Gold, Blood, and Rumor:

The Buried Treasure Legend of Hell Gate Ronde

Origins of a Place

Before the town of Missoula existed, before the Montana Territory was organized, and before American settlers had established more than a handful of permanent outposts west of the Continental Divide, there was Hell Gate Ronde. The name itself carries history in two languages. The canyon cutting through the eastern wall of the valley was called “Porte de l’Enfer,” or “Gate of Hell,” by French-Canadian trappers who passed through the Missoula Valley in the 1820s and were reportedly disturbed by the skeletal remains of Bitterroot Salish people strewn through the narrow defiles — evidence of recurring ambushes by Blackfeet warriors who exploited the canyon’s terrain to devastating effect (Lewis-Clark.org, “Passing Hell’s Gate,” https://lewis-clark.org/the-trail/road-to-the-buffalo/hells-gate/, accessed 20 Apr. 2025). The word “ronde,” as used by French-Canadian traders and trappers in the mid-nineteenth century, designated a broad, flat valley enclosed by mountains — what contemporaneous Americans sometimes called a “hole” — and by around 1850, the full term Hell Gate Ronde had come to describe the wide Missoula Valley itself (Lewis-Clark.org, “Passing Hell’s Gate”).

The Salish people, whose ancestral territory encompassed much of western Montana, called the valley lm-i-sul-etiku, a phrase that translates approximately as “the place chilled with fear” — a reference both to the cold waters of the Clark Fork and to the danger that accompanied passage through the canyon’s narrow mouths (University of Montana, “Yellowstone and Hellgate: A Discussion of Two Montana Names,” https://www.umt.edu/this-is-montana/columns/stories/yellowstone-hellgate.php, accessed 20 Apr. 2025). The eastern entrance, flanked by what are now Mount Sentinel and Mount Jumbo, formed a chokepoint that Blackfeet raiding parties had long used to intercept Salish hunters traveling eastward to the bison plains. The human cost of those ambushes had left a grim physical impression on the landscape that shaped European naming conventions for generations.

The First Settlement

Permanent Euro-American settlement in Hell Gate Ronde began in 1860, when Christopher P. Higgins and Francis L. Worden arrived in the Missoula Valley with a pack train of seventy-six mules loaded with merchandise — and, notably, a safe — after departing Walla Walla, Washington Territory. They established a trading post that would become the core of the short-lived town of Hell Gate (Historical Museum at Fort Missoula, “Early Missoula History,” https://fortmissoulamuseum.org/exhibit/early-missoula-history/, accessed 20 Apr. 2025). Their establishment was the first commercial enterprise in what would become Montana that was not purely a fur-trading operation, and it quickly became a waypoint on the Mullan Road, a federal military wagon road stretching 633 miles between Walla Walla and Fort Benton on the Missouri River (Lewis-Clark.org, “Passing Hell’s Gate”).

The Washington Territorial Legislature recognized Hell Gate Ronde’s importance by formally placing the seat of the new Missoula County “at or near Worden and Co. Trading Post in Hell Gate Ronde” (Destination Missoula, “History,” https://destinationmissoula.org/history, accessed 20 Apr. 2025). At its peak the town held no more than twenty permanent residents, but its geographic position — at the convergence of routes running north-south and east-west — gave it outsized commercial and political significance in the early 1860s. Life there was materially hard. Winters were severe, employment options narrow, and the saloon business apparently competitive. Still, a blacksmith shop, a livery stable, a hotel, and multiple drinking establishments had gathered around the Worden and Higgins store within a few years of its founding (Historical Museum at Fort Missoula, “Early Missoula History”).

In January 1862, Captain John Mullan referenced Hell Gate Ronde directly in his military reports, describing how he directed the establishment of a storehouse, corral, and supply depot at a central location he called Camp Humphreys, noting that the nearby settlers would help guard the stores (Malcolm Brooks, “History on the Bluff,” Substack, https://malcolmbrooks.substack.com/p/history-on-the-bluff, accessed 20 Apr. 2025). Mullan’s reference constitutes one of the most direct primary-document descriptions of the site’s strategic importance during the territorial period, and his observations underscore that Hell Gate Ronde was at this time functioning as a legitimate logistical node, not merely a frontier outpost.

The Plummer Gang and Hell Gate

The events that would seed the treasure legend unfolded against the backdrop of the Montana gold rush. Beginning in 1862 with the discovery at Grasshopper Creek and accelerating dramatically after the Alder Gulch strike in 1863, the region attracted thousands of miners and the full spectrum of people who followed them — merchants, freighters, gamblers, and predators. Among the predators was a network of road agents who preyed on gold shipments traveling between the mining camps. By late 1863, Thomas Dimsdale — an English-born editor who would publish the first book ever printed in Montana Territory — estimated that over 100 travelers had been killed in road agent attacks in and around Alder Gulch alone (Dimsdale, Thomas J. The Vigilantes of Montana; or, Popular Justice in the Rocky Mountains. Montana Post Press, 1866. Available via Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/68146/68146-h/68146-h.htm, accessed 20 Apr. 2025).

