t Salmon River mines, their original
destination, still awaited them. Winter was approaching. It was now too
late in the season to reach the Salmon River mines, five hundred miles
across the mountains, and it was four hundred miles to Salt Lake, the
nearest supply post; therefore, most of the men joined this little
army of prospectors in Montana. Some of them drifted to the Grasshopper
diggings, soon to be known under the name of Bannack--one of the wildest
mining-camps of its day.

These different origins of the population of the first Montana camps are
interesting because of the fact that they indicate a difference in the
two currents of population which now met here in the new placer fields.
In general the wildest and most desperate of the old-time adventurers,
those coming from the West, had located in the Idaho camps, and might
be expected in Montana at any time. In contrast to these, the men lately
out from the States were of a different type, many of them sober, most
of them law-abiding, men who had come out to better their fortunes and
not merely to drop into the wild and licentious life of a placercamp.
Law and order always did prevail eventually in any mining community.
In the case of Montana, law and order arrived almost synchronously with
lawlessness and desperadoism.

Law and order had not long to wait before the arrival of the notorious
Henry Plummer and his band from Florence. Plummer was already known as
a bad man, but was not yet recognized as the leader of that secret
association of robbers and murderers which had terrorized the Idaho
camps. He celebrated his arrival in Bannack by killing a man named
Cleveland. He was acquitted in the miners' court that tried him, on
the usual plea of self-defense. He was a man of considerable personal
address.

The same tribunal soon assembled once more to try three other murderers,
Moore, Reeves, and Mitchell, with the agreement that the men should have
a jury and should be provided with counsel. They were all practically
freed; and after that the roughs grew bolder than ever. The Plummer band
swore to kill every man who had served in that court, whether as juryman
or officer. So well did they make good their threat that out of the
twenty-seven men thus engaged all but seven were either killed or driven
out of the country, nine being murdered outright. The man who had acted
as sheriff of this miners' court, Hank Crawford, was unceasingly hounded
by Plummer, who so