Episode 194: Lawless

This is the story of the one.

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In 1386, a pig wandered into the home of its owner in a town in northwestern France and it attacked a small child.

In retaliation, the people there had the pig put on trial.

It was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged in the center of town.

When that day arrived, the pig was dressed in human clothing before making the drop.

In Germany in 1685, locals managed to kill a wolf that had been plaguing them for years.

Being a superstitious lot, they were convinced it was actually a werewolf, but since it hadn't changed back into its human form, they dressed it up in skin-colored clothing and put on a fake beard, and then they put it on trial.

It was naturally found guilty.

And let's not forget the packed courtroom in Hotun, France, back in 1506.

That's where one of the most brilliant legal minds in French history stood before the court and argued in defense of a gang of rats.

He managed to help the creatures escape execution, but they had to sit through a stern warning before they were set free.

Courtrooms have been around for centuries and have tended to be the place where evidence and testimony have been weighed on the scales of justice.

It's rarely been perfect and it has sometimes faced bizarre moments, such as pigs or rats.

But at the end of the day, having that system in place meant having a sense of security.

Every now and then, though, there was no court, no jury to hear testimony, and no judge to make an impartial decision for the common good.

Without that light in the darkness, many communities were left struggling to handle the crimes and claims that came their way.

And in one town, at least, that lack of authority led to something most people wanted to avoid: tragedy.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

If there's one thing in history that had the power to lure thousands of people out into the wilderness in search of glory, it was gold.

The dates might vary from region to region, but there have been a number of powerful gold rushes in American history, and one of the biggest by far took place in what is now the state of Montana.

Gold rush life was a lot like you'd expect.

A small number of people would discover gold, word would get out, and then the multitudes would flock to join them.

Almost overnight, entire towns would spring up with everything you needed to feel at home, as long as all of it was essential to the miners, that is.

And that's exactly what Nevada City, Montana was.

It was established in 1863 as just one community in a whole string of new towns that lined the Alder Gulch.

In fact, pretty soon an entire 14-mile stretch of the Gulch was filled with mining towns of various sizes, giving the location its nickname, the 14-mile city.

In their day, Nevada City and nearby Virginia City were considered to be some of the richest deposits in the country.

Some estimates say the mines there pumped out the modern equivalent of over $2.5 billion worth of gold.

Not too bad for such a dry, dusty corner of Montana.

But frontier life was still dangerous, and even more so when mining was involved.

A good example is the U.S.

Grant Mine, named after the president of the same name.

It only operated for four years, beginning in 1864, but it cut extensive tunnels into Alder Mountain during that time, and delving that deep came with a price.

The mines there were prone to flooding, so escape tunnels were cut to the surface to give miners a chance to get out quickly if the water levels surged.

But it was hard to build systems that combated cave-ins and fires, which happened enough to take hundreds of lives.

But the real danger was outside the mines.

It's said that during its heyday, the gold rush had one primary currency, gold.

Folks paid for things with gold dust, gold flakes, and sometimes even large gold nuggets, and that meant carrying that precious yellow metal around with them everywhere they went.

And that made them easy targets for outlaws.

They had a lot of different names for them back then, but most people called them highwaymen.

And if you were an honest miner wanting to cart your hard-earned gold from one place to another, they were your worst nightmare.

Murders were common.

Highway robbery, the literal kind, was even more so.

And after a while, people got pretty fed up.

The trouble was, back in the 1860s, Montana was just a territory, and that meant it didn't have the robust legal system that actual states had.

Sure, there were elected sheriffs, often serving more than one community at a time, but there wasn't much of a breakwater against the waves of crime.

So communities built their own.

They called them vigilante committees, not the sort of committee that writes down their minutes and follows Robert's rules of order.

No, these were more like the Wild West version of a neighborhood watch.

Honest, hardworking citizens who gathered together to protect each other and to hunt down criminals who deserved justice for their crimes.

It was a way of protecting their investments, it was a way of generating safety, and it was a way to get the community involved in delivering justice.

But it wasn't without its flaws, and in some instances, it created more mess than it helped prevent.

And when things got out of hand, it really got bloody.

There were three groups at work in the area.

There was the local miners' court, a collection of random miners who were summoned whenever big decisions needed to be made.

