Part 21

“By the discoveries of the bodies of the victims, the confessions of the murderers before execution and other information, it was found that one hundred and two people had within a few months certainly been killed by these miscreants in various places, and it was believed that many more had shared the same fate. The whole country became terrorized, and, although the few ranchmen and dwellers in the mining camps knew the road agents, they dared not expose them for fear their lives would pay the penalty. Some action on the part of the honest portion of the community to check these wholesale murders and robberies and bring their perpetrators to justice became imperatively necessary. But what was to be done? It was four hundred miles to the nearest man who was authorized to administer an oath. Clearly no relief could be had from the law. The conclusion that something should be done was hastened by the murder and robbery of Lloyd Magruder and his party, the sum stolen being over fourteen thousand dollars. They were murdered by a number of road agents whom they had unknowingly hired to drive their teams. Magruder was well known and very popular throughout the whole region. This culminating outrage of the desperadoes led to the formation of the vigilance committee late in the year 1863. Five men in Virginia City and one in Nevada City took the initiative in the matter. Two days had not elapsed before their efforts were united, and when once a beginning had been made the ramifications of the league of protection and order extended in a week or two all over the territory. From the 21st of December, 1863, to the 14th of January, 1864, twenty-four of the desperadoes, including the leaders, Henry Plummer and George Ives, were captured and hanged at various places. Every one confessed, or there was testimony to show, that he had murdered one or more men. This vigorous action of the Vigilantes brought to an end the terrible deeds of blood and rapine of the road agents in Montana, and criminals of all classes and grades fled for their lives.”

Again Judge Wade says: “Life, liberty and property were without any protection. The situation was desperate and unparalleled. It was crime against society, criminals against honest men, murder and robbery against life and property. The people, few in numbers and scattered over a wide extent of country, were compelled to organize and confederate together for self-preservation. They acted with deliberation. The supreme hour had come. They were to test their right to live. Their calmness was not that of despair or cowardice, but of self-respect, manhood, American citizenship. They did nothing in the nature of mob violence or lynch law. Remembering the forms of law in their distant homes, where judge and jury tried men for crime, they organized citizens’ courts with the miners’ judge to preside, formed juries who listened to the evidence, had attorneys to prosecute and defend, and not until the testimony had excluded every doubt was a verdict of guilty returned; and when returned, without undue delay, uninfluenced by petty technicalities, maudlin sympathy, or unholy passion, it was, in an orderly manner, carried into execution. There is nothing in history like these trials. They were open and public; they were attended by the well disposed people and the desperadoes alike, all being armed and on the alert, some looking for the arrival of confederates and preparing to rescue the prisoners, and others, with their lives in their hands, ready to prevent the attempt. It required supreme courage for a lawyer to prosecute, or for a witness to testify against, a prisoner at these trials.”

“Now” Montana has its courts of civil and criminal jurisdiction equal to any state in the Union, and the sturdy stroke of the miner followed by that of the mechanic, farmer, stockman and manufacturer has brought out her hidden treasures, until today Montana is the wealthiest state in the Union in proportion to its population. The total value of the product of her mines and ranges for the year 1897 amounted to $69,139,675, or about $324 per capita of her population, which is about 210,000.

To carry on the vast commerce given rise by this great wealth, Montana has in operation 2,928 miles of railroad, equipped equal to any railway system in the world.

The yearly lumber product is estimated to be worth $1,500,000. The coal product, at an average valuation of $2.60 per ton, is counted at $8,000,000. Nearly all of the lumber and coal are consumed at home.

The towns and mining camps that were “then” propagating crimes and greed, and filling the air with blasphemy, “now” have well selected libraries and are lavish in their expenditures to secure the best class of educational and beneficent institutions. Forty years ago there were but two places of worship in what is now Montana, and they were at St. Mary’s and St. Ignatius’ missions, where Fathers Giorda and Hoecken were teaching Christianity to the red men of the forest. The four religious denominations--Methodists, Presbyterians, Catholics and Episcopalians--have in Montana “now” over two hundred churches, and other denominations will add seventy-five more to the number. There are social and benevolent organizations, and nearly every secret society known is represented with well-equipped lodges. “Now” Montana has 709 public schools, 55,473 pupils, and 1,186 teachers, and it has its normal school and school of mines, state university and agricultural college. It has 488 postoffices, eighty weekly and fifteen daily newspapers, besides ten semi-weekly and monthly journals.

