Jan. 17, 2026
Lewistown, Montana: When the Guide Became the Killer (1889)
In 1889, the Montana frontier witnessed a cold-blooded betrayal when a trusted hunting guide turned killer. What began as an expedition into the wilderness ended in murder when greed overcame loyalty. The guide who was supposed to lead them to game instead led them to their graves. This is the story of trust broken, justice pursued, and the harsh realities of life in the untamed West.
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WEBVTT
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[SPEAKER_00]: mid-June 1889.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Judas River runs cold through central Montana territory.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The water flows down from the little belt mountains, snaking through grassland where cattle ranchers have only just begun to replace the buffalo herds.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A rancher riding his property, spots something, caught against the rocks, near samples crossing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: At first he thinks it's driftwood, then he gets closer.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A body, a woman face down, well dressed, too well dressed for drowning.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Before the weekends, four more will surface.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Five people scattered across miles of river.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Two married couples in a six-year-old girl.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They'd loved Helena with dreams.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A new wagon built by one of the finest manufacturers in the country.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Two heavy draft horses, worth a small fortune.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Fine clothes, jewelry glinting and the Montana sun.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They traveled more than a hundred miles in the territorial capital.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They'd been looking for opportunity for a place to settle, for the promise the West kept making to those brave enough to chase it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They'd hired a guide.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His name was James Wilbur, and within two weeks of those body surfacing, he'd be dead, too.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Hanging from his gel cell, in great falls by a method so elaborate, that newspapers called it the work of a fiend incarnate, and within a month after that, someone would dig up his body from potters field.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It would vanish forever.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back, friend, to hometown history.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The podcast that takes a stroll down the main streets and back alleys of the past to uncover how local stories shaped the world.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Shane Waters.
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[SPEAKER_00]: At a day, we're exploring Lewis Town, Montana.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We're in 1889.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Five immigrants hired a guide to lead them to a gold camp.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In that guide, murdered every single one of them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: June 1889.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Montana territory had precisely five months left before achieving statehood, and the Judas Basin remained front here in the truest sense.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A contemporary newspaper put it quite plainly.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Fewer than ten fixed homes stood between the U-Bit Stage Station and buildings, the distance
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[SPEAKER_00]: long stretches of grassland where a traveler might not see another human being for days.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The gold camp at Maiden had proven remarkably prosperous.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Miners had extracted over three million dollars from its hills.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A fortune that drew prospectors from across the country and beyond.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The camp had swelled to 1200 souls, complete with solumes and the rough-hune infrastructure
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[SPEAKER_00]: Edward Biggs and his wife Lucina had spent the past year in Helena, the territorial capital, same with Joseph Kurtz and his wife Sarah.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The men had worked mining claims there before, earned their stake, saved their money.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now they saw it as one newspaper carefully recorded, a desirable place to settle and make a home.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Little, Ida Shaw's traveled with him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Six years old.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Her exact relationship to the two families, the historical record simply doesn't explain.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Was she a niece, a daughter of friends?
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[SPEAKER_00]: An orphan, taken in.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The newspapers of 1889 didn't think to ask.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And now, we'll never know.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But this much was clear, the party looked prosperous.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It acquired a new Bainwagon, a respected brand, built sturdy for the frontier.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Two state horses, each weighing around 1,300 pounds, new harness with ivory rings, a buckskin pony.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You hear that announced to anyone watching, these folks had means.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In quite visible personal wealth, Frontier John Beck would later testify that the party appeared unusually well-dressed for immigrants, with considerable jewelry on their persons.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That visible prosperity painted a target on their backs.
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[SPEAKER_00]: interchames Wilbur, about 32 years old.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The newspapers would later call him a wily criminal from great falls.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Though what crimes preceded murder, if any, the record doesn't preserve.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He offered his services as a guide to the Maiden gold camp,
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[SPEAKER_00]: common practice and territory where trails went unmarked, and water sources meant the difference between survival and death.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They trusted him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: June 6th, the party passed through the Ubit stage station, heading northeast towards Maiden Gold camp.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The station keeper noted there are a rival, nothing unusual.
