ABSTRACT
Two men, relatively young, arrived within months of each other at the scenes of the earliest substantial gold strikes in the territory that was soon separated from Idaho and had its own name, Montana. It would not be a state until very late, 1889. Although they never knew each other, the coming of the two men into a kind of conjunction was to make a difference to western legendry and even to western history. Henry Plummer, who came to Montana from rumored troubles left behind in California and Nevada, reached Bannack in late 1862. The solitary school in Virginia City seemed to be only a beginning. On June 10, 1865, Sidney Edgerton, the territorial governor, appointed Thomas Dimsdale superintendent of public education of a territory that had no other schools. Later public accounts have followed the line of thought initiated by these contemporaries and have succeeded in making a legend of the sheriff who was an outlaw.
