About the Author

Professor Thomas J. Dimsdale was an Englishman who came to Virginia City, Montana, at the height of the 1860s gold rush in search of a better climate for his health. He ended up embroiled in one of the great controversies in Montana history as the author of The Vigilantes of Montana, a work protesting his own innocence as well as that of the vigilantes in the death of Henry Plummer. Western historian R. E. Mather is co-author of Hanging the Sheriff: A Biography of Henry Plummer.