Books and Stories by Carol Buchanan
George

Chrisman and Plummer

Although men had sought gold in what is now southwestern Montana began during the later 1850's, it became serious in the spring of 1862, as the Civil War was ramping up. Southerners and other Confederate sympathizers fled what they considered an illegal invasion of the South by the Union. Northern sympathizers to the Union came to avoid the draft and because they had other pressing reasons, as Dan Stark does in God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana.Chrisman's Store from  Hangman's Gulch Still others came because they were determined that new parts of the Far West should remain Union rather than Confederate.

In the spring of 1862 men made a rich strike on Grasshopper Creek, and soon the settlement of Bannack sprang up.

Among those who came was a southerner named George Chrisman, who brought his slave with him. The black man seems to have also been named George. He helped out in the store Chrisman started (shown in the photo, with two double windows on either side of the central door.) It is a large building by gold camp standards, and sources say it was well stocked, with a counter along the side and shelves for various supplies. Like most merchants, Chrisman probably sold everything from harness and picks to canned milk and petticoats.

Because it was a roomy place, he let Henry Plummer have an office in the back. Everyone was friendly and no one felt the need for adoor or walls because who keeps secrets from the elected sheriff? There Plummer and his deputies and friends could hear everything that went on in the rest of the store. The leader of the criminal conspiracy and his henchmen knew who was in money, who had made a strike, and who planned to travel. They heard it at Chrisman's.

When the Vigilantes hanged Henry Plummer on January 10, 1864, the rope came from George Chrisman's store, and he sent the slave George to fetch it.