An Eastern writer tells of the libraries in some of the cities of the West and expressed his astonishment at the intellectual character of the people. The facts are, as far as reading is concerned, that the people of the West are a long ways ahead of those of the East. The brightest, most energetic young men and women of the East make up the leading element of the West. There are more college-educated men in the Western cities than in cities of the same size in the East. People in the West are generally more progressive than in the East. Few towns of the size of this (and none of its age) in the East have the electric lights, the miles of electric railroads, the telephone exchange, the churches, the public library, the elegant opera house, the fine public school buildings, the beautiful parks and, in fact, all the modern improvements which this city has. As to her resources, no one but nature herself can lay claim to placing them where they are. The many precipices, where the mighty Missouri plunges over one and then another with a force of several hundred thousand horse-power, the mountains of various minerals that are near by, the extensive coal fields that are at her doors, the thousands of acres of rich pasture and farming land that surround her. All these have been placed there by Him who created all things; and it seems to have been kept in reserve for a permanent camping ground for the advanced civilization of the West. The great water power at the falls of the Missouri is “now” largely employed in operating reduction works and smelters that reduce ore of the Rocky mountains to the amount of two thousand tons every twenty-four hours and here is operated one of the largest electric refining plants on the continent, where all kinds of metals are separated and refined. All this industrial growth has taken place during the last ten years. This is only a small portion of the development that has taken place in this state during the same length of time.

It is not Montana alone that has experienced these changes during the last thirty-six years. The “Then and Now” has revolutionized things in many other sections of the West as greatly as it has in this state. For “then” there was no Southern Pacific railway, no Union nor Central Pacific, no Great Northern or Northern Pacific, neither a Canadian Pacific, nor any transcontinental railway in existence. “Now” it is safe to say that 30,000 miles of railway have been built west of the Missouri river since “then.” And “now” great cities have sprung up on the sites that were “then” occupied by Indians and wild game. Verily, great have been the changes wrought in the mighty West by “Then and Now.”

ROBERT VAUGHN. Dec. 2, 1899.

A SAMPLE OF THE PIONEERS OF MONTANA.

Of all the instances in this book giving illustrations of the “then and now,” not one is more striking than the following sketch of a once humble Norwegian boy, who, in 1854, landed in the United States with barely enough money to pay his first night’s lodging, but who is now one of the millionaires of Montana. The young Norwegian referred to is A. M. Holter, one of Montana’s first pioneers, and who now resides in Helena, the capital of the state. A sketch of the frontier life of such a man is a chapter well worth reading. It shows what a man with push, pluck and energy can accomplish.

The first place at which Mr. Holter resided after coming to the United States was Freeport, Iowa, and he remained in that state until 1859, making Osage his headquarters. In the spring of 1860 he joined the rush of gold-seekers to Colorado, then called Pike’s Peak. By this time he had joined his brother Martin. After arriving in Colorado, the brothers went to mining and farming; in these pursuits they made some money, but nothing big. In the fall of 1863, in company with his partner, E. Evensen, A. M. Holter left Denver, Colo., bound for Alder gulch, bringing with them a small sawmill. It took them about thirty days to make the trip. After much difficulty, they arrived in Alder gulch. To give an account of this arrival, I cannot do better than to give the following which appeared in the Helena Independent Sept. 7, 1899, after an interview with Mr. Holter concerning his early days in Montana. He said:

“The fact is that we--my partner and I--didn’t get there until Dec. 1, 1863, and we selected a location on Ramshorn gulch. We managed to get our outfit as far as the summit between Bevin and Ramshorn gulches with teams, where we found deep snow and more snow falling. It kept on snowing; I remember seventeen days in succession that it snowed every day. We camped there under some spruce trees, with no other shelter, and the wind blowing all the time. There we made a hand sled to handle the machinery and built a brush road a distance of a mile and a half to get the machinery we had down to the creek, where our water power was to be had. We finally got the stuff down there and had a cabin up without doors or windows and moved into it the day before Christmas, 1863. We hung up our blankets on the door and window and prepared to make the best of it on Christmas day. The snow was then four feet deep and it was still snowing. In fact, we had snow all winter, although I do not remember that it ever got much deeper than that around us.

