In the Old West, at Bannack, Virginia City, and Nevada, in the Alder Gulch section of Montana, where a hundred million dollars in placer gold was recovered in the early sixties, road agents plundered and killed, without mercy. Placer gold, as many know, is free gold that has been eroded from exposed gold-bearing ledges and deposited in the sands and gravel along the water courses. It was the first form of gold-mining in the West—the lure that caused the great stampede to California in 1849. It has rightfully been called “the poor man’s gold,” because of the comparative ease in which it is recovered. The flush times in the Alder Gulch section, which contained about twenty thousand eager gold diggers, made rich pickings for the road agents. They preyed upon individual miners, on express companies, on anyone, anywhere they could grab gold-dust, or minted gold, the money of the times. And they were killers, every one of them. The Montana vigilantes, sworn to secrecy and loyalty, with a by-law boldly asserting, “The only punishment that shall be inflicted by this committee is Death,” undertook the job of exterminating the road agents. And in one month’s time twenty-one of the notorious Henry Plummer gang were hung. The job was pepped up a bit when the first victims squealed on the others. This is history of the Montana vigilantes. They patterned after the California vigilantes. And it is to be assumed that vigilantes everywhere were organized along the same lines. There was a vigilante committee in Nemaha County at least nine years prior to the hanging of Manley. In September, 1868, Melvin Baughn, a horse-thief, was legally hanged at Seneca for killing Jesse Dennis, one of the deputized men who helped capture him. In writing of that hanging George Adriance said there was a vigilante committee at the time, and it wanted the officers to turn Baughn over to the committee. Charley Manley and Joe Brown were charged with being implicated in stealing John O’Brien’s horse. O’Brien lived on the Dave Ralston place west of Granada and Brown lived on a quarter section of land west of the Charley Green farm in the Granada neighborhood, about two miles from the O’Brien farm. Charley Manley lived with the family of W. W. Letson at Netawaka. He had lived with the Letsons at Granada and at Wetmore before they moved to Netawaka. Letson and Spencer kept a general store here in the old corner building now owned by Cawood Brothers, originally built by Rising and Son.