ABSTRACT
At precisely five o’clock on Saturday afternoon, April 30, 1870, two young men stood on a box in the back of an open wagon, stout ropes around their necks, their arms and feet secured, their faces covered with white handkerchiefs. A team of horses hitched to the wagon was struck, and as the wagon lurched forward, the two fell out of the tailgate and strangled on a sturdy branch of Helena’s famous Hangman’s Tree. “Vigilantes at Work” headlined the Helena Daily Herald, although the grisly event was scarcely news, since hundreds of the citizenry of Helena had witnessed it. Nor was such summary treatment of criminals new in Montana Territory. Vigilantes in Helena had hanged eleven since 1864, while in Virginia City, the clandestine extra-legal committee had executed twenty-two thieves and murderers and had encouraged scores of other malefactors to find employment elsewhere. By 1870, however, machinery for administering official justice was in place and operative. And yet, a combination of public outrage and tradition combined to overwhelm the law for the last time in Helena when George Wilson and Arthur Compton paid for a robbery that netted them less than $300 and left crippled for life their elderly victim who survived multiple gunshot wounds and a savage beating to identify them and speed them toward justice. Although the executions were extra-legal, they were not clothed in classic vigilante secrecy. The perpetrators wore no masks, and their deed was witnessed by scores of the good people of Helena. It was a final convulsive act of outrage on the part of citizens who had yet to be convinced that legal justice could be expected to deter violent crime in Montana Territory.