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[SPEAKER_00]: just another group of immigrants, chasing the same dreams that had drawn so many others.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The next day, June 7th, around 1 in the afternoon.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Frontier, John Beck, encountered them on the road, between Beaver Creek and Rock Creek.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He pulled his team aside to let them pass.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Beck would remember it quite vividly in the weeks to come.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Their appearance, their wagon, their jewelry catching the afternoon light.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The woman he spoke with told him they were looking for a desirable place to settle.
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[SPEAKER_00]: they seemed hopeful.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That night on a bench of land between spring creek and cotton wood creek, James Wilbur murdered all five of them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No witnesses survived to testify, but investigators were later pieced together what happened from physical evidence and Wilbur's own behavior.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He used a rifle.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He disposed of the bodies in the Judith River at scattered locations.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Miles apart, so discovery would be delayed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He burnt the party's trunk in the campfire, leaving only the iron fittings in the ashes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Then he loaded the wagon and headed northwest.
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[SPEAKER_00]: June 8, Sunrise, Rancher LS Butler was outlooking for stray horses when he spotted a man in a wagon on that same benchland.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Butler rode within 20 feet of the stranger, asked about the horses, asked where he was headed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The man gave nothing, barely spoke at all.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But Butler noticed something quite strange.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The wagon appeared full to the top of the box, packed tight with goods.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The canvas sheet tucked carefully around all sides.
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[SPEAKER_00]: On his way home, Butler found a smoldering campfire, and in the ashes, what looked like trunk irons.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't realize it yet, but he'd just spoken with a murderer.
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[SPEAKER_00]: June 9th, noon.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Frontier JW Morgan stopped to camp at loose creek and a stranger joined him for lunch.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The man said only that he was from Nebraska, but Morgan found him very reticent.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The stranger refused to eat or refused to drink.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Acted very queer, Morgan would
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[SPEAKER_00]: Then Saturday, June 15th, the first body surfaced as staples crossing, a woman face down in the Judith River.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The community realized what they had on their hands.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Sheriff Clary of Ferguson County began tracking the killer through suspicious trades.
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[SPEAKER_00]: At James Woods Ranch, a man calling himself Jack Gilding, had traded fine horses for ordinary mayors.
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[SPEAKER_00]: At Cassner's place on Belkreek, the same man traded a distinctive bean wagon for a battered spring wagon.
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[SPEAKER_00]: at how our prices box myth shop in great falls.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That spring wagon had been repaired.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The trail pointed northwest toward Sand Kooley.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Telegraph wires hummed between jurisdictions, messages between Lewis Town, Great Falls, and every settlement in between.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The coordination between Ferguson County, Cascade County, and Great Falls demonstrated sophisticated police work for the territory, but first they had to catch him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: June 21st, early morning.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The sky just beginning to lighten over the Montana Plains.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Near Cascade, Sheriff Downing and Deputy Joe Hamilton spotted a wagon through their field glass.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A man had made camp half a mile off the main road.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The kind of detour somewhere makes, and they don't want to be seen.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The two lawmen approached with guns, drawn.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When they got close enough, they shouted for the man to raise his hands.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Wilber's right hand, drifted toward his hip pocket.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Toward the self-cocker revolver, he kept there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His wife, roused from sleep in the wagon, began screaming.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Don't kill my husband, you villains.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And what witnesses described as other incoherent, exclamations.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Downing in Hamilton held steady, they secured a Winchester rifle from the wagon.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They disarmed Wilbur, and they ordered him to hitch up his team and accompanying them to great falls.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He arrived at the county jail around noon.
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[SPEAKER_00]: James Wilbur would not see another sunrise.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Around midnight Friday, less than 12 hours after his arrest, prisoners and the great false jail heard her noise.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Something heavy, dropping.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They assumed someone had fallen from a
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[SPEAKER_00]: At seven o'clock the next morning, the jailer made his rounds.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He found James Wilbur, hanging from the top of his cell, cold, stiff, dead.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The method was quite elaborate, so elaborate that it shocked every hardened frontiersman.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He torn a strip from his blanket, tied it as a loop in the top of his cell bars.
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[SPEAKER_00]: torn another strip from his pillow slip to former news, used his silk hanker chiff to bind his right wrist to his right ankle, made another slip knot, enacting his left wrist to his left ankle, with both feet drawn up so they couldn't possibly touch the floor, he rolled himself off
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[SPEAKER_00]: The great falls later captured the territory stunned reaction.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No one but a fiend incarnate could have conceived and carried out such a means for self-destruction.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No confession, no explanation, no final words.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The five people he'd murdered on that benchland, they would never know why they died.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Their families would never witness a trial.
