Hank Crawford

The Butcher Who Held the Badge First:

Hank Crawford and the Making of Law at Bannack

When the Montana vigilantes hanged Henry Plummer at Bannack on January 10, 1864, he was the town's elected sheriff. He was not its first. Before Plummer there was Hank Crawford, a butcher who held the post for a matter of weeks in the spring of 1863 and left town after a quarrel with Plummer that ended in gunfire (Dimsdale 32-39; Kruger). Crawford's tenure was brief, and the sources on it are thin and partly partisan. It nonetheless offers a useful look at how a law officer was made at Bannack before any government reached the place.

A Camp With Rules but No Government

John White found gold on Grasshopper Creek on July 28, 1862, and a camp took shape around the strike (Thomasma 6). By the following spring Thomas Dimsdale, the Virginia City editor who published an early and influential book-length account of the period, put the population at more than a thousand (24). The nearest organized authority was distant and, for practical purposes, absent. Congress created Idaho Territory on March 3, 1863, adjourned without funding it, and its governor did not reach Lewiston until July (Thomasma 35). A Digital Public Library of America exhibit drawing on Montana Historical Society materials describes the result in general terms: the gold fields were far from official law enforcement, and miners' courts and vigilance committees filled the gap ("Becoming a Territory").

The miners did write rules. A transcription of the Bannack District's laws, posted by Montana GenWeb, records a meeting on October 19, 1862, at which the district's president was authorized to "appoint a Sheriff to act in any case pending." That describes an officer named for a single dispute, not a standing post. Laws adopted on April 26, 1863, let the president name a sheriff to carry out a trial's decision, and those of May 23, 1863, listed the district's officers as president, miners' judge, sheriff, and coroner ("Beaverhead County"). The Montana Historical Society's Research Center holds a four-item collection of Bannack Mining District records from 1862 and 1863 ("Bannack Mining District Records"). The transcription cited here has not been checked against those originals, and it should be read with that in mind.

The Butcher

Dimsdale, Les Kruger, and Melissa Poindexter Thomasma's University of Montana thesis all describe Crawford as a butcher (Dimsdale 38; Kruger; Thomasma 31). In January 1863, according to Dimsdale, he was boarding in Bannack with L. W. Davenport and was in poor health (26). The Historical Society of Montana's 1876 list of people present in the Bannack district during the winter of 1862-63 includes a "Crawford, Henry" among three men named Crawford, without further identification ("Montana Winter"). Emerson Hough, writing in 1907, calls him Jack Crawford (Hough).

Crawford enters the record on January 14, 1863, the day Plummer shot Jack Cleveland in a Bannack saloon (Kruger; Thomasma 32-33). Dimsdale writes that no one at the scene was willing to lift the dying man until Crawford arranged to carry him to shelter and sent for a doctor. Cleveland lived about three hours (26). Crawford later said that Plummer pressed him to learn what Cleveland had said before dying, a detail that comes from Crawford's own account and, as Thomasma notes, has been disputed (33). Dimsdale reports that no action followed for some time (27).

The Trial That Made a Sheriff

In March 1863, according to Dimsdale, Charley Reeves scuffled with a chief of a Native camp near Yankee Flat. That evening Reeves and a man named Moore returned with William Mitchell and fired into the camp's lodge. Four people died: the chief, a boy, an infant, and a Frenchman named Brissette who had run toward the noise (30-31). The Deseret News, in a 1988 history of the camp, confirms the number of dead and reports that a miners' court expelled three men for the shooting (Jensen).

A mass meeting convened the next morning. Reeves and Moore were pursued, caught in a thicket near the creek, and brought back to Bannack (Dimsdale 31). Dimsdale places Plummer's trial for killing Cleveland in the same round of proceedings and reports his acquittal on the ground that Cleveland had threatened him first (31). Kruger agrees that a miners' jury acquitted Plummer.

The prosecution of Reeves and Moore then came apart. The lawyer who had promised to prosecute announced on the morning of the trial that he had been retained for the defense, and a volunteer took the case with little success. Judge Hoyt of St. Paul was chosen to preside, and, in Dimsdale's words, Hank Crawford was elected sheriff (31-32). A crowd of perhaps five or six hundred argued for hours over whether to try the men en masse or by jury, and chose a jury, with Nathaniel P. Langford and others summoned from a sawmill to sit on it. On the first ballot one juror voted for death and eleven against. Langford was the one. The jury returned a sealed verdict of banishment and confiscation of property, with the two men permitted to wait at Deer Lodge until the mountain passes opened (32).

Weeks Without Pay

Dimsdale describes an office that depended on the decisions of mass meetings. Crawford offered his resignation two or three times, and friends persuaded him to stay, promising to support him and to repay his costs (33). He sold the arms taken from Plummer, Reeves, and Mitchell to cover expenses. A Plummer associate known as Old Tex then called a miners' meeting that voted to return the weapons, and Crawford had to retrieve them and pay costs, including the prisoners' board, with, by Dimsdale's account, no compensation ever paid (33-34). A separate meeting authorized him to seize and sell Cleveland's horses to recover his outlay, but Tex told him Cleveland had an absent partner and advised him to wait (34). Dimsdale also reports that a miners' meeting remitted the banishment of Moore and Reeves, who had been held at Hell Gate by snow in the passes, and that they returned to Bannack (41).

The Shot and the Departure

Dimsdale narrates a run of confrontations between Plummer and Crawford over the horse and over insults. At one of them Plummer demanded that Crawford draw a pistol, and Crawford refused (35-37). The next morning Crawford borrowed a rifle from his friend Buz Caven (38). At noon, as Dimsdale tells it, Plummer stood opposite the shop door with a double-barreled gun, a friend named Frank Ray brought Crawford a rifle (Dimsdale does not say whether it was the same weapon), and Crawford fired. The ball broke Plummer's arm (38-39).

