NaraMoore ⛩️👻八尺様👻⛩️ at FediHeaven of Boot Hill: A brief history of the end of Sheriff Henry Plummer—Bannock, Montana (1864)
#Wss366 Boot #HistoricalFiction
“Lies, lies, lies,” Sheriff Plummer yelled as the Vigilance Committee of Alder Gulch dragged him from his home. His tone was less than manly for a person of his stature. Coatless, breath steaming in the cold winter air, he had lost all his dignity.
“We caught some of them vermin you call friends. They told us all about you before we hung um,” a freight driver called from the crowd.
“You elected me to protect you. That’s what I’ve been doing.”
The hardworking folk of Bannock met his statement with scorn and jeers. Long plagued by bandits, they had no sympathy for an incompetent or corrupt sheriff. At this point, it didn’t matter which; someone would pay.
Horsehair Ned appeared behind Plummer, holding up a heavy bar of bullion. “Behind his stove. A whole heap of them, pretty as you please.”
If the sheriff had anything more to say, the catcalls drowned it. Only the minister and the blacksmith kept the crowd from tearing the captured man limb from limb: the minister appealing to their Christian morality, and the other to their desire not to have their heads crushed.
The uproar dimmed only when they reached the northern road where the miners held his deputies—Buck Stinson and Ned Ray—captive. The shadow of the gallows at the end of the road was having its effect.
Still, the crowd only grew larger as they progressed. Neither the gallows nor the blistering cold of Montana in January could keep them from making the long trek to the execution grounds.
“What ya looking at?” the district judge asked, noticing Plummer looking up the steep hill to the east. “Heaven or Boot Hill. Yea be going to one, sure as shooting, and not the tother.”
“What about a trial?” the man asked, tearing his eyes away from the slope.
“Don’t need one,” the judge said. “But if it makes you feel better, I hereby pronounce you, Henry Plummer, guilty.”
The truth lies within his grave, now lost in the dust.
#Western #WesternHistory #Bannock #SheriffHenryPlummer #Outlaws #TootFic #MicroFiction #NMFic
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