Vigilante Days and Ways

The American West in the nineteenth century was a violent place.

Fear of punishment exercised no restraining influence on the conduct of men who had turned crime into a profession.

They hesitated at no atrocity necessary to accomplish their guilty designs.

In the lands of Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming, murder and robbery often went hand in hand.

The country, filled with canyons, gulches, and mountain passes, was especially adapted to conducting murder, and the unopulated distances between mining camps afforded ample opportunity for carrying them into execution.

Pack trains and companies, stage coaches and express messengers, were as much exposed as the solitary traveller, and often selected as objects of attack.

Miners, who had spent months of hard labor in the accumulation of a few hundred dollars, were never heard of again after they left the mines to return to their distant homes.

There was no limit to this system of organized brigandage.

When not murdering and stealing, these villains spent their ill-gotten gains through gambling, licentiousness and further terrorizing the local populations.

But the people of these regions did not bow down to the bandits forever, instead they rose up against their oppressors and formed vigilance committees, took the “law unto themselves” and condemned the outlaws to death.

What else could they do? How else were their own lives and property to be preserved? What other protection was there for a country entirely destitute of law?

Nathaniel Pitt Langford’s fascinating Vigilante Days and Ways uncovers the ways of life of early pioneers to the American West, how they survived in the face of lawlessness and eventually killed those who were persecuting them. By presenting the details of people lived during this time he allows the reader to come to their own conclusion as to whether the vigilantes were justified in their actions or not.

“Vigilante Days And Ways brings to life dramatic scenes of Montana in the 1860s when it was attractive to most of its newest residents only for the gold that lay waiting to be scooped from its streams.” Midwest Book Review

Nathaniel Pitt Langford was an explorer, businessman, bureaucrat, vigilante and historian from Saint Paul, Minnesota who played an important role in the early years of the Montana gold fields, territorial government and the creation of Yellowstone National Park. Vigilante Days and Ways was first published in 1890 and Langford died in 1911.