rth, at the upper waters of the
Beaverhead. All the towns to the westward were now abandoned, and the
miners left Florence as madly as they had rushed to it from Oro Fino and
Elk City. West Bannack and East Bannack were now all the cry. To these
new points, as may be supposed, the organized band of robbers fled with
the others. Plummer, who had tried Elk City, Deer Lodge, and other
points, now appeared at Bannack.

One after another reports continued to come of placers discovered here
and there in the upper Rockies. Among all these, the strikes on Gold
Creek proved to be the most extensive and valuable. A few Eastern men,
almost by accident, had found fair "pay" there, and returned to that
locality when they found themselves unable to get across the
snow-covered mountains to Florence. These few men at the Gold Creek
diggings got large additions from expeditions made up in Denver and
bound for Florence, who also were unable to get across the Salmon River
mountains. Yet others came out in the summer of 1862, by way of the
upper plains and the Missouri river, so that the accident of the season,
so to speak, turned aside the traffic intended to reach Florence into
quite another region. This fact, as events proved, had much to do with
the later fate of Henry Plummer and his associates.

These Eastern men were different from those who had been schooled in the
mines of the Pacific Slope. They still clung to law and order; and they
did not propose to be robbed. The first news of the strikes brought over
the advance guard of the roughs who had been running the other camps;
and, as soon as these were unmasked by acts of their own, the little
advance guard of civilization shot one of them, Arnett, and hung two
others, Jernigan and Spillman. This was the real beginning of a
permanent vigilante force in Montana. It afforded perhaps the only known
instance of a man being buried with a six-shooter in one hand and a hand
of cards in the other. Arnett was killed in a game of cards, and died
with his death grip thus fixed.

The new diggings did not at first prove themselves, and the camp at
Bannack, on Grasshopper Creek, was more prosperous. Henry Plummer,
therefore, elected Bannack as his headquarters. Others of the loosely
connected banditti began to drop into Bannack from other districts, and
Plummer was soon surrounded by his clan and kin in crime. George Ives,
Bill Mitchell, Charlie Reeves, Cy Skinner, and others began operations