After all, it was a community of miners, so they should all pitch in and help out.

Then there was the gang of highwaymen known as the Innocents.

The name was a joke, though, because these men were ruthless killers who would rob their own mothers if they were carrying a bag of gold dust, and they were giving people headaches up and down the Alder Gulch, all throughout the 14-mile city.

And finally, there was the Vigilante Committee of Nevada City.

These were locals who had had enough, ranchers who had been driven to bankruptcy, miners who had been picked clean by criminals, shop owners who had been robbed one too many times, and it was their belief that there was safety in numbers, so they united to fight back.

And they had a good reason to do so.

The innocents had a self-proclaimed leader who was a bit of a hothead, and more than that, he was trigger happy.

He was a tall, thin man with a dark mustache named George Ives, and just about everyone in town was looking for a way to take him down.

In the winter of 1863, the corpse of a local man named Nicholas Tybolt was discovered out by the appropriately named Stinking Water River.

Tybolt was a young Dutch immigrant who worked for a local rancher named William Clark and had been on an errand to purchase some mules for him, which meant that he'd been traveling with a small sack of gold dust.

The hunter who found the body also stumbled upon two men nearby who claimed to know what had happened.

George Ives had encountered the young Dutchman, taken his gold, and then shot him as he knelt and prayed for his life to be spared.

Using information from these two men, locals were able to track Ives down, and with numbers on their side, they cornered him and took him into custody.

And he had an actual trial too, although one that was organized and run by locals on their own.

It was the best a territory could manage back then.

And Ives' trial began on December 19th of 1863, hoping for justice and maybe even an end to their troubles.

But it would be a rough road to get there.

It's said that over 1,500 people gathered to watch the trial.

The Vigilante Committee sent one of their own to act as chief prosecutor, a local attorney by the name of Wilbur Sanders, and he got to work making the case for Ives' guilt.

It wasn't easy, though.

There was a large number of members of the innocence embedded within the community, and they made things difficult for the Vigilante Committee.

Heck, even the sheriff, a guy named Henry Plummer, was in on it, although he avoided getting too involved at that moment at risk of blowing his cover.

But Ives confessed to the murder, and on December 21st, just three days after the trial began, the jury was sent off to deliberate and bring back a verdict.

Less than an hour later, they returned.

George Ives, they said, was guilty.

For his crime, Ives was sentenced to death by hanging.

Locals took him out to a spot between two buildings where a beam connected them up above and tossed a rope over it.

A box was laid out for Ives to stand on, and as the noose was being placed around his neck, they asked him if he had any last words.

He did what you might expect.

He recanted his confession.

He pinned the murder on someone else entirely, and he asked them to tell his mother that he was innocent.

Oh, and he shouted out a curse upon the townsfolk, because what would the hanging of a wanted killer be without that stereotypical declaration of a curse, right?

A moment later, the box he stood on was kicked out from under him, and his tall, lanky frame dropped.

After a few minutes of twitching, that dark mustache of his stopped moving, and the judge declared him to be dead.

His body was cut down, and despite the freezing temperatures that day, a grave was dug in the hard soil of the local graveyard.

Legends say that Ives was buried right beside his victim, Nicholas Teibolt, as a way of letting the young Dutchman know that his killer had been caught.

Ives didn't get the funeral.

He didn't even get a coffin or a simple pine box.

But he got what the rest of the town felt he deserved after everything he had done to them.

Justice.

As you might imagine, an area with such a dangerous past is an easy home to stories of ghosts.

And while Nevada City is just a shadow of its former self, there are apparently other, darker shadows waiting for those who visit.

The local hotel has been the site of a number of unusual encounters.

Most common is the figure of an older man, dressed, as modern visitors might say, like a cowboy.

Others have seen the same ghostly figure down at the local saloon.

Other guests in the hotel have reported footsteps in the hallway, only to open their doors to find no one there.

And some have even seen mysterious figures in the hallway mirror, figures that aren't actually there when they turn around.

One common sighting at the hotel is the figure of a weeping woman.

Guests have checked in and hauled their luggage to their room, only to unlock their door and find a woman sitting on the bed or in a chair, her hands buried in her face as she wailed in grief.

Upon returning to the front desk, these guests are always greeted with the same shocking news.