Other accounts agree on the wound and differ on the circumstances. Kruger writes that Crawford fired from hiding while Plummer stood in the street with a shotgun resting on his knee, and that the bullet shattered Plummer's right elbow, forearm, and wrist. Thomasma, drawing on eyewitness Edwin Purple by way of the historian Frederick Allen, describes a shot taken from a partly concealed spot in a restaurant doorway at Plummer's back. By that account Plummer turned and dared Crawford to finish the job, and the second shot missed (34). Plummer reportedly refused amputation and recovered (Thomasma 34-35). Dimsdale adds that the ball lodged in the wrist and was found there after his execution (39-40).

Crawford did not stay to see the outcome. Dimsdale gives the date of his departure as March 13, 1863, on horseback for Fort Benton and then by river toward Wisconsin, followed by three men who never caught him (39). Kruger gives mid-March and says Crawford turned in his badge. Hough says he fled down the Missouri. The Deseret News says he resigned and left for fear of revenge from Plummer's friends (Jensen).

The Election of May 1863

Thomasma writes that Walter Dance, president of the mining district, agreed to elections for a judge, sheriff, and coroner, with polling monitors and counters. Plummer defeated Jefferson Durley among 554 ballots cast, and left on May 26 to marry Electa Bryan at Sun River (35-36). A University of Montana feature dates the election to May 24, 1863 ("Bannack: Education"). Kruger puts it slightly more than two months after Crawford's departure, which agrees. The DPLA exhibit's caption says the Society's district records show Plummer's appointment ("Becoming a Territory"). Before leaving, Plummer named D. H. Dillingham chief deputy and Ned Ray, Buck Stinson, and Jack Gallagher as other deputies (Thomasma 36). Dimsdale names Stinson and Ray as his first appointments. The office thus passed from Crawford to Plummer in roughly ten weeks.

What the Record Does and Does Not Support

Four sources, Dimsdale, Kruger, Thomasma, and Hough, agree that Crawford was sheriff before Plummer, that he was a butcher, that he shot Plummer, and that he left Bannack. Dimsdale and Kruger date the departure to March 1863. On several other points the evidence is thinner.

First, the start of his term is unclear. Dimsdale says "elected" in one chapter and "appointed" in the next (32-33), and places the choice at the March trial. Thomasma's paragraph on the winter says the miners' court "sanctioned" him to act as sheriff, in a passage that seems to precede the Cleveland shooting (31). If she is right, Crawford held the office from winter and not for weeks. The sources do not settle the point.

Second, much of Dimsdale's account of the feud appears to rest on Crawford's own telling. Thomasma judges Dimsdale's book as a whole to be biased, since he relied on informants close to the vigilantes (48-49). Third, Crawford's later life is disputed. Dimsdale wrote in 1866 that he had returned and was living at Virginia City after marrying in the East (39), while Hough says he never returned. Dimsdale's claim is the closer in time, but it has no second source. Finally, the district laws rest on one web transcription, and the identity of "Henry Crawford" on the Society's winter list is an inference. Nathaniel P. Langford's Vigilante Days and Ways (1890) devotes a chapter to Crawford, and it was not available for checking here; a reader pursuing the question should begin there.

Works Cited

"Bannack: Education, Religion, and Justice (Part 2 of 4)." This Is Montana, University of Montana, https://www.umt.edu/this-is-montana/columns/stories/bannack-part-two.php. Accessed 19 Oct. 2026.

"Bannack Mining District Records, 1862-1863." SC-238, Research Center Archives, Montana Historical Society, https://mhs.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/resources/1723. Accessed 19 Oct. 2026.

"Beaverhead County, Montana: Mining History." Montana GenWeb, https://www.mtgenweb.com/beaverhead/mining_history.htm. Accessed 19 Oct. 2026.

"Becoming a Territory." Boom and Bust: The Industries That Settled Montana, Digital Public Library of America, https://dp.la/exhibitions/industries-settled-montana/mining/becoming-territory. Accessed 19 Oct. 2026.

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 19 Oct. 2026. Page numbers refer to the original pagination preserved in this edition.

Historical Society of Montana. "Montana Winter 1862-3 Surnames ~ C ~." Contributions to the Historical Society of Montana, vol. 1, 1876. American History and Genealogy Project, https://ahgp.org/mt/montana-winter-1862-3-surname-c.html. Accessed 19 Oct. 2026.

Hough, Emerson. "Henry Plummer." The Story of the Outlaw: A Study of the Western Desperado, Outing Publishing, 1907. Legends of America, https://www.legendsofamerica.com/we-henryplummer-hough/. Accessed 19 Oct. 2026.

Jensen, Frank. "Montana: History Haunts Old Gold Camp." Deseret News, 3 July 1988, https://www.deseret.com/1988/7/3/18770829/montana-history-haunts-old-gold-camp/. Accessed 19 Oct. 2026.

Kruger, Les. "Sheriff Plummer Is Long Gone, but His Double-Barreled Shotgun Remains." HistoryNet, 23 Jan. 2018, https://historynet.com/sheriff-plummer-long-gone-double-barreled-shotgun-remains/. Originally published in Wild West, Feb. 2010. Accessed 19 Oct. 2026.

Thomasma, Melissa Poindexter. "'The Lawmen Faced the Outlaws, No Badge Upon a Breast': Historical Memory and the Legacy of Henry Plummer and the Montana Vigilantes." 2010. U of Montana, MA thesis. ScholarWorks at University of Montana, https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/7. Accessed 19 Oct. 2026.