The Montana Vigilantes 1863–1870: Gold,Guns and Gallows

16. Postmortem Echoes of Times Past

338 DOI: 10.7330_9780874219203.c016 16 Postmortem Echoes of Times Past Some more cold lead and twisted hemp is badly needed on the Musselshell. —Fort Benton River Press, July 9, 1884 I request that the State of Montana grant Sheriff Henry Plummer a pardon. —Frederick J. Morgan, May 21, 1993 G old was found at Bannack, Alder Gulch, Helena, and many other less notorious locations of Montana in the latter half of the 1860s. It was dug. It was panned. It was sluiced. It was mined. It was found in various forms such as gold dust, flakes, and nuggets. The problem was that as a natural resource near the surface of the Montana earth, its supply was finite. Gold was discovered, extracted, and sold to the point where its better and easier finds were eventually exhausted. By the early 1880s, the price of gold was still $20.67 an ounce. Gold continued to be sluiced and mined, but the easiest finds were depleted and the territory ’s production of the yellow metal was in decline.1 While precious metal production totaled $18,000,000 in 1865, it steadily declined during the 1870s and totaled only $4,702,636 in 1880.2 By the 1880s, however, vast areas of Montana that had previously been accessible only by horse and stagecoach became more readily accessible by trains. While trains made Montana accessible to persons and goods, the converse was equally true—trains also permitted western territorial products to be exported to other regions of the continent. Trains would have a profound effect upon the nature of Montana’s economy. Americans were an enterprising people. The Protestant work ethic, rugged individualism, and the limitless opportunities of free-market capitalism enabled Postmortem Echoes of Times Past 339 the country to expand westward and, in the process, to construct farms, towns, and cities from virgin land. Settlers in the western territories were aided by abundant natural resources. Along the way, people were also ingeniously innovative . Factories in the East relied more and more upon the use of machinery and assembly-line labor to mass-produce products. Homestead farms also benefitted from innovation, such as improved iron plows for planting, mechanical twine-binders for reaping wheat, and barbed wire for the fencing of acreage.3 In this climate of expansion, innovation, and entrepreneurship, persons interested in cattle ranching on the open plains were poised to reap considerable financial rewards. Cattle could be raised and fed on the open range. The plains were seemingly limitless, open, and available for use. Montana grasses were plentiful and nutritious, and raising cattle was easier than agriculture and more certain than mining.4 Cattle could be raised and slaughtered to feed prospectors in the mining territories, railroad workers in the states and territories where railroads were under construction, and army soldiers protecting the frontier. Cattle products could also be shipped by train to places like Chicago, Illinois, and Abilene and Wichita, Kansas.5 Cattle ranching romanticized the proverbial “cowpoke” who worked eighteen-hour days and drove herds great distances for sale, adorned with long boots, spurs, chaps, gloves, and a western-style hat for protection against the sun, on a horse with a saddle containing limited provisions. The economics of cattle ranching made sense. During the 1860s, the population of the United States grew by 22 percent while the number of cattle Figure 16.1. Montana cattle range in the 1880s. (Courtesy of the Montana Historical Society, image 981-676.) Postmortem Echoes of Times Past 340 in the country decreased by 7 percent.6 By the end of the Civil War, cattle that could be sold in Texas for $3.00 to $5.00 per head could be sold in the northern markets for $30.00 to $50.00 per head.7 By 1880, cattle ranches had spread throughout the American plains from the Rio Grande at the south to the Canadian border at the north.8 Cattle ranching extended into Montana, where there were wide-open prairies, unlimited grass for grazing, and a proximity to the Northern Pacific Railroad upon its completion in 1883.9 Cattle became Montana’s “new gold.” Cattle presented a compelling advantage that gold could not, in that it was a resource that was seemingly and forever renewable. While the “beef bonanza” would eventually crash as a result of falling prices in 1885, a severe drought that left the animals in poor condition in...