed for that purpose until a photograph of a double lynching scandalized the state, became so overwhelming that newspaper editor Robert Fisk famously called for stemming the tide of recent vigilante terror by return- ing to "decent ordinary lynching." The Masons, meanwhile, had spread throughout the state, and if the vigilance committee had begun with the tacit approval of Virginia City's Masons, some other Brothers had decided that it didn't augur well for the future of justice in Montana. As historian Frederick Allen pointed out, by 1879, the first time that "3-7-77" appears in print, vigilante justice would have brought no small degree of shame to high-ranking establishment Masons such as Hiram Knowles, a recently retired territorial justice (resolutely anti-vigilante, as an avatar of the legal system) who had ascended to the post of Montana's Masonic grand master. The grand sec- 2023 & 24 of B E S T M O N TA N A A S V O T E D B Y R E A D E R S O F Y E A R S WO N W I N N E R ! 406-587-3103 thesapphiremotel.com 404 E Park Ave, Anaconda sweethomemtgifts.com of B E S T M O N TA N A A S V O T E D B Y R E A D E R S O F 2024 W I N N E R !

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