The Hardin tribune-herald. [volume] (Hardin, Mont.) 1925-1973, 1934-04-27
scorned by many as a tyrant and q

scorned by many as a tyrant and q
despot.
The situation must have been painful
to him. His friends afterwards MAIN
tanned with a good show of evidence
that the experience broke both his
heart and health. But the general wa
not a man to be intimidated or to de-
sert his position. He stuck to his guns
and fought with an Irish will, giving
as good blows as he received.
He never recovered his former pop
ularity during his lifetime, but in later
years his name found its way to the
top of the roll of those who built Mon
tana.
Death came at Fort Benton, July 1,
1867. General Meagher had ridden
hard all day and reached the town at
dusk, tired and i'll of intestinal fever.
Finding no hotel accommodations, the
party retired to a Missouri river steam
er, the G. A. Thompson, for the night.
Later in the evening the general
became delirious and was seized with
the fancy that the citizens of Fort Ben
ton were plotting against him. He call
ed repeatedly for a pistol with which to
defend himself. His. friends treasured
him and saw him comfortably in bed
in a StaterOOm before retiring them
selves.
Shortly before midnight the sentry
stationed OF board was reused by .
cry and a splash. He sounded the
alarm as he rushed to the bulwarks
but, strain his eyes as he might, he
could see no trace of a man overheard
in the swift, treacherous waters of the
Missouri.
General Meagher was missing.
The sentry testified that shortly be
fore the splash he had seen a figure
in a white night shirt pass him at q
distance. He was corroborated in this
by a colored barber. It is thought that
the general tripped over a coil Of rope
and plunged through a gap in the rail-
ing.
The body was never recovered.
There is little doubt that the fore
going is the true account of General
Meagher's death. F~orty-six years later,
in 1913, a man named Patrick Miller,
in Jail at Plains, after a drunken spree,
made the startling confession" that
he had murdered the governor at the
instigation of the vigilantes.
He said Meagher had been hanged
and his body buried in a secret place.
He had received $4,000 for his share IN
the deed, he asserted.
As soon as Miller recovered his senses,
however, he repudiated his statements
and his story had been so much at var
lance with common facts of time and
place that pioneers branded it as being
preposterous.
Probably the old vigilantes as a body
took no stand in the Daniels affair
whatever. At the time of the Daniels
hanging former members of the e1-
ecutive committees for Helena and
Virginia City hotly denied completely
IN the deed.
Their organization, they insisted, had
gone out of existence with the arrival
in Montana of Governor Edgerton and
had never been revived.
Extra-legal hangings attributed to
the ~vigilantes continued in Montana
for several years, however. Probably
the old organization fell heir to the
weakness of all secret societies, in that
it could not clear itself of reprehensive
acts done in its name but without ite
consent. The later executions were
possibly more in the nature of modern
lynching bees than in that of vigilante
justice.
The classic example of extra-legal
capital punishment during the later
days is contained in a legend of the
town Of Silver Bow. There the story
says, a miner was once found in the
act of hanging a Chinaman single
handed. He was doing it, the miner
is reputed to have explained, lust for
| luck"