The deadliest campaign of vigilante justice in American history erupted in the Rocky Mountains during the Civil War when a private army hanged twenty-one troublemakers. Hailed as great heroes at the time, the Montana vigilantes are still revered as founding fathers. Combing through original sources, including eye-witness accounts never before published, Frederick Allen concludes that the vigilantes were justified in their early actions, as they fought violent crime in a remote corner beyond the reach of government. But Allen has uncovered evidence that the vigilantes refused to disband after territorial courts were in place. Remaining active for six years, they lynched more than fifty men without trials. Reliance on mob rule in Montana became so ingrained that in 1883, a Helena newspaper editor advocated a return to “decent, orderly lynching” as a legitimate tool of social control. Allen’s sharply drawn characters, illustrated by dozens of photographs, are woven into a masterfully written narrative that will change textbook accounts of Montana’s early days—and challenge our thinking on the essence of justice.

Frank Thompson vividly recalls his experiences in gold-rush era Montana, where sought his fortune, served in the first territorial legislature, and met some of the territory's most notorious road agents.

This is the story of Montana Territory in the last half of the nineteenth century, when a massive influx of gold seekers brought murderers and robbers into the region and forced the creation of an organization of law-abiding citizens known as the Vigilantes. Led by Captain James Williams, the Vigilantes sought to stop the blatant activities of more than fifty road agents in the Bannack-Virginia City mining area, who were secretly directed and protected by a local sheriff, Henry Plummer. The first instance of taking the law into their own hands occurred when an impromptu group of men captured, tried, and hanged one notorious killer, George Ives. Thereafter, with public approval, the Vigilantes continued to ride across the land, bringing swift retribution to all wrongdoers. Lew L. Callaway, who grew up knowing Captain Williams as a friend to his father, herein recounts the stories of such famous episodes as the trial of Ives and the controversial capture and hanging of Joseph A. Slade, who was carrying the severed ears of one of his victims in his pocket on the day he was hanged. More than a history of the bloody era that spawned the Vigilantes, this is the story of life in Montana Territory, of gold fever, Indian warfare, and the cattle empire that ended, along with Captain Williams’s life, in the disastrous winter of 1887.

Winner of the 2009 Spur Award for Best First Novel by the Western Writers of America, as a "work whose inspirations, image and literary excellence best represent the reality and spirit of the American West." December 1863. Daniel Stark, New York lawyer and radical abolitionist, has come to the gold fields of Alder Gulch, in what will become Montana, to get enough gold to make restitution to the clients whose assets his father gambled away before killing himself. But where ruffians rule and murder is tolerated, Dan realizes that he will likely not survive to take his gold home unless he joins with others, Union and Confederate sympathizers alike, who form a Vigilante group to establish law and order. With Dan as Vigilante prosecutor, they hunt down suspected members of a criminal conspiracy operating in the area. As the Vigilantes identify and try the conspirators in secret tribunals, Dan faces the horrible prospect of hanging both a friend and the husband of the woman he loves.

Since the days of the wild West, Montanans have struggled to be "tough on crime" with limited resources. During Montana’s early territorial years, "criminal justice" was almost nonexistent: a few towns had inadequate and chronically overcrowded jails; occasional prisoners were sent east to the federal penitentiary in Detroit; and vigilantes summarily dealt with others suspected of crimes. In 1871, the federal government funded a penitentiary in Deer Lodge that was turned over to Montana when it achieved statehood in 1889. In this absorbing book, Keith Edgerton provides a social history of the Montana Penitentiary, with a primary focus on its early, formative years. After statehood, Montana leased its penitentiary to contractors, who utilized cheap inmate labor to turn a profit for themselves and for the state. Warden Frank Conley became a regional political boss and amassed a personal fortune, using inmates for road construction and a variety of public and private projects. Eventually, charges of corruption led to his ouster by Governor Joseph M. Dixon and sparked a trial and heated controversy that resulted in Dixon’s political downfall. After 1921 the prison system came under full control of the state government. Although there were changes at the penitentiary during the rest of the twentieth century--and two full-scale riots in the 1950s--there was also a depressing repetition of corruption, neglect, and underfunding.

From the Preface:On the frontier, says conventional wisdom, a structured society did not exist and social control was largely absent; law enforcement and the criminal justice system had limited, if any, influence; and danger--both from man and from the elements--was ever present. This view of the frontier is projected by motion pictures, television, popular literature, and most scholarly histories. But was the frontier really all that violent? What was the nature of the violence that did occur? Were frontier towns more violent that cities in the East? Has America inherited a violent way of life from the frontier? Was the frontier more violent than the United States is today? This book attempts to answer these questions and others about violence and lawlessness on the frontier and do so in a new way. Whereas most authors have drawn their conclusions about frontier violence from the exploits of a few notorious badmen and outlaws and from some of the more famous incidents and conflicts, I have chosen to focus on two towns that I think were typical of the frontier--the mining frontier specifically--and to investigate all forms of violence and lawlessness that occurred in and around those towns.

Franklin Henry Little (1878–1917), an organizer for the Western Federation of Miners and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), fought in some of the early twentieth century’s most contentious labor and free-speech struggles. Following his lynching in Butte, Montana, his life and legacy became shrouded in tragedy and family secrets. In Frank Little and the IWW, author Jane Little Botkin chronicles her great-granduncle’s fascinating life and reveals its connections to the history of American labor and the first Red Scare. Beginning with Little’s childhood in Missouri and territorial Oklahoma, Botkin recounts his evolution as a renowned organizer and agitator on behalf of workers in corporate agriculture, oil, logging, and mining. Frank Little traveled the West and Midwest to gather workers beneath the banner of the Wobblies (as IWW members were known), making soapbox speeches on city street corners, organizing strikes, and writing polemics against unfair labor practices. His brother and sister-in-law also joined the fight for labor, but it was Frank who led the charge—and who was regularly threatened, incarcerated, and assaulted for his efforts. In his final battles in Arizona and Montana, Botkin shows, Little and the IWW leadership faced their strongest opponent yet as powerful copper magnates countered union efforts with deep-laid networks of spies and gunmen, an antilabor press, and local vigilantes. For a time, Frank Little’s murder became a rallying cry for the IWW. But after the United States entered the Great War and Congress passed the Sedition Act (1918) to ensure support for the war effort, many politicians and corporations used the act to target labor “radicals,” squelch dissent, and inspire vigilantism. Like other wage-working families smeared with the traitor label, the Little family endured raids, arrests, and indictments in IWW trials. Having scoured the West for firsthand sources in family, library, and museum collections, Botkin melds the personal narrative of an American family with the story of the labor movements that once shook the nation to its core. In doing so, she throws into sharp relief the lingering consequences of political repression.