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[SPEAKER_00]: officials interviewed other prisoners to verify this was suicide and not a nighttime lynching.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Folks quite understood that vigilante justice remained a genuine possibility.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But no, Wilbur had done this himself.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He'd escaped whatever justice awaited him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Or so, everyone thought.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Undertaker powers buried James Wilbur in a potter's field at Highland Cemetery in Great Falls.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Plain pine coffin, unmarked grave, the lot reserved for the unclamed, the indigent, in the damned.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody came forward to claim his body.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His wife, present at the arrest, screaming for his life,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Weeks later, a groundskeeper noticed disturbed Earth in Potter's field.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Someone had been digging recently.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They raised the coffin, empty.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Great Falls Tribune reported it with what reads across the century, like a shrug.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Where it has gone to, no one in authority seems to know or care.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Folks had theories, of course.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Folks always have theories.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One held that someone roused to indignation, as the papers put it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Couldn't stomach a murderer, resting in the same cemetery as decent people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So they dug him up, and disposed of him elsewhere.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Another theory whispered that doctors had taken him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The 1880s remained the final years, when medical schools sometimes relied on grave robbing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The medical profession had actually been offered, well-versed body, before burial.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But they declined, deeming it perhaps unlucky to make use of it, even for surgical purposes, so said the newspapers.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But perhaps someone changed their mind.
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[SPEAKER_00]: a third theory, never officially endorsed but persisted in local memory, held that Wilber's body ended up displayed in some doctor's office in great falls, a curiosity, a specimen, a reminder of what evil looks like when it wears a man's face.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The tribunes conclusion, it looks as if public excretion pursued the murder to the grave.
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[SPEAKER_00]: James Wilbur had escaped earthly justice through suicide, but someone made sure he didn't rest in peace.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His body was never recovered.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The victims, Edward and Lucina Biggs, Joseph and Sarah Courts, in six-year-old Eidashos, were pulled from the Judith River, over several terrible days,
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[SPEAKER_00]: where they were ultimately buried.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The historical record does not preserve.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Five months after those murders, November 8, 1889, Montana achieved statehood.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The formal structures of American law were placed territorial justice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The last frontier officially closed,
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[SPEAKER_00]: What does Lewis Townwantana remember about James Wilbur?
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[SPEAKER_00]: By all accounts, not much.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Judith Basin moved on.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Gold gave way to cattle ranching.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Cattle ranching gave way to wheat farming.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The stage road became a highway.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Maiden, the gold camp those five travelers never reached, became a ghost town.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But the case illuminates something essential, about the movement when frontier became state.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Look at what happened in those few weeks of June 1889.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Sheriff Clary coordinated a man-hunt across county lines, using telegraph technology.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Witness testimony was gathered systematically.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Physical evidence was tracked through a chain of transactions.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This was modern police work, recognizable today.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, someone still dug up a grave in the night and made a murderer's body vanish.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That older impulse, the one that operates outside courtrooms, and official records.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The one that says some crimes deserve punishment beyond what the law provides.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It persisted right alongside the telegraphs and the coordinated investigations.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The victims themselves, the bigs family, the curses, little eye to shawse.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They'd done nothing wrong.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They'd simply trusted a guide.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In territory where trails were unmarked, and water sources meant survival, hiring someone who claimed to know the way was the reasonable choice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They had no way of knowing, no way of distinguishing a legitimate guide from a predator wearing a helpful face.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the part that haunts, isn't it?
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[SPEAKER_00]: The randomness of it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The way safety and danger can look exactly the same until it's too late.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's the story of five travelers who trusted the wrong man, in a territory, poised between two ideas of justice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If you found this story as haunting, as I did, share it with someone who loves for gotten American mysteries.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Shane Waters.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Every hometown has a story.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Tonight it's the bench land between Spring Creek and Cottonwood Creek, where five hopeful travelers trusted the wrong guide.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Good night, friend.
