A Ghostly Ghost Town?

by Rain Trueax

In 2010, my husband and i were on a freewheeling trip through Montana, with no set destinations. He suggested we stop at Bannack. I wasn't that excited at the possibility, since I knew little of its history as a mining town. When we got there, I learned it was where Henry Plummer met his end, and I instantly got more interested.

Bannack was supposed to be Bannock, for the Native American tribe. When registering it, someone misspelled it. After stopping at the visitor center, paying the admittance and getting a small pamphlet explaining some of the buildings, we were free to wander through the town. It was very picturesque, perfect for the camera with structures in better shape than many other ghost towns  I have visited.

In several of the buildings, I wondered if there might be ghosts. Mining towns of that time had many sudden deaths with much potential for a spirit hanging around. I didn't actually feel any energy from a ghost-- despite being open to it. Maybe a nighttime visit would have a different result. Do ghosts have a preferred time to come out? Especially in the hotel, I took photos wondering if something more would show up-- it didn't.

One of the more likely possibilities as a ghost would be Henry Plummer. His story is filled with all the controversy as is found with other bigger than life people of that time. Was Plummer a murderous outlaw or in the end victimized by the vigilantes who were the real robbers and killers. Online, you can find many opinions as to who he was and his history. Here's one-- [Henry Plummer].

When I decided to write about Bannack, I went looking online for 'ghost hunters' who had been there. Although I have never seen a ghost myself, I have been places where I've felt strange energies. I can't say it was true at Bannack. When I return someday, which I'd love to do, and camp in the lovely campground with our vacation trailer, I would at least know who might have been unwilling to leave even after death.

Dorothy Dunn was in her teens when she drowned in the dredge pond August 4, 1916. Her friend, who had been with her that fateful day, was the first to claim she appeared to her as a ghost. Today, it appears children are most likely to see her wearing a blue dress. She has talked to some in Hotel Meade, which had been her home, as her father was hotel manager at the time of her death.

Supposedly, the hotel has other apparitions. An older woman haunts the second floor as well as Dorothy. Crying children are also supposedly heard by some. Are those ghosts or impressions left by past energies. The hotel was used for a time

as a hospital-- places very likely to have ghostly manifestations.  Saloons like the one alongside here have sudden death stories of shootouts and bullets gone astray.
 
Another building with ghostly stories is Chrismans' Store. It had offices at the back used by Henry Plummer. Some, who do this kind of research, claim to have photographed hauntings with fuzzy figures. This though is the kind of thing that always makes me wary, since photos can be so easily faked. Still, are there even today ghostly meetings there where the men chew the fat-- so to speak?

The Bessette House is another claimed location. Abed Bessette, who first owned it, was one of the vigilantes. He raised sheep and owned several buildings, including the hotel. He died in Bannack in 1919. Did he not want to leave? 

The possibilities for ghosts in his home go beyond him. During typhoid, diphtheria, and other killer epidemics, his home was used to quarantine patients and many died there. There is supposedly photo evidence of a ghost there.

In terms of becoming a ghost, one of the most exciting potentials has to be Henry Plummer. After a checkered history (read link above) in 1863, he had arrived in Bannack where he was appointed sheriff.  Was he using that as a way to also rob and murder with his posse, named The Innocents? Whoever was doing the violence, 102 people were murdered in mining camps and along the road between [Bannack and Virginia City]. 

On December 23, 1863, a vigilante committee was organized, formed a posse, captured him, put him in his own jail before they hung him on a gallows above the town, along with two of his deputies. That gallows is still there or so goes the story. He'd done a lot in his 27 years but was he trying to do right by Bannack?  Questions remain as to whether the real robbers were the vigilantes since the robberies didn't stop with his death. 

Was Plummer wronged, and he hangs around the town out of anger at a tragic miscarriage of justice, a desire to find vindication, or did he have nowhere else to go after a misused life? There are those who claim they have seen him in the Skinner Saloon, Chrismans' store and other buildings in the town. His grave, higher up the gulch with the gallows, has been robbed twice. The second time it is claimed his skull was taken and put in a saloon. That saloon later burned to the ground.

Do I believe in ghosts? I don't know. I have friends who claim to see them. I've watched a couple of the cable shows where they search for them, knew one of the psychics who was on a show when they went to Tombstone ghost hunting. I haven't been convinced ghosts are a reality-- don't know that they're not either. 

I've put ghosts in only one of my books, A Price to be Paid. It's an Arizona paranormal/metaphysical romance that goes into reincarnation and whether one lifetime is enough to pay for wrong deeds. The possible man needing to pay for his misspent life was in one of my Arizona historicals, where he met a fitting end.

For me, such thinking comes under the heading of speculation and mystery. I won't go ghost hunting... well, unless I head back to Bannack to camp in that lovely campground. 

BANNACK MONTANA: A TOWN FROZEN IN TIME (LITERALLY IN THE WINTER)

Last month I shared a bit about Virginia City, Montana and its meteoric rise and fall as a great city nestled in the Montana mountains.  However, before there was Virginia City another city was the jewel of Montana built set in a gold rush. 