“I didn’t know a thing about the sawmill business, and my partner, who had represented himself to be a millwright, proved that he didn’t know much about it either. We unpacked our machinery and began to put it together and found that some of the parts that were necessary for its use were missing. The feeding apparatus was gone, among other things. We set to work and invented a new movement, which, by the way, was afterwards patented--by other parties.

“In the first place, we had to have blacksmithing done, and we had no tools, so we set out to make some. We had a broadax and we drove it into a block of wood and used it for an anvil. We had a sledge, and made a pair of bellows out of some wood and our rubber coats. There was a nail hammer with the outfit, and with it and the sledge, and the anvil and a forge we got together, we managed to make the other tools we absolutely needed. We made our own charcoal, and finally got that part of the preliminary work done.

“We had no lathe to turn the shafting, and we finally rigged a contrivance in the cabin wall to thrust one end into. We fixed up a wheel for the other end and made a belt out of rawhide to turn the thing by hand until we got the shafting turned. The lathe was even more primitive than the blacksmith shop, but we got the work done after a fashion, although it was a slow process.

“After that we whipsawed some lumber, made our water wheel, fitted up the mill, and got out several thousand feet of lumber before spring set in. That was my first winter’s work in Montana, and it was a hard one, too; part of it was all the more trying because I had my face cut up in a little unpleasantness with the road agents about that time.

“We had no belting, and we made some of rawhide, but there was no way of keeping it dry, for we had a water mill. We heard of eighty feet of six-inch belting at Bannock. I went over and tried to buy it. The man that owned it had no use for it and said so, but he wouldn’t set a price and I made him several offers, finally telling him that I would give him $600, all the money I had with me. He wouldn’t sell even then, and I had to go back without it, and we made a shift to use a canvas belt that we made ourselves. It was a poor affair, but we got along somehow.

“Lumber brought high prices, though, and we made some money after all our trouble. We got $140 a thousand for sluice lumber, and $125 for common lumber. The sluice lumber was finished on the edges and the other wasn’t. The second year we started a yard at Nevada City, and I remember that the demand was so great that whenever we expected a wagon in there would be a crowd of men waiting for it, who wouldn’t let me get to it at all. As soon as the binding was taken off the load, they would make a rush for the wagon and every man would take off what he could carry. The demand was so keen that they felt justified in taking it by force, and I wouldn’t even have a chance to keep an account of what was taken. As far as I know, however, it was always correctly accounted for and I do not believe that there was ever a stick that went out that way that I didn’t get my pay for.”

The reader will notice that Mr. Holter spoke of having “a little unpleasantness with the road agents.” The story of that occurrence is now fresh in my memory. It was this way:

Mr. Holter was on a return trip from Virginia City, Dec. 11, 1863, when he came very near being killed by highwaymen, who were then terrorizing the country with their violence. George Ives, the leader of a gang of desperadoes, and some of his companions, had met Holter on the way near the mouth of Big Hole, and had evidently been keeping track of him, thinking that he might sell some goods which he had in Virginia City, and that on his return he would have some money. Mr. Holter had marketed some articles in Virginia City, but, as it happened, he did not draw the money for them. This time he was returning with the two yoke of oxen without the wagon, and at the point of the road where the trail over the hill strikes the gulch, just below Nevada City, Ives and his companion, Erwin, passed him, and, as they went by, one spoke to the other, addressing him as George. They went on ahead and took the lower road by Laurin’s place, but Holter with his oxen took the upper road. When near the crossing of Brown’s gulch, Ives and Erwin, finding that Holter had taken the upper road, galloped their horses and met him. They began business at once; Ives drew and leveled his revolver on Holter, standing about four feet from him, and ordered him to pass over his money. Holter said that he did not have any, but Ives said that he knew better, and made him turn all his pockets inside out. Holter passed over his empty purse; Ives examined it and then threw it away; and he gave him his pocketbook, in which there were some papers and a small amount of postal currency. Ives was angry at not getting money, as he evidently expected. He ordered Holter to leave the road and follow their trail. Holter remarked that as they had the drop on him he supposed he would have to obey. Just then he turned and spoke to his cattle, turning instantly again only to see Ives deliberately aiming at his head, and Ives discharged his pistol just as Holter threw back his head. The bullet entered Holter’s hat just above the band and grazed his scalp, cutting the hair as smoothly as with a razor and taking the skin off part of his brow. For a moment Mr. Holter was stunned, and would have fallen had it not been for the fact that he was near the oxen and threw his arm over the neck of one of them and staggered against the animal. On recovering his senses, his first impulse was to pick up a new ax and a handle that had dropped from under his arm. Ives at this instant, seeing that his first shot had not killed, raised his gun and deliberately aimed again at Holter’s heart, but the gun snapped. Seeing a possibility of escaping, Holter jumped in front of the cattle and got on the other side of them before Ives could fire again. The off oxen suddenly started up and crowded the others onto the mounted desperadoes, diverting their attention and making them move back. During this commotion, Holter at once thought of some beaver dams in the creek a few yards away and broke for them. The road agents, seeing some men with a team coming up the road, went off in another direction as unconcerned as if nothing had happened. Holter then made his way to a cabin on the lower road, where “One-Eyed Reilly” and his associates lived. Here he tried to borrow a rifle or get them to go back with him, but they refused him any assistance whatever. From their answers and conduct, Mr. Holter became satisfied that they were confederates or silent partners with the road agents. As it was then growing dark, Holter went back to where he had left the oxen. After having unyoked them, he recovered his hat and went up the gulch and stayed over night with Stuart, Malcolm Morrow and Charles Olsen, who were then mining there. It turned out that the reason Ives’ pistol only snapped the time he tried to shoot Holter the second time was that at Lauren’s Ives, being already pretty full and being refused any more liquor, he had amused himself by shooting at the decanters and had but one shot left.