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[SPEAKER_00]: mid-June 1889.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Judas River runs cold through central Montana territory.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The water flows down from the little belt mountains, snaking through grassland where cattle ranchers have only just begun to replace the buffalo herds.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A rancher riding his property, spots something, caught against the rocks, near samples crossing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: At first he thinks it's driftwood, then he gets closer.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A body, a woman face down, well dressed, too well dressed for drowning.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Before the weekends, four more will surface.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Five people scattered across miles of river.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Two married couples in a six-year-old girl.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They'd loved Helena with dreams.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A new wagon built by one of the finest manufacturers in the country.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Two heavy draft horses, worth a small fortune.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Fine clothes, jewelry glinting and the Montana sun.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They traveled more than a hundred miles in the territorial capital.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They'd been looking for opportunity for a place to settle, for the promise the West kept making to those brave enough to chase it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They'd hired a guide.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His name was James Wilbur, and within two weeks of those body surfacing, he'd be dead, too.
01:41.072 --> 01:56.049
[SPEAKER_00]: Hanging from his gel cell, in great falls by a method so elaborate, that newspapers called it the work of a fiend incarnate, and within a month after that, someone would dig up his body from potters field.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It would vanish forever.
02:00.957 --> 02:03.099
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back, friend, to hometown history.
02:03.880 --> 02:11.327
[SPEAKER_00]: The podcast that takes a stroll down the main streets and back alleys of the past to uncover how local stories shaped the world.
02:12.848 --> 02:13.649
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Shane Waters.
02:14.190 --> 02:16.652
[SPEAKER_00]: At a day, we're exploring Lewis Town, Montana.
02:17.533 --> 02:18.234
[SPEAKER_00]: We're in 1889.
02:19.755 --> 02:23.599
[SPEAKER_00]: Five immigrants hired a guide to lead them to a gold camp.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In that guide, murdered every single one of them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: June 1889.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Montana territory had precisely five months left before achieving statehood, and the Judas Basin remained front here in the truest sense.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A contemporary newspaper put it quite plainly.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Fewer than ten fixed homes stood between the U-Bit Stage Station and buildings, the distance
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[SPEAKER_00]: long stretches of grassland where a traveler might not see another human being for days.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The gold camp at Maiden had proven remarkably prosperous.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Miners had extracted over three million dollars from its hills.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A fortune that drew prospectors from across the country and beyond.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The camp had swelled to 1200 souls, complete with solumes and the rough-hune infrastructure
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[SPEAKER_00]: Edward Biggs and his wife Lucina had spent the past year in Helena, the territorial capital, same with Joseph Kurtz and his wife Sarah.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The men had worked mining claims there before, earned their stake, saved their money.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now they saw it as one newspaper carefully recorded, a desirable place to settle and make a home.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Little, Ida Shaw's traveled with him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Six years old.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Her exact relationship to the two families, the historical record simply doesn't explain.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Was she a niece, a daughter of friends?
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[SPEAKER_00]: An orphan, taken in.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The newspapers of 1889 didn't think to ask.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And now, we'll never know.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But this much was clear, the party looked prosperous.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It acquired a new Bainwagon, a respected brand, built sturdy for the frontier.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Two state horses, each weighing around 1,300 pounds, new harness with ivory rings, a buckskin pony.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You hear that announced to anyone watching, these folks had means.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In quite visible personal wealth, Frontier John Beck would later testify that the party appeared unusually well-dressed for immigrants, with considerable jewelry on their persons.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That visible prosperity painted a target on their backs.
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[SPEAKER_00]: interchames Wilbur, about 32 years old.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The newspapers would later call him a wily criminal from great falls.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Though what crimes preceded murder, if any, the record doesn't preserve.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He offered his services as a guide to the Maiden gold camp,
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[SPEAKER_00]: common practice and territory where trails went unmarked, and water sources meant the difference between survival and death.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They trusted him.
05:42.495 --> 05:50.267
[SPEAKER_00]: June 6th, the party passed through the Ubit stage station, heading northeast towards Maiden Gold camp.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The station keeper noted there are a rival, nothing unusual.
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[SPEAKER_00]: just another group of immigrants, chasing the same dreams that had drawn so many others.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The next day, June 7th, around 1 in the afternoon.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Frontier, John Beck, encountered them on the road, between Beaver Creek and Rock Creek.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He pulled his team aside to let them pass.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Beck would remember it quite vividly in the weeks to come.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Their appearance, their wagon, their jewelry catching the afternoon light.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The woman he spoke with told him they were looking for a desirable place to settle.