One side of the street in Bannock, MT (photo from Kirsten Lynn)

Despite all the years I lived in Montana, I never made it to Bannack until last summer, and what a wonder. The town is actually bustling for a ghost town, only now it only bustles from morning until sundown during the summer months. Walking down the streets  and into the many buildings visitors can go back in time to when Bannack was one of biggest and baddest towns in the West. 

More Bannack, MT (photo by Kirsten Lynn)

Bannack was founded in 1862 when John White discovered gold on Grasshopper Creek.  As with most gold strikes, prospectors and businessmen flooded into the area.  By 1864, Bannack was named as the Territorial Capital of Montana.  Bannack didn’t remain the capital for long as it was soon transferred to Virginia City.

Only a year after gold was discovered in Bannack, the prized nuggets were found near Virginia City and many prospectors moved on to the renewed hope of fortune.  However, some stayed on in Bannack trying new mining techniques. 

From 1862 to the 1930s, Bannack continued as a mining town its population fluctuating.  By the 1950s most people had moved on and the mining dwindled to nothing. With the last of the town’s citizens gone, the State of Montana declared Bannack a State Park.  

Bannack, MT school and Masonic Lodge (photo by Kirsten Lynn)

When Bannack and Virginia City were at their zenith, the road between the two towns was the scene of more holdups, robberies, and murders than almost any other comparable stagecoach route. The worst of the outlaw gangs in the area had none other than Bannack’s own sheriff as its leader.

Henry Plummer was born and raised in Maine.  He headed West in 1852 and settled in Nevada City, California.  There he opened a bakery. Well-liked and ambitious, Plummer was elected sheriff in 1856. However, in 1857, Plummer was convicted of second-degree murder for killing an unarmed man. Though he claimed it was in self-defense, he was convicted after witnesses testified he was having an affair with the murdered man’s wife.

After six months in San Quentin prison, Plummer was released. He made good again in Nevada until a shootout in a whorehouse sent him on the run. He hooked up with outlaws traveling through Idaho.  Plummer named his crew, “The Innocents.” Go figure.

 When Plummer arrived in Bannack, Montana in 1862, the people knew nothing of his record. A likable sort of fellow he was able to convince the residents to elect him sheriff in May of 1863. He built his jail to have rings put in the floor so prisoners could not escape by punching holes in the sod roof.  Little did the people of Bannack know Plummer should have been the first resident in his jail, but they did notice he wasn’t able to stop the string of murders and robberies conducted by road agents terrorizing the town.

Bannack Jail (yes that's me behind bars, Kirsten Lynn)

A vigilance committee of nearly 2000 members was created. It didn’t take them long to destroy Plummer’s gang.  Erastus “Red” Yeager revealed Plummer’s complicity right before they hanged him.  On a bitter cold January morning in 1864, the Vigilantes arrested Plummer.  Despite his pleas for his life Plummer was hanged on the very gallows he had prepared for another.  By that spring all of “The Innocents” were dead or departed. 

While certainly one of the more colorful characters, Plummer was just one of many who added to the fascinating history of Bannack.  Today you can visit the old hotel, school, mayor’s house, saloon, and even bachelor’s row among other businesses and homes and truly step back into Montana’s past in its first Capital. 

Kirsten Lynn is a Western and Military Historian. She worked six years with a Navy non-profit and continues to contract with the Marine Corps History Division for certain projects. Making her home where her roots were sewn in Wyoming, Kirsten also works as a local historian. She loves to use the history she has learned and add it to a great love story. She writes stories about men of uncommon valor…women with undaunted courage…love of unwavering devotion …and romance with unending sizzle. When she’s not writing, she finds inspiration in day trips through the Bighorn Mountains, binge reading and watching sappy old movies, or sappy new movies. Housework can always wait.

Outlaw Lawmen

By Kathleen Rice Adams

Life on the open range could be a discomforting experience, what with outlaws popping out of the woodwork with the slightest provocation, nesters “accidentally” mistaking some cattleman’s range for the quarter section they’d purchased, steers stampeding wherever they pleased, and wild animals running amok in settlers’ vegetable gardens—not to mention all those Indians to keep track of.

Things weren’t much easier for townies. For one thing, outlaws didn’t confine themselves to the countryside. Drunks stumbled out of saloons with reckless abandon, ladies of questionable virtue roamed the streets at will, and barbers pulled teeth or performed surgery like they knew what they were doing. Even church socials sometimes got out of hand.

At least folks in town could count on the law to keep things somewhat under control, right?

Not always.

Finding a reliable lawman was anything but easy. El Paso, Texas, discovered that when it hired Dallas Stoudenmire as city marshal. Stoudenmire, a deadly gunman with a mean temper and a fondness for strong drink, insisted on starting fights and shooting people—some of them criminals. As a young man, famed lawman Wyatt Earp stole horses. Between gigs as a county sheriff, town marshal, and city policeman, Earp gambled, owned brothels, got arrested for a number of crimes, broke out of jail, led a vigilante group, and otherwise made a nuisance of himself. Pat Garrett may have been a straight arrow legally speaking, but he was unpleasant to be around. Even his fellow officers objected to his disposition: a refreshing mixture of arrogance and surliness.

