In 1862, a group of disappointed gold miners roaming through southwest Montana stopped to pan Willets Creek (as named by Lewis and Clark). The miners called it Grasshopper Creek. They struck gold, and it was one of the big strikes that reverberated with a thrill all the way across the continent. The first lucky miners wanted to keep it secret, but as more and more fine gold turned up, desperate and heavily armed men showed up by the thousands. Thus Bannack was founded as Montana’s first capital city. The shootin’ and buryin’ started immediately.
Early resident of Boot Hill, Bannack MT.
The ghost town of Bannack, view from Boot Hill.
In an earlier installment of this series I mentioned “numbers” next to disease as one of the immediate causes of the Plains Indian apocalypse. Gold and silver explain the numbers. Miners and their hangers-on flooded in. The surviving ghost town of Bannack is the core of the older settlement; at its peak the valley in the photo above was covered with shacks, extending up all the nearby creeks and rivulets. The climax of the Sioux War was more than a decade away, and far to the east; associated with another gold strike, in the Sioux treaty lands in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
Numbers. The white migration into Montana and the Dakotas knew no borders. At the end of the Civil War, this population movement soon became more sudden and definitive than the tribal migrations of the Goths or the Vandals. The East, having succumbed to a racialized politico-military convulsion and the economic and moral collapse of the defeated Confederacy, spontaneously vomited war across the full length of its frontier. Desperados, outlaws, treasure seekers and failed men of every description, along with madly optimistic immigrants, sometimes whole families, swarmed west. To some extent territorial seizure was regulated by U.S. cavalry units left over from the butchery in the East, but the invasion itself was composed of civilian hordes; the professional cavalry were the wagging tail of this mass migration.
By no means were all the newcomers land seekers, and many did not intend to stay in the West. Many were seeking treasure in the ground, while others were seeking their treasure at gunpoint on the road from the mines. Thus Bannack, a very salty hellhole in its day—so disorderly that some of the details of its history are composed of conflicting accounts.
Numbers. The white migration into Montana and the Dakotas knew no borders. At the end of the Civil War, this population movement soon became more sudden and definitive than the tribal migrations of the Goths or the Vandals. The East, having succumbed to a racialized politico-military convulsion and the economic and moral collapse of the defeated Confederacy, spontaneously vomited war across the full length of its frontier. Desperados, outlaws, treasure seekers and failed men of every description, along with madly optimistic immigrants, sometimes whole families, swarmed west. To some extent territorial seizure was regulated by U.S. cavalry units left over from the butchery in the East, but the invasion itself was composed of civilian hordes; the professional cavalry were the wagging tail of this mass migration.
By no means were all the newcomers land seekers, and many did not intend to stay in the West. Many were seeking treasure in the ground, while others were seeking their treasure at gunpoint on the road from the mines. Thus Bannack, a very salty hellhole in its day—so disorderly that some of the details of its history are composed of conflicting accounts.
Beaverhead County Courthouse, built in 1875, later converted to a hotel.
Vernacular architecture, Bannack.
The ambiguous saga of Sheriff Henry Plummer says much about life in early Bannack. First, though, it’s important to remember that Bannack lasted as a steadily shrinking high desert shantytown far into the 20th century, until the last resident left in the 1970s.
"Sputnick": 1960s dredge mining equipment, Bannack.
Sheriff Henry Plummer couldn’t have foreseen Sputnik. Hell, he didn’t even foresee his own hanging, even though he was the one who built Bannack’s first gallows. Bannack’s great blessing, gold, was the problem. Gold shipments regularly disappeared, leaving only corpses behind—over a hundred victims just from gold robberies alone, not including the other roughhousing going on. And there the story splits. Either the sheriff was named as the head of the gang by a murderer on the gallows, or else he was caught red-handed with his deputies. Either way he suddenly wound up with a rope around his neck and there the story splits again—he either claimed innocence and asked “for a good drop” or else offered to return “a wagonload of gold” if the Vigilantes would spare his life. Which they did not. We’re free to imagine Henry Plummer’s stolen gold out there under a rock somewhere, which would be a magnificent ending.
Remains of authentic red velvet wallpaper from the old days of Bannack, later papered over with a more sedate pattern.
Dry air preserves Bannack.
Wandering the halls: Hotel Meade.
Bannack’s old saloon bears mute testimony to whiskey.
It must have taken many years for Bannack to calm down. Meanwhile, the territorial capital shifted to Virginia City after the enormous Alder Creek gold strike there. Geology once again made its weight felt politically. Life was wilder if anything and southwest Montana was briefly ruled at gunpoint by the Vigilantes, who were not necessarily universally popular. Neither was what passed for the law—the massive timbers of Bannack’s old jail are riddled with bullet holes.
Bannack's original jail.
Scarred.
So ornery they had to chain them to the floor: jail annex, Bannack.
Virginia City circa 1868. https://westernmininghistory.com/towns/montana/virginia-city/
Geologically, ghost town Bannack is off the highway, unlike Virginia City and adjacent Nevada City, which survive as important roadside attractions.
Virginia City, MT.
The word “anarchy” is often a synonym for mad disorder and violence. Philosophically, though, anarchy is better described as a highly individualistic social system prizing personal autonomy above other social values. It’s a concept closely tied to “autarchy,” a social system (or part of a multi-tiered system) where the most socially elite, typically the richest or most powerful, are excused from the effects of law. Obviously much more could be said, especially in the academic context. It’s worth noting occasions where odd social systems like classical anarchy emerge briefly as founding conditions. Colonizing situations where a new population violently substitutes itself for a previous population seem to provide opportunities for considerable legal fluidity.
NEXT BLOG: POLITE FICTIONS
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