Henry Plummer

Henry Plummer was born about 1832 in Addison, Maine, and went west to the California mines as a teenager. Able and ambitious, by his early twenties he owned mining and business interests in Nevada City, California, where he was elected city marshal. His promise curdled into violence: in September 1857 he shot and killed John Vedder in a dispute involving Vedder's estranged wife, was convicted of second-degree murder, and won a pardon in 1859, partly on grounds of ill health. Further shootings followed as he drifted through the Nevada, Idaho, and Montana gold camps.

Plummer arrived on Grasshopper Creek during the Bannack rush and in May 1863 was elected sheriff of the mining district. That autumn, robberies and murders plagued the roads between Bannack and the new diggings at Alder Gulch, blamed on a shadowy gang the miners called the "Innocents" — and captured road agents, under threat of hanging, named Sheriff Plummer as the gang's secret chief. On January 10, 1864, the newly organized Montana Vigilantes seized Plummer and two associates at Bannack and hanged them without trial from the gallows Plummer himself had erected as sheriff.

Whether Plummer truly led the road agents remains one of the enduring controversies of the American West. The evidence against him came largely from coerced confessions and vigilante memoirs, accounts differ sharply, and modern historians are divided; a posthumous mock trial held in Montana in 1993 ended in a hung jury, leaving the question formally unresolved.