Empty Mansions

that in 1863 was plagued by robbers.
    W.A. was acquainted with the suspected leader of the robbers, a gunslinger named Henry Plummer, who also happened to be the newly elected sheriff. Most evenings in Bannack, W.A. would play billiards for an hour, then meet his friend Lloyd Selby at a saloon. Selby preferred to play cards, and his game was Old Sledge, akin to whist, sometimes called All Fours or Seven Up.
    “One evening I went to get Selby to go home and found that he was drunk,” W.A. recalled. “He had a large amount of gold dust with him in buckskin pouches. I was wearing a blue army overcoat and had my gold in my boots. A pouch of gold dust lay on the table. Henry Plummer, who was present, reached over and picked it up. Thereupon Selby pulled out his revolver and caressing it said, ‘There’s a friend that has never forsaken me.’ Plummer laid down the pouch. Somehow I got Selby home.… Ever since that nightI have thought it a mystery that we were not robbed on the way home.”
    After Plummer and his associates were hanged, W.A. came to know many of the Vigilante leaders, who included the leading men of that territory. In early 1864, he became a Mason, joining the ancient fraternalorganization’s lodge in Virginia City, wherethe Masonic leader was also the president of the first group of Vigilantes. As the state lodge’s longtime secretary, Cornelius Hedges, told it, “We will not say that all the Vigilantes were Masons, but we would not go astray to say that all Masons were Vigilantes.” W.A. would rise in 1877 to be the state grand master, or president, his first elected position of leadership.
    Although the Vigilante trials swiftly established law and order in the region, their actions are controversial today. The guilt or innocence of Sheriff Plummer is still debated, and many of the later executions, carried out by successors to the original Vigilantes, may have been little more than murder.
    But to W.A. and his friends, the morality of the early Vigilante trials was clear. “They had undoubted proof,” he told a reunion of the Montana Pioneers in 1917, “of the criminal action of all these men.” In a speech the year before in Virginia City, at a Masonic reunion, W.A. joked about the violent period, suggesting that some of his listeners had been far more active participants: “While I had considerable knowledge of the bandits then in the country … I did not personally know as much about them as some of you people did.” He praised the Masons, among other early members of the Vigilantes, for making the uncivilized Montana Territory safe so honest men like him could earn a living.
“I BEGAN TO REALIZE MY SITUATION”

 
    “T HERE WAS NO LACK ,” W.A. wrote in his journal, “of opportunities for those who were on the alert for making money.”
    W.A.’s striving and a good head for figures began to pay off as he bought and sold in dizzying fashion whatever a miner might need. He “traded tobacco at ten dollars a pound for boots at sixteen dollars a pair,” earning from the miners such insulting monikers as “Tobacco Billy.” When he sold flour, they called him “Yeast Powder Bill.”
    Here was a man prospering by his wits in the rough high country in winter, trading on his reputation as an honest businessman. He lent money atrates of about 2 percent per month, which would be usurious today but was not out of line in that time and place. His ledgers show him keeping track of every expenditure—at breakfast how much for molasses and butter, in the evening how much for tea. He would open a store, then close it, travel over mountains for new goods, and return to open a new store. When his peaches froze solid on the journey, he sold them as “chilly peaches.” He bought tobacco at $1.50 a pound in Boise, Idaho, “with every dollar I had,” and sold it in Helena, Montana, at “$5 to $6 a pound.” A contemporary marveled at W.A.’s entrepreneurship, saying, “He never touched a dollar except twenty came back in its place.”
    • • •
    In 1867, W.A. found that he couldearn a bigger profit by hauling the U.S. mail from the headwaters of the Columbia River, near Missoula in western Montana, through northern Idaho to Walla Walla, then the largest community in Washington Territory, a distance of more than 450 miles. As a subcontractor of the U.S. government, he organized a system of ponies, riders, boats, and way stations that provided mail delivery three times a week.
    The