Omaha was the nearest railroad station, and to reach this distant city meant a hard journey for the miner who had made his “pile” and wished to go back home. Gold dust was the only money and it was weighed and taken at its weight’s value. The traveler could go on horseback or wagon to Fort Benton and then take passage on a steamboat to Sioux City, Iowa. Another method of travel was to follow the trail on horseback to Salt Lake City, and take the train or the stage-coach from there. The cost of the latter mode of travel can be estimated when it is known that the sending of a letter in that way cost two dollars and a half. All travel was dangerous, for with the finding of gold, desperate men had come west, who robbed and killed for the wealth so hazardously secured by the miners. Hold-ups were regular occurrences, particularly between Bannack and Virginia City, a distance of seventy miles. Miners who had spent months of hard labor in the accumulation of a few hundred dollars were never heard of again after starting from a mine to a distant home eastward. Men were robbed in camp, daily and nightly. Gambling and all forms of evil abounded. Many of the men who disappeared were found to have been shot ruthlessly. The nature of the country, with its canyons, gulches, and mountain passes, was especially adapted to this means of highway robbery. The unpeopled distances between the mining camps also helped the lawless element to do their bloody work. Nowhere else on the face of the earth, nor at any period since men became civilized, have murder, robbery, and social vice presented such an organized front. The young territory determined to stop this trade of stage-robbing and formed a protecting band called the “Vigilantes.” The name is associated with some of the bloodiest episodes of frontier days. In the absence of any other protection, the Vigilantes took law into their own hands, and dealt sternly with the highway robber and murderer. Between December, 1863, and February, 1864, twenty-four “road agents” were hanged by the Vigilantes for their crimes against the miners. Two years later, one million and five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of gold was taken from Helena to Fort Benton unmolested. The early Vigilantes were the best and most intelligent men in the mining section. They saw that in the absence of all law they must become a law unto themselves, or submit to the bloody code of the desperadoes by whom they were surrounded. They entered on their work without knowing how soon they might have to encounter a force greater than their own. They did their work swiftly and efficiently as relentlessly they followed the offender. Little mercy was meted out to the guilty men, and many a lonely tree on the plains held ghastly reminders of the swift vengeance which overtook the robbers. The Vigilantes hung many a hardened sinner, giving him first an opportunity to make his peace with God.