wild-fire. Miners rushed to the creek and set up their tents, shacks and log cabins. Unlike Rome, this first town of Montana, called Bannock, was built in a single night. Soon after the gold seekers had settled down to work in earnest, the road agents, a well-organized gang of “roughs” from all over the West, began to rob the stage-coaches travelling between Bannock and Virginia City. “Innocent” was their pass-word; mustaches, beards and neckties tied with a sailor’s knot, their sign of membership. After a succession of miners, homeward bound with their gold-dust, had dropped from sight, never to be heard of again, those who remained decided to elect a sheriff. Their choice fell upon a certain Henry Plummer, who was also sheriff of Virginia City. Plummer, however, never seemed to arrest the right man, a circumstance which was explained later when it was discovered that he was the chief of the gang of road agents. The funeral of a miner who had died of mountain fever, the first man for some time to die from a natural cause, gave the community the opportunity to organize secretly the “Vigilantes,” and finally to round up the road agents, either hanging them or giving them warning to leave the country.

Montana was established as a territory in 1864, Bannock becoming the first capital, and in the sane year the first county seat of Beaverhead County. The capital was removed to Virginia City in 1865, but not until 1882 did Dillon become the county seat. The boundaries of Beaverhead changed very little until 1911, when 938 square miles of Madison County, 600,320 acres in all, were annexed. Men began settling on the land west of Bannock as early as 1862; stock men mainly with herds. A few farmers also began to take up choice bits of land along the rivers. The railroad, then the Utah Northern, entered from the south in 1879. As it was being built, tent towns were established every fifty miles. One of these towns was never moved and grew into the present town of Dillon.

The first attempt to open up to the white man the land along the Powder and Lower Tongue Rivers, in what is now Sheridan County, was made by General Patrick E. Conner on August 29, 1865, and was eminently successful. He attacked the Arapahoe Indians with a force of 250 regular soldiers and successfully routed seven hundred warriors. The next effort ended, however, in disaster. On the twenty-first day of December, 1866, at a point on Sheridan’s southern boundary now known as Massacre Hill, eighty-two officers and men sacrificed their lives to the hostile Sioux and Cheyennes in attempting to open a road across the country from Fort Laramie to Montana.

LONELINESS IN UNION COUNTY

The black spot in the center of this not very attractive picture is a squatter’s hut.