The gang’s alleged ringleader was Henry Plummer, the elected sheriff of Bannack, Montana’s first territorial capital. Plummer was hanged by the Montana Vigilantes on January 10, 1864 — an act that remains one of the most debated episodes in Montana history, with historians disagreeing sharply about the strength of the evidence against him. What is not disputed is that in the weeks following Plummer’s execution, the Vigilantes swept westward to Hell Gate Ronde in pursuit of other alleged gang members.

Among those hiding at Hell Gate was Cyrus Skinner, a California-born career criminal who had opened a saloon in the town after fleeing Bannack as Vigilante pressure mounted. Skinner had a documented history of larceny and prison escapes stretching back to California, and his saloon in Bannack had been, by multiple accounts, a gathering point for many of the men later identified as Plummer’s associates (Legends of America, “Cyrus Skinner — Gold Field Outlaw,” https://www.legendsofamerica.com/we-cyrusskinner/, accessed 20 Apr. 2025). He relocated to Hell Gate and set up another saloon, apparently believing the more remote location would afford protection.

The Trial in Worden’s Store

On the night of January 24, 1864, a Vigilante company led by Captain James Williams rode ninety miles to Hell Gate and located Skinner and two other alleged road agents, Aleck Carter and John Cooper. According to a contemporaneous account later republished in the Missoulian, Skinner was found seated on the safe belonging to the Worden and Higgins store — the same iron safe brought all the way from Walla Walla in 1860, which Worden would later carry to St. Louis and exchange for $65,000 in gold dust (Missoulian, “Montana History Almanac: Vigilantes Hang Two Criminals,” https://missoulian.com/lifestyles/territory/montana-history-almanac-vigilantes-hang-two-criminals/article_cc0b65d8-2597-11e0-9707-001cc4c03286.html, accessed 20 Apr. 2025). The juxtaposition is arresting: a suspected outlaw perched atop a merchant’s strongbox stuffed with gold, awaiting his fate.

A three-hour trial was held inside the store, its jury composed largely of Vigilantes. Both Skinner and Carter were found guilty and sentenced to hang. Skinner made a brief escape attempt as he was being led to the corral but was recaptured. Shortly after midnight on January 25, 1864, Skinner, Carter, and Cooper were hanged from poles propped over the fence of Captain Christopher Higgins’s corral, store boxes serving as the drops (Old Missoula, “Vigilantes Nab Six Road Agents at Hell Gate,” https://oldmissoula.com/vigilantes-nab-six-road-agents-at-hell-gate/, accessed 20 Apr. 2025). Three more men — Bob Zachary, George Shears, and “Whiskey Bill” Graves — were hunted down in the surrounding area and hanged over the following day. In total, six alleged road agents met their ends at or near Hell Gate Ronde within a thirty-six-hour span.

The Treasure Legend: Construction and Credibility

It is at precisely this point — the moment when men died before they could speak freely — that the treasure legend took root. The core of the story, as it circulated through subsequent decades, held that Skinner and members of the Plummer gang had buried a cache of gold coins and nuggets somewhere near the Hell Gate settlement before the Vigilantes arrived, and that none of those hanged revealed the location. Some versions of the legend expanded to include Henry Plummer himself, claiming that he offered to lead the Vigilantes to buried gold in exchange for his life, and that they refused.

The anonymous author of a satirical history of Hell Gate published in the Deer Lodge newspaper The New North-West in March 1874 — one of the earliest surviving accounts to directly reference treasure-seeking at the site — described visiting the ruins of Hell Gate Ronde and encountering a French-Canadian landowner who noted that “all supposed treasure had probably long since been carried off by the diggers,” implying that amateur searches of the site were already underway within a decade of the hangings (Old Missoula, “Hell Gate’s Alternate History,” https://oldmissoula.com/hell-gates-alternate-history/, accessed 20 Apr. 2025). The phrasing is casual and somewhat ironic in tone, which is consistent with the article’s overall satirical register, but it documents the existence of the legend and of active searching as early as 1874.

What does the documentary record actually support? Several verifiable facts are relevant. First, the Plummer gang was a real criminal operation that stole substantial quantities of gold — Dimsdale’s account, while written from a pro-Vigilante perspective, drew on firsthand testimony and has been accepted in its broad outlines by most subsequent historians. Second, Cyrus Skinner was genuinely wealthy by the standards of the time. Skinner had owned four saloons across Idaho and Montana, invested in mining claims, and maintained ongoing criminal connections that would have given him access to ill-gotten gold (Legends of America, “Cyrus Skinner”). Third, the speed of the Vigilante operation — riding ninety miles, conducting trials, and executing men within hours — would have left minimal opportunity for concealed assets to be disclosed or located.

However, several elements of the legend as commonly told are either unverifiable or demonstrably inaccurate. The claim, repeated in popular treasure-hunting sources, that Hell Gate Ronde had a population of two thousand residents around 1850 has no basis in the historical record — the settlement did not exist as an organized town until 1860 and never exceeded approximately twenty permanent residents (Destination Missoula, “History”). Similarly, the assertion that Henry Plummer was himself hanged at Hell Gate Ronde is incorrect; Plummer was executed at Bannack on January 10, 1864, two weeks before the Hell Gate executions took place (Dimsdale, The Vigilantes of Montana). These errors are characteristic of treasure legend accretion, in which details from multiple events and locations blend together through repeated retelling.

