Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A • S P R I N G 2 0 1 8 78 He served 2 years of his 10-year sentence at San Quentin before being pardoned by the Governor. Plummer, reinstated as police, went to visit a lady friend at a saloon and was engaged by an inebriate into a political argu- ment. His adversary pulled a knife and attempted to plunge it downward through Plummer's hat, managing to cut his scalp before Plummer pulled his gun and shot the man through his left side, killing him instantly. Once again, Plummer cried self-defense, and the Nevada Democrat supported his claim when they reported that the dead man, at 21, had been a "quarrelsome and dissipative" presence in the camps. He decided to head back East, but was stymied in that plan by meeting and falling in love with a Ms. Electra Bryan of Bannack. So did Plummer's sometime friend and often adversary Jack Cleveland, who had followed him north from Nevada City. e trio set out for Bannack, near Alder Gulch, to make their fortune. ALDER GULCH AND PLUMMER'S ALLEGED REIGN OF TERROR In the early 1860s gold was struck in Alder Gulch, now in Montana but then part of the lawless Idaho territory. Plummer, who must have been aware that the mounting body-count around him was making an unpopular figure in Nevada, came north to try his luck. As writer and historian Doro- thy M. Johnson wrote of Alder Gulch, "no matter how dangerous it was to live there, or how desperately hard it was to get there, this was where the gold was. And this was where people were still going to go." Not long after arriving, Jack Cleveland got in an argument, apparently over a debt. Plummer tried to intercede, assuring the men that it would be paid, but Cleveland would not drop the matter, telling the men that he would be back, and he'd come shooting when he came. Plummer seemed to have had fill of Cleveland, and shot him, as author Greg Strandberg puts it, "below the belt". Cleveland fell to his knees and begged for his life, and asked Plummer whether he would kill a man on his knees. Plummer said he would not, and told Cleveland to get up, whereupon he shot him through the head and the heart. In his zeal, Plummer even managed to shoot another man observing Cleveland's murder, although it was only a flesh wound. Not long after, Plummer was elected Sheriff of Bannack. e lawlessness of the territory was quite literal. According to Western historian Dr. Merle Wells, "congressional neglect" had left large portions of Modern Idaho, Montana and nearly all of Wyoming with "no criminal code or civil law whatever". As a result, "vigilance committees" arose all over the territories in order to "police" non-existent laws, usually with violence. ey took as their main enemies the road agents, gangs of thieves and murderers who harassed and killed travelers for their gold. e road agents were sys- tematic, with an uncanny ability to pick victims who were carrying gold dust on their persons. ey knew each other by small signs: the knot in their tie, the characteristic cut of their facial hair, and by the repetition of their pass- phrase: "I am Innocent". ey knew themselves, therefore, as the Innocent. e citizens of Bannack had learned to be wary of their Sheriff, whose reputation preceded him as in the case of Sam Hauser and N. P. Langford, who were carrying $14,000 in gold dust across the country to St. Louis for some business-men. ey found themselves in a coach with Plummer. Hauser shrewdly decided to announce to the whole coach, not just Plum- mer, that they were carrying a fortune, in cases witnesses would be needed later. During the tense ride, Hauser kept a pistol in his lap, while Langford conspicuously displayed a loaded double-barreled shotgun. e ride was without incident but, suspiciously, Plummer gave Hauser a gift before part- Governor's Mansion at Bannack Vigilante's Hanging Tree Re-enactment of Plummer's lynching during Bannack Days Re-enactment of Plummer's lynching during Bannack Days JOE SHELTON JOE SHELTON

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