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[SPEAKER_00]: they seemed hopeful.
06:37.045 --> 06:44.815
[SPEAKER_00]: That night on a bench of land between spring creek and cotton wood creek, James Wilbur murdered all five of them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No witnesses survived to testify, but investigators were later pieced together what happened from physical evidence and Wilbur's own behavior.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He used a rifle.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He disposed of the bodies in the Judith River at scattered locations.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Miles apart, so discovery would be delayed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He burnt the party's trunk in the campfire, leaving only the iron fittings in the ashes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Then he loaded the wagon and headed northwest.
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[SPEAKER_00]: June 8, Sunrise, Rancher LS Butler was outlooking for stray horses when he spotted a man in a wagon on that same benchland.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Butler rode within 20 feet of the stranger, asked about the horses, asked where he was headed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The man gave nothing, barely spoke at all.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But Butler noticed something quite strange.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The wagon appeared full to the top of the box, packed tight with goods.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The canvas sheet tucked carefully around all sides.
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[SPEAKER_00]: On his way home, Butler found a smoldering campfire, and in the ashes, what looked like trunk irons.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't realize it yet, but he'd just spoken with a murderer.
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[SPEAKER_00]: June 9th, noon.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Frontier JW Morgan stopped to camp at loose creek and a stranger joined him for lunch.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The man said only that he was from Nebraska, but Morgan found him very reticent.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The stranger refused to eat or refused to drink.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Acted very queer, Morgan would
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[SPEAKER_00]: Then Saturday, June 15th, the first body surfaced as staples crossing, a woman face down in the Judith River.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The community realized what they had on their hands.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Sheriff Clary of Ferguson County began tracking the killer through suspicious trades.
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[SPEAKER_00]: At James Woods Ranch, a man calling himself Jack Gilding, had traded fine horses for ordinary mayors.
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[SPEAKER_00]: At Cassner's place on Belkreek, the same man traded a distinctive bean wagon for a battered spring wagon.
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[SPEAKER_00]: at how our prices box myth shop in great falls.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That spring wagon had been repaired.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The trail pointed northwest toward Sand Kooley.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Telegraph wires hummed between jurisdictions, messages between Lewis Town, Great Falls, and every settlement in between.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The coordination between Ferguson County, Cascade County, and Great Falls demonstrated sophisticated police work for the territory, but first they had to catch him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: June 21st, early morning.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The sky just beginning to lighten over the Montana Plains.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Near Cascade, Sheriff Downing and Deputy Joe Hamilton spotted a wagon through their field glass.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A man had made camp half a mile off the main road.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The kind of detour somewhere makes, and they don't want to be seen.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The two lawmen approached with guns, drawn.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When they got close enough, they shouted for the man to raise his hands.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Wilber's right hand, drifted toward his hip pocket.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Toward the self-cocker revolver, he kept there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His wife, roused from sleep in the wagon, began screaming.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Don't kill my husband, you villains.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And what witnesses described as other incoherent, exclamations.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Downing in Hamilton held steady, they secured a Winchester rifle from the wagon.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They disarmed Wilbur, and they ordered him to hitch up his team and accompanying them to great falls.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He arrived at the county jail around noon.
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[SPEAKER_00]: James Wilbur would not see another sunrise.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Around midnight Friday, less than 12 hours after his arrest, prisoners and the great false jail heard her noise.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Something heavy, dropping.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They assumed someone had fallen from a
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[SPEAKER_00]: At seven o'clock the next morning, the jailer made his rounds.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He found James Wilbur, hanging from the top of his cell, cold, stiff, dead.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The method was quite elaborate, so elaborate that it shocked every hardened frontiersman.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He torn a strip from his blanket, tied it as a loop in the top of his cell bars.
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[SPEAKER_00]: torn another strip from his pillow slip to former news, used his silk hanker chiff to bind his right wrist to his right ankle, made another slip knot, enacting his left wrist to his left ankle, with both feet drawn up so they couldn't possibly touch the floor, he rolled himself off
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[SPEAKER_00]: The great falls later captured the territory stunned reaction.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No one but a fiend incarnate could have conceived and carried out such a means for self-destruction.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No confession, no explanation, no final words.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The five people he'd murdered on that benchland, they would never know why they died.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Their families would never witness a trial.
