This story begins the same way as the previous ones. In the mid-19th century, a small gold nugget was found in the Grasshopper Creek in southwestern Montana. Soon gold diggers came to the banks of the stream.
At first, the vein was considered rich, so the population began to grow by leaps and bounds. The village was named Bannak, after an Indian tribe that once lived in this area. The place was pretty wild. By 1863, a post office was opened in the village of gold diggers and it received the status of a city. Bannack became the capital of the county, and then - for a short time - of the entire state. From the very beginning, there was created its own police, not subordinate to the federal one.
But by the early 1880s, the gold rush had subsided. The mines produced less and less precious metal, and the population began to thin out. However, the city was not completely abandoned. The settlers achieved the assignment of the status of a historical monument to Bannak, and now the remaining several dozen houses have been mothballed and maintained. And here, too, the influence of the posthumous curse on the ghost town cannot be ruled out.
The story of the life and death of Sheriff Plummer once shook the whole of America. We can safely say that the fate of this man reflected the violent temper and cruelty of the Wild West.
As a very young man, Henry Plummer arrived in the town of Nevada City. At first, he worked hard at a bakery and saved enough money to buy a small ranch. In 1856, Henry, who had a reputation for being educated and well-mannered, was elected sheriff. He got down to business so abruptly and gained such authority that a year later he was re-elected to the same position.
However, the twenty-five-year-old Plummer was unlucky: he was ruined by a passion for a married woman. One of the local gold prospectors found him one evening with his wife. According to one version, the deceived husband pounced on the sheriff with his fists, according to the other, he challenged him to a duel. Plummer immediately proved that he could shoot better than his opponent. Despite the intercession of local residents, who claimed that it was self-defense, the sheriff was sentenced to ten years and imprisoned in San Quentin prison.
But Plummer's supporters were persistent. In addition, the young man was diagnosed with tuberculosis. And the former sheriff was released within six months. During his imprisonment, Plummer's ranch burned down, and he was again left penniless. For some time he worked as a clerk in a grocery store, and then again got involved in history - he shot a poker partner in a brothel.
Plummer was arrested again, but there was not enough evidence. However, in prison, Henry was identified by a petty thief as a stagecoach robber. He supposedly accidentally survived one of the raids and confidently pointed at Plummer. However, the witness himself was once arrested by a former sheriff, and many decided that he was simply settling scores. Henry did not wait for the denouement, his ex-lover bribed the jailer, and Plummer fled in an unknown direction.
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He first tried to cover up his tracks by sending a note to one of the California newspapers, according to which Henry Plummer and two of his accomplices were captured and hanged in Washington state, and he himself went to Bannack. There, according to one version, he put together a gang and healed on a grand scale. As it turned out, Plummer sought the place of sheriff, but lost the first election. In January 1863, his lucky rival was shot and killed while trying to apprehend a robbery suspect. Plummer was able to present the case in such a way that the murdered sheriff came to a friendly meeting with the bandits, and Henry put everyone down on the spot. Naturally, Plummer immediately took the coveted post. And there were no people willing to compete with him: by the spring of 1863, dozens of gangs flooded the surrounding mountains.
At first, the locals were pleased with the new sheriff: in a short time, he and his assistants shot and hanged several dozen robbers. But then the townspeople began to suspect that Plummer was playing a double game, and the caught criminals were his competitors.
The people of the American West were not defenseless lambs in those days. The prospectors of Bannack and neighboring Virginia formed a committee of vigilants, or vigilantes, and hunted down bandits. In January 1864, they caught and hanged four dozen of Henry's accomplices. Probably, one of them split, and the sheriff came under suspicion. In February 1865, a squad of sixty-five armed vigilants broke into Plummer's office. He was tied up, tried and immediately hanged. True, given his past merits, he was buried according to the generally accepted custom, and not like a bandit. But before his death, Plummer managed to curse both the vigilantes and the whole town where he found his end.
Nevertheless, the robberies in the vicinity did not stop, although they began to decline. The last gang was defeated only in 1867. And the debate about Plummer's guilt continues to this day. Evidence of his ties to the bandits was sketchy and conflicting. The vigilants did not keep any documentation. And there is no guarantee that robbers who wanted to settle scores with the sheriff did not creep into their ranks.
A year after Plummer's death, inscriptions began to appear on the fences and walls of Bannack's houses: "Henry is innocent." Sometimes they were made with chalk, sometimes with blood. For a long time it was believed that these were the tricks of the supporters of the executed sheriff. But as time went on, fewer and fewer inhabitants remained in the town, and Plummer's name was forgotten. And the inscriptions continued to appear. In addition, his grave was found twice dug. The second time, a mysterious grave-digger stole the skull of the deceased and for some reason hid it in the back room of Skinner's saloon, where a real den was once located. Soon after, the drinking establishment caught fire and burned down. But the area where the saloon stood is still the favorite place of the Plummer's ghost.
Sometimes tourists even manage to take a picture in which a blurred figure of a person is visible. But the mysterious blood inscriptions stopped appearing when in 1993 a Beaverhead County judge reviewed Plummer's case and ruled: presumably innocent.
From the book: "The most eerie and mystical places on the planet and the secrets of their inhabitants." Reutov Sergey