Archaeology of the Site

By 1913, a journalist visiting Hell Gate Ronde found little remaining: two or three buildings that had been converted into outhouses on a working ranch, and four burial mounds identified as containing the remains of the Plummer gang members hanged there (Old Missoula, “Hell Gate’s Alternate History”). The site passed through private ownership for much of the twentieth century. A photograph taken around 1910 and preserved in regional archives shows the shell of Worden’s trading post still standing, its sod roof partially intact, with Frank Woody — Hell Gate’s first county official and later Missoula’s first mayor — visible in the doorway alongside the painter Edgar Paxson (Malcolm Brooks, “History on the Bluff”). No systematic archaeological investigation of the site has been conducted and reported in peer-reviewed literature as of this writing, meaning that the question of whether any material cache was buried and remains undiscovered cannot be answered by the physical record.

What the Evidence Suggests

The Hell Gate Ronde treasure story occupies a familiar position in western American historical memory: it is a legend constructed from a foundation of genuine, verifiable events — a criminal gang, a cache of stolen gold, summary executions — to which subsequent generations have attached increasingly specific and increasingly unverifiable details. The foundation is real. The Plummer gang did steal gold. Cyrus Skinner and his associates were genuine outlaws with genuine assets. They were killed before anyone with legal authority to investigate their estates had an opportunity to do so.

Whether any gold was physically buried near Hell Gate Ronde is a separate and unanswerable question. No primary document — no diary entry, no sworn statement, no inventory from the Vigilante committee — records either the existence of a specific buried cache at the site or a deathbed confession from any of the six men hanged there. The 1874 New North-West reference to “diggers” searching the ruins suggests the legend was active within a decade of the events, but that early currency does not constitute evidence that the legend was accurate. Legends spread quickly when they intersect with the appetite for lost wealth.

What can be said with confidence is that Hell Gate Ronde was, for a brief but consequential period in the early 1860s, the most important settlement in what would become western Montana. It served as the county seat, the primary commercial node on the Mullan Road, and the stage for some of the most violent episodes of frontier justice in the region’s history. The town vanished almost overnight in 1865 when Worden and Higgins built a mill and store four miles east, and the entire community followed within months, leaving behind a name, a handful of graves, and a story that proved more durable than the buildings.

The treasure legend endures not because the evidence for it is compelling, but because the conditions that produce such legends — sudden death, abrupt displacement, untraceable wealth — were genuinely present at Hell Gate Ronde. That is, perhaps, the most historically interesting thing about the mystery: not whether gold is buried there, but what the persistence of the story reveals about the way frontier violence and wealth collapse into myth.

Works Cited

Brooks, Malcolm. “History on the Bluff.” Substack, 23 Feb. 2024, https://malcolmbrooks.substack.com/p/history-on-the-bluff. Accessed 20 Apr. 2025.

Destination Missoula. “History.” Destination Missoula, https://destinationmissoula.org/history. Accessed 20 Apr. 2025.

Dimsdale, Thomas J. The Vigilantes of Montana; or, Popular Justice in the Rocky Mountains. Montana Post Press, 1866. Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/68146/68146-h/68146-h.htm. Accessed 20 Apr. 2025.

Historical Museum at Fort Missoula. “Early Missoula History.” Fort Missoula Museum, https://fortmissoulamuseum.org/exhibit/early-missoula-history/. Accessed 20 Apr. 2025.

Legends of America. “Cyrus Skinner — Gold Field Outlaw.” Legends of America, https://www.legendsofamerica.com/we-cyrusskinner/. Accessed 20 Apr. 2025.

Lewis-Clark Trail Alliance. “Passing Hell’s Gate.” Discover Lewis and Clark, https://lewis-clark.org/the-trail/road-to-the-buffalo/hells-gate/. Accessed 20 Apr. 2025.

Missoulian. “Montana History Almanac: Vigilantes Hang Two Criminals.” Missoulian, 24 Jan. 2011, https://missoulian.com/lifestyles/territory/montana-history-almanac-vigilantes-hang-two-criminals/article_cc0b65d8-2597-11e0-9707-001cc4c03286.html. Accessed 20 Apr. 2025.

Old Missoula. “Hell Gate’s Alternate History.” Old Missoula, https://oldmissoula.com/hell-gates-alternate-history/. Accessed 20 Apr. 2025.

Old Missoula. “Vigilantes Nab Six Road Agents at Hell Gate.” Old Missoula, https://oldmissoula.com/vigilantes-nab-six-road-agents-at-hell-gate/. Accessed 20 Apr. 2025.

University of Montana. “Yellowstone and Hellgate: A Discussion of Two Montana Names.” This Is Montana, University of Montana, https://www.umt.edu/this-is-montana/columns/stories/yellowstone-hellgate.php. Accessed 20 Apr. 2025.