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[SPEAKER_00]: officials interviewed other prisoners to verify this was suicide and not a nighttime lynching.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Folks quite understood that vigilante justice remained a genuine possibility.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But no, Wilbur had done this himself.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He'd escaped whatever justice awaited him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Or so, everyone thought.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Undertaker powers buried James Wilbur in a potter's field at Highland Cemetery in Great Falls.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Plain pine coffin, unmarked grave, the lot reserved for the unclamed, the indigent, in the damned.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody came forward to claim his body.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His wife, present at the arrest, screaming for his life,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Weeks later, a groundskeeper noticed disturbed Earth in Potter's field.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Someone had been digging recently.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They raised the coffin, empty.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Great Falls Tribune reported it with what reads across the century, like a shrug.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Where it has gone to, no one in authority seems to know or care.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Folks had theories, of course.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Folks always have theories.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One held that someone roused to indignation, as the papers put it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Couldn't stomach a murderer, resting in the same cemetery as decent people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So they dug him up, and disposed of him elsewhere.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Another theory whispered that doctors had taken him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The 1880s remained the final years, when medical schools sometimes relied on grave robbing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The medical profession had actually been offered, well-versed body, before burial.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But they declined, deeming it perhaps unlucky to make use of it, even for surgical purposes, so said the newspapers.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But perhaps someone changed their mind.
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[SPEAKER_00]: a third theory, never officially endorsed but persisted in local memory, held that Wilber's body ended up displayed in some doctor's office in great falls, a curiosity, a specimen, a reminder of what evil looks like when it wears a man's face.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The tribunes conclusion, it looks as if public excretion pursued the murder to the grave.
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[SPEAKER_00]: James Wilbur had escaped earthly justice through suicide, but someone made sure he didn't rest in peace.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His body was never recovered.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The victims, Edward and Lucina Biggs, Joseph and Sarah Courts, in six-year-old Eidashos, were pulled from the Judith River, over several terrible days,
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[SPEAKER_00]: where they were ultimately buried.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The historical record does not preserve.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Five months after those murders, November 8, 1889, Montana achieved statehood.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The formal structures of American law were placed territorial justice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The last frontier officially closed,
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[SPEAKER_00]: What does Lewis Townwantana remember about James Wilbur?
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[SPEAKER_00]: By all accounts, not much.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Judith Basin moved on.
16:52.840 --> 16:54.642
[SPEAKER_00]: Gold gave way to cattle ranching.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Cattle ranching gave way to wheat farming.
16:58.606 --> 17:00.368
[SPEAKER_00]: The stage road became a highway.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Maiden, the gold camp those five travelers never reached, became a ghost town.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But the case illuminates something essential, about the movement when frontier became state.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Look at what happened in those few weeks of June 1889.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Sheriff Clary coordinated a man-hunt across county lines, using telegraph technology.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Witness testimony was gathered systematically.
17:35.096 --> 17:39.784
[SPEAKER_00]: Physical evidence was tracked through a chain of transactions.
17:39.804 --> 17:43.210
[SPEAKER_00]: This was modern police work, recognizable today.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, someone still dug up a grave in the night and made a murderer's body vanish.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That older impulse, the one that operates outside courtrooms, and official records.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The one that says some crimes deserve punishment beyond what the law provides.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It persisted right alongside the telegraphs and the coordinated investigations.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The victims themselves, the bigs family, the curses, little eye to shawse.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They'd done nothing wrong.
18:19.662 --> 18:21.105
[SPEAKER_00]: They'd simply trusted a guide.
18:22.468 --> 18:32.147
[SPEAKER_00]: In territory where trails were unmarked, and water sources meant survival, hiring someone who claimed to know the way was the reasonable choice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They had no way of knowing, no way of distinguishing a legitimate guide from a predator wearing a helpful face.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the part that haunts, isn't it?
18:46.270 --> 18:47.271
[SPEAKER_00]: The randomness of it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The way safety and danger can look exactly the same until it's too late.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's the story of five travelers who trusted the wrong man, in a territory, poised between two ideas of justice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If you found this story as haunting, as I did, share it with someone who loves for gotten American mysteries.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Shane Waters.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Every hometown has a story.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Tonight it's the bench land between Spring Creek and Cottonwood Creek, where five hopeful travelers trusted the wrong guide.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Good night, friend.