No one else has been given a key to their room.

And just on the edge of Nevada City is a historic home known as the Sedman House.

It was built there in the 1860s by a miner by the same name for his wife and children.

But when he died of spotted fever, followed by the death of their daughter Clara from diphtheria, the widow Sedman moved away.

The trouble is, if the stories are true, Clara's spirit stayed behind.

Today the house stands as a museum, giving visitors a glimpse into what life looked like for those gold rush go-getters a century and a half ago.

It's a fascinating exhibit for sure, and it lures in a lot of tourists, but things aren't all that they appear inside.

Employees in the past have reported coming to work in the morning to find the bedding messed up, as if someone had climbed onto the beds while the place was closed.

Some of the visitors have whispered about unusual figures and shapes inside.

And many years ago, a number of people were said to have approached the historical guides to tell them that the little girl in Victorian clothing really added a bit of realism to the tour.

The trouble is, the house never employed a little girl.

But if there's one ghostly figure on most people's tongues, it's probably the tall, thin man with a dark mustache that's been sighted in various places.

A figure many believe is the ghost of George Ives.

He's been spotted at the local hotel, dressed in the clothing of an old highwayman.

And back in 2006, a photographer came to town to snap a few photos for the state's Heritage Commission.

After touring the area a bit, someone pointed out the location of George Ives' execution, and he asked a couple of his friends to stand next to the historical marker there and smile for the camera.

When he later examined the photo, though, he was surprised to find that neither of his friends were actually in the shot, which was odd, but something else was.

It was the translucent, ghostly image of a tall, lanky man with a hint of a mustache on his lip.

Even more surprising, though, is the date the photo was taken, December 21st, the 143rd anniversary of George Ives' death.

The places we live have a way of growing around our actions.

They take on the flavor of the people who once walked the streets, and echoes of past tragedies can often be heard, like shadows cast on the wall by pain and grief.

And Nevada City is certainly one of those places.

But one thing I love about the town's past is just how much the people there worked to make it better.

The trial of George Ives might not have been perfect.

After all, every single one of the 24 jurors were members of the Vigilante Committee, but it certainly was a turning point for everyone there.

It was the moment the town went went from lawless to orderly.

After Ives' trial and execution, nearly two dozen more members of the innocents were rounded up, put on trial, and hanged.

Eventually, even that corrupt sheriff, Henry Plummer, found himself at the end of the hangman's noose, on a gallows that had been constructed years earlier, on his own orders no less.

And with justice like that, word spread.

The community became known as a safe place to live and it drew in more minors as a result.

But all all good things must come to an end, and as the years ticked by, fewer and fewer people called Nevada City their home.

By 1872, the place was a ghost town.

Perhaps literally.

But the Vigilante Committee lived on in other ways.

Remember Wilbur Sanders, the town attorney who worked to convict George Ives of murder?

He eventually became the first U.S.

Senator from the state of Montana.

Another, Sidney Egerton, became the state's first governor.

Not too shabby for a group of neighbors who started out fighting a group of outlaws.

One other member of the group, James Stewart, even had a brother who went on to start his own vigilante committee elsewhere.

Granville Stewart was a rancher who faced a similar threat in his town, only his outlaws were cattle thieves.

So in 1884, he built a team of locals who fought back.

They called themselves the Stewart Stranglers, which sounds more like a name of a pair of serial killers than law-abiding citizens.

But Montana was still just a territory, and those ranchers needed someone to stand up for them.

In 1884 alone, the group killed 20 cattle thieves.

Their actions, noble to some, criminal to others, depending on how you view them, certainly made them famous.

In fact, one wealthy ranch owner from western North Dakota caught wind of their mission and volunteered his services, but Stewart politely declined the offer.

Why?

Because he was worried the newcomer might bring them too much unwanted attention.

He was, after all, a prominent politician with a national reputation who was headed for great things in the years to come.

The 26th President of the United States?

Theodore Roosevelt

Stories from the Wild West have a certain attractiveness to them, don't they?

They're a deep well of injustice, heroic townsfolk, and bloody tragedy.

So it should come as no surprise that there are other similar stories to tell.

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Learn more at AARP.org/slash wise friend.

So what do this animal

and this animal

and this animal

have in common?

