In contrast to these, the men lately out from the States were of a different type, many of them sober, most of them law-abiding, men who had come out to better their fortunes and not merely to drop into the wild and licentious life of a placercamp.
Law and order always did prevail eventually in any mining community.
In the case of Montana, law and order arrived almost synchronously with lawlessness and desperadoism.
Law and order had not long to wait before the arrival of the notorious Henry Plummer and his band from Florence.

Plummer was already known as a bad man, but was not yet recognized as the leader of that secret association of robbers and murderers which had terrorized the Idaho camps.

He celebrated his arrival in Bannack by killing a man named Cleveland.

He was acquitted in the miners' court that tried him, on the usual plea of self-defense.

He was a man of considerable personal address.
The same tribunal soon assembled once more to try three other murderers, Moore, Reeves, and Mitchell, with the agreement that the men should have a jury and should be provided with counsel.