A Decent, Orderly Lynching
Subtitle: The Montana Vigilantes
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: November 2004
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 421
ISBN-13: 9780806136370
Subjects: American history: c 1800 to c 1900; True crime; United States - State & Local - General; Lynching; History - U.S.; Vigilantes; United States - General; History: American; Montana; Murder - General; United States - 19th Century/Old West; United States - State & Local - West; History; Legal History; 19th century; Frontier and pioneer life
First sentence: Henry Plummer was born in 1832 on the Atlantic coast of Maine, about as far from the American West as a person could get in the United States, in climate and custom as well as distance.
Description: "The deadliest campaign of vigilante justice in American history erupted in the gold camps of the Rocky Mountains during the Civil War, when a private army hanged twenty-one troublemakers, including a rogue sheriff. Hailed as great heroes at the time, the Montana vigilantes are still revered as founding fathers who brought order to a lawless land." "Combing through original sources, including eyewitness accounts never before published, journalist and historian Frederick Allen concludes that the vigilantes were justified in their early actions, as they fought violent crime in a remote corner hundreds of miles 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 for social control. As Allen shows in this definitive account of Montana's "formative morality play," many of the vigilantes' targets were not guilty of any crimes at all."--Jacket.