iff gave him many advantages. He posed
as being a silver-mine expert, among other things, and often would be
called out to "expert" some new mine. That usually meant that he left
town in order to commit some desperate robbery. The boldest outrages
always required Plummer as the leader. Sometimes he would go away on
the pretense of following some fugitive from justice. His horse, the
fleetest in the country, often was found, laboring and sweating, at the
rear of his house. That meant that Plummer had been away on some secret
errand of his own. He was suspected many times, but nothing could be
fastened upon him; or there lacked sufficient boldness and sufficient
organization on the part of the law-and-order men to undertake his
punishment.

We are not concerned with repeating thrilling tales, bloody almost
beyond belief, and indicative of an incomprehensible depravity in human
nature, so much as we are with the causes and effects of this wild
civilization which raged here quite alone in the midst of one of the
wildest of the western mountain regions. It will best serve our purpose
to retain in mind the twofold character of this population, and to
remember that the frontier caught to itself not only ruffians and
desperadoes, men undaunted by any risk, but also men possessed of a yet
steadier personal courage and hardihood. There were men rough, coarse,
brutal, murderous; but against them were other men self-reliant, stern,
just, and resolved upon fair play.

That was indeed the touchstone of the entire civilization which followed
upon the heels of these scenes of violence. It was fair play which
really animated the great Montana Vigilante movement and which
eventually cleaned up the merciless gang of Henry Plummer and his
associates. The centers of civilization were far removed. The courts
were powerless. In some cases even the machinery of the law was in the
hands of these ruffians. But so violent were their deeds, so brutal, so
murderous, so unfair, that slowly the indignation of the good men arose
to the white-hot point of open resentment and of swift retribution. What
the good men of the frontier loved most of all was justice. They now
enforced justice in the only way left open to them. They did this as
California earlier had done; and they did it so well that there was
small need to repeat the lesson.

The actual extermination of the Henry Plummer band occurred rather
promptly when the Vigilantes once got under way