Distinctly Montana Magazine

69 w w w . d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m O UT OF CURIOSITY, NOT BLOODLUST, TWENTY-ONE- YEAR-OLD GEORGE BRUFFEY STOOD WITH THE NEVADA CITY MOB. Townsfolk had turned the wood frame of an under-construction store into gallows. The offi- cers, so-called, let George Ives, convicted of mule theft and murder, read a letter to his friends. Such officers tied his hands behind his back. They stood him on a tall, wooden box and cinched the hemp, fibrous and coarse, tight around his neck. Six others held a twenty-foot cord package-lashed to the box on which he teetered. Bruffey had just met Ives at a dinner table near the Beaverhead River. They ate beef and Bitterroot Valley cabbage. They talked of growing vegetables. Ives found it foolish to cultivate in this region, citing frosts. They yanked the box from his feet. Ives plunged. Like a fish on a line, he thrashed. Then he did not. And "the crowd," wrote Bruffey, "about four hundred people, surged up the hill. All was over, and he was decently buried." A century ago, George Bruffey's name was much less obscure to Montanans. Indeed, he witnessed and recorded memories of George Ives's execution. This incident famously gave birth to the Vigilantes. But he's far more than one eyewitness to that episode. He built the first road from Butte to Helena. He served in a territorial and state legislature, despite distaste for "too many rules of order" and "too much superfluity." From the vantage of Frank Worden's store near present-day Missoula, he watched tribal hunting parties of 1,000 men, women, and children with 2,000 head of horses fork off toward the Judith Basin, Sun River, and Shields Valley. Bruffey took travel advice from John Bozeman. He ate boiled elk and roasted antelope with Bob Dempsey and the Bannocks with whom Dempsey lived. Bruffey defended Jim Bridger against ru- mors of polygamy. More namesakes of streets, creeks, peaks, towns, and counties populate his memoir, Eighty-One Years in the West. The book came out in the 1920s, shortly before Bruffey died from injuries sustained while walking the 25 miles from Livingston to Bozeman. He was 86. Every paper in the state published his obituary. Eighty-One Years in the West is a fusty, crinkled, hundred-years-out-of-print collector's item. It gives an insider's look at big moments in Mon- tana history. Even better, it shows how average pioneers, not copper kings, business titans, or governors, lived. You learn of the tools, transportation, ailments and remedies, clothing and shelter. Reading Bruffey, you can almost taste his gritty, bitter campfire coffee. George A. Bruffey was born in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, in 1842, the youngest of six. His father worked as a wagon maker. Fleeing smallpox, malaria, and cholera, the Bruffeys moved to Missouri, then Iowa, then back to Missouri. There, his parents opened an inn patronized by cattle drivers returning from the West. Young George found their stories enticing. He remembered a country on the brink of civil war, too. Feeling no desire to die for the Confederate or Union cause, he pursued the only other option. Bruffey went first to Nebraska. By 1862, he reached Denver. From there, he joined a wagon train bound for the Salmon River in the Idaho Territory. Along their way, his travel party heard that a place called Alder Gulch held superior gold. By the time he reached Alder Gulch, Bruffey had been a rancher and farmer, oxen driver, logger, timber yard owner, and brick maker. He next learned to mine in these camps near Virginia City, which, in 1863, consisted of "twenty log cabins and many bush shacks." His minimalism neglected the grime and rubble, street muck they called gumbo, and the rich aroma of stock animals and deficient sanitation. He had barely been in the Gulch long enough to acquaint himself with saloon keeper Bill Palmer and fellow hunters when they rode into town with the corpse of Nicolas Tiebolt, George Ives's victim. "They told us he had been dragged to where they had found him with a rope tied around his neck. He had been badly picked under the shoulders by magpies." Bruffey got his first lesson in the region's do-it- yourself criminal justice system. As Ellen Baum- ler notes in Dark Spaces, a history of the Mon- tana prison, the nearest federal penitentiary was in Detroit. No sanctioned law enforcement ex- isted. And it's hard to enforce laws when, for all intents and purposes, there are none. At George Ives's outdoor, December trial, with a bonfire warming the buffalo-robed "jury," Bruffey saw locals like Wilbur Sanders and Don Byam be- come prosecutors and judges. In a few days, Sanders and Byam, along with 22 others, would sign their Vigilante Oath. In the by ROSS PETERSON illustrations by ROBERT RATH THEY YANKED THE BOX FROM HIS FEET. IVES PLUNGED. LIKE A FISH ON A LINE, HE THRASHED. THEN HE DID NOT.

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