Some men found a badge to be an excellent disguise for nefarious activities. Take these guys, for example:

Henry Plummer

Henry Plummer

In 1856, at the age of 24, Plummer became the marshal of Nevada City, Calif., the third-largest settlement in the state. In 1859, the marshal killed the husband of a woman with whom he was having an affair. Sentenced to ten years in San Quentin, he received parole in six months and immediately joined a gang of stagecoach robbers.

In January 1862, Plummer formed his own gang and began hijacking wagons transporting gold out of mining camps. When that enterprise petered out in January 1863, Plummer relocated to the newest gold rush in Bannack, Montana. There, he formed the Innocents, a network of road agents that numbered more than 100 men within a few short months.

In May 1863, Plummer lost a sheriff election and subsequently threatened his rival until the man high-tailed it, fearing for his life. Plummer took over the sheriff’s job and right away appointed two of his Innocents cronies as deputies. Oddly, crime dramatically increased. In about nine months, more than 100 murders occurred and robberies, assaults, and assorted other crimes reached unprecedented levels. All the while, Plummer—under the guise of cracking down on lawlessness—hanged witnesses.

On January 10, 1864, having had enough law enforcement for a while, fifty to seventy-five vigilantes rounded up Plummer and his two deputies and hanged them in the basement of a local store.

Burt Alvord and Billy Stiles

Burt Alvord, Yuma Territorial Prison, 1904

In the 1890s, Alvord and Stiles served as deputy sheriffs in Willcox, Arizona. Unsatisfied with their salaries, the two began robbing Southern Pacific Railroad trains to supplement their income. Emboldened by pulling a number of successful jobs, they undertook their most daring escapade on September 9, 1899, in what came to be known as the Cochise Train Robbery. Instead of cleaving to tradition and stopping the train on a lonely stretch of track in the middle of nowhere, Alvord and Stiles had five members of their gang blow up the safe while the train was stopped in the town of Cochise. Alvord and Stiles, maintaining their law-enforcement decorum, were part of the posse that unsuccessfully attempted to apprehend the robbers in the Chiricahua Mountains.

About five months later, on February 15, 1900, the gang struck again, in broad daylight in the tiny town of Fairbank, Arizona. While the train was stopped at the station, the Alvord-Stiles gang approached the express car, guns drawn, only to find the messenger responsible for the safe unwilling to abide such rude behavior. During the gunfight that erupted, two of the five gang members were wounded and one ran away. The messenger, also wounded, hid the safe’s key before losing consciousness. Unable to find the key and without a single stick of dynamite between them, the rest of the gang scrammed.

Fairbank, Ariz., railroad depot, circa 1900

Once again, Alvord and Stiles rode with a posse to track down the outlaws, one of whom was injured so badly he had to be left behind about six miles outside town. Despite Alvord’s and Stiles’s attempts to misdirect the pursuers, they stumbled across the wounded man, who fingered Alvord as the ringleader before he died. Stiles confessed and turned state’s evidence, allowing him to remain comfortably outside the bars while Alvord cooled his heels inside. A short while later, Stiles broke Alvord out of the pokey and the two of them lit out for Mexico.

The Arizona Rangers invaded Mexico and, in 1904, engaged the two now-expatriates in a gun battle. They captured Alvord, but Stiles got away. After a brief stint in the Rangers under an assumed name, Stiles was killed a few years later while working as a lawman in Nevada, also under an assumed name. Alvord did two years in Yuma Territorial Prison and beat it for Panama upon his release.

H.D. Grunnels

Steam train, 1898

In 1898, Fort Worth, Texas, Assistant Police Chief Grunnels talked a gang of Oklahoma bank robbers out of robbing a local diamond merchant and into robbing a train in Saginaw, Texas, instead. Grunnels masterminded the operation, planning to apprehend the bandits after they made off with the money, then collect the reward and keep the loot.

The Apple Dumpling Gang might have performed the train heist with more aplomb. While crawling across the top of the coal tender to reach the engine, the gang’s leader slipped and accidentally discharged his pistol. His minions mistook the misfire as their signal to hop on the train and commence whatever mischief their roles required. Chaos ensued.

Meanwhile, Grunnels and a cadre of Fort Worth police officers not in on the plan raced to the rescue of a train that had yet to be robbed. The discombobulated robbers vamoosed. The Fort Worth Police Department became suspicious when it discovered Grunnels reached the scene of the crime before the crime had been reported. Grunnels was fired and indicted, but he disappeared before trial.

The hero in my new short story could give lessons in how to fail at outlawry to any of the compromised lawdogs above. It’s due out any day now in the Prairie Rose Publications anthology Lassoing a Groom.

“The Worst Outlaw in the West”

Laredo Hawkins has one ambition: to redeem his family’s honor by pulling the first successful bank robbery in the Hawkins clan’s long, disappointing history. Spinster Prudence Barrett is desperate to save her family’s bank from her brother’s reckless investments. A chance encounter between the dime-novel bandit and the old maid may set the pair on a path to infamy…if either can find a map.