They all live on an Organic Valley farm.

Organic Valley dairy comes from small organic family farms that protect the land and the plants and animals that live on it from toxic pesticides, which leads to a thriving ecosystem and delicious, nutritious milk and cheese.

Learn more at OV.coop and taste the difference.

The day he rode into town, one chapter ended and another began.

They were big chapters too, especially for a bustling town like Deadwood, South Dakota.

The community there, like so many others in the region, was the product of a gold rush.

It's what brought in thousands of white settlers who pushed out the native Lakota peoples.

By 1876, there were 25,000 people living and working in Deadwood, making it one popular place, and not just for miners.

Where there was gold, there were outlaws.

That seemed to be the general rule of thumb in that era.

But big towns like Deadwood were like a roaring fire, and all sorts of other types of individuals flocked to its warmth and glow.

But few were as well-rounded or as famous as Wild Bill Hickok.

Hickcock had been an outlaw, a sharpshooter, and even a Union soldier during the Civil War.

But he also loved to gamble, which is what he was doing on August 2nd of 1876.

That's when Jack McCall pulled a gun on him and shot him.

Legend says Hickok was holding two pairs at the time, both black suits, two aces and two eights.

Today it's known as the dead man's hand.

But the day Deadwood lost one star, another rode into town.

Seth Bullock had just come off a sour defeat over in Helena, Montana, where he'd run for the office of sheriff but lost.

So he was looking for a new life away from that sore spot, and he found it in Deadwood.

He got off on a pretty good foot too.

Almost right away the folks in town decided that he'd make a good sheriff and they elected him to that position.

He was a hard worker and took care of the people around him.

Local rancher Theodore Roosevelt, yeah, that guy again, also noticed his work ethic and appointed him a U.S.

Marshal as well.

But Deadwood was home to Bullock.

Heck, he even started up a hardware store and eventually built a hotel there in 1895, which tells me he was doing pretty well.

He even opened up his hotel, the Bullock, to victims of a cholera outbreak, giving them a place to rest and recover.

Many children were said to have died there, but they did so in comfort, thanks to his generosity.

Oh, and one other time, another lawman rode into town looking for work.

Ben Bullock was so confident he had everything under control that he just turned the guy away.

His name?

Wyatt Earp.

Bullock passed away in 1919, and he's buried there just outside of town.

And Deadwood itself has done a bit bit of dying in the years since.

Down from that peak of 25,000, the town today is home to maybe 1,200 people.

But more than that, it's home to ghosts of the past.

Over the years, visitors to the historic community have reported seeing ghostly figures in the local saloon, known as the Fairmont.

It's no wonder, either.

That place was the site of a number of shootings and also where a number of people died after long, difficult lives.

And nearby is the Adams House, built in 1892.

The name actually comes from the second owners of the house, but after Mr.

Adams passed away from a stroke, his wife started hearing sounds in the house.

She claimed it was her dead husband, still walking around upstairs, and sometimes sitting in his favorite rocking chair.

In fact, his presence there made her feel so comforted that she left the house exactly as it had been the day he died.

And it stayed that way for 50 years through her own death and the purchase of the place by new owners.

Today, it's a bed and breakfast, and visitors and staff alike have all reported the shadowy figure of a man upstairs and a rocking chair that moves on its own.

And of course, the Bullock is also reported to be haunted.

Sheriff Bullock himself was an avid smoker in life, said to be fond of nice cigars.

Oddly, despite a non-smoking policy in the hotel, guests today still report smelling the sweet scent of cigars.

Objects have been known to move in the hotel as well, and money in the register at the front desk has reportedly been mixed up a number of times, all of which sounds like pranks played by little kids.

Perhaps they are the deeds of those who came to the hotel looking to recover so long ago.

The one ghost I can't find any record of, though, Wild Bill Hickok himself.

Some people apparently got enough attention in life to warrant not sticking around after death.

And that's just fine by me.

This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Michelle Mudo and music by Chad Lawson.

Lore is much more than just a podcast.

There is a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

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My production company, Grim and Mild, specializes in shows that sit at the intersection of the dark and the historical.

You can learn more about all of those shows and everything else going on over in one central place: grimandmild.com.

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And as always,

thanks for listening.