After getting back to camp, thinking and talking to his partner about the matter, Mr. Holter made up his mind deliberately that it was his duty above all things to arm himself and hunt up Ives and kill him or perish in the attempt. His partner did all he could to persuade him to give up the idea, but at last said that he would go with him. After outfitting themselves, they both started out to hunt Ives, when at the very first place they stopped they were told that Ives had been hanged. The news made Holter feel very badly, not because Ives was hanged, but because he was not present to assist with the job.

The first quartz mill Mr. Holter said that he saw in the territory was on the Monitor lode in Bevin’s gulch, and not far from his sawmill. The stamps were made of wood with iron bands around the bottom to keep them from splitting, and spikes were driven thickly into the wooden stamp to receive the blow when striking the ore.

The next year Holter and his partner started lumber yards at Virginia City and Nevada City in Alder gulch, and the same summer Holter, with two other men by the name of Cornelius and Olson, built some water works in Virginia City. This was rather a hard undertaking, for everything had to be invented anew from the ordinary way of building water works. The piping and hydrants had to be made of logs, and there was no way to procure a manufacturer’s auger with which to bore the logs. As high as $150 apiece was paid for three augers made by a blacksmith for the purpose. Mr. Evensen, his partner in the sawmill, had gone back to Denver to get more machinery and a planing mill. He purchased a freight outfit, consisting of oxen and wagons, and secured a second-hand planing mill, but was unable to get any machinery, so he loaded up with provisions and started back. On his return he was snowed in on Snake river, where he lost most of his outfit. What remained of the goods was brought on pack animals into Virginia City in the spring of 1865 at 10 cents per pound freight. But good prices were obtained for these remnants, however. Ten-penny nails were sold at Virginia City for $150 per keg, in gold dust. These were again retailed at $2 per pound. Some flour had arrived in Virginia City, and the price had dropped from $150 per sack of ninety pounds to $60. Holter reshipped what flour he had to Helena, where it was disposed of at $100 per sack.

That winter he bought a second-hand portable steam engine and boiler, and had managed to make a sawmill and move it onto Ten Mile creek, about eight miles west of Helena. To this was added the planing mill his partner had bought in Denver, Colo., and which was the first one of the kind in Montana. Soon afterwards the firm opened a lumber yard in Helena, at a point which is now the corner of Main and Wall streets. While the price of lumber at Virginia City had been $125 per thousand for common and $140 per thousand for sluice or flume lumber, the price at Helena was only $100 per thousand for common lumber. In the latter part of June, 1865, Mr. Holter bought out Mr. Evensen and took in his brother Martin as a partner, and the firm became known as A. M. Holter & Bro., and the demand for lumber was increasing very fast.

In the autumn of 1866 Mr. Holter went East by the Overland stage. The price for transportation to Omaha was then $350 in gold dust, or $700 in currency. While nearly a month on the road to Chicago, he said that after deducting stop-overs it took him but seventeen days and nights actual travel. It was the quickest trip on record up to that date.