Monday, May 01, 2006
Day Seven: Virginia City and Helena
I had the first good night of sleep I’ve had on this whole trip at the Stonehouse Inn last night. I woke up at six, and slipped outside for a walk downtown. When I returned, everyone was up and John and Linda were fixing breakfast (John, a self-taught carpenter, remodeled their amazing kitchen and built some of the furniture in the house). Later, we met Evelyn and Joanne over at the library. With their help we were able to determine that Henry Larrabee wasn’t in fact the sheriff of Madison County, as we previously thought. He was, however, the first sheriff in Missoula, which meant this afternoon we had to drive to Helena where the records we need are stored (I made Jim listen to Paul Zarzyski’s poem Why I Like Butte on my iPod as we passed by Butte). We will do more research at the Montana Historical Society tomorrow, and then we’ll head home.
Evelyn and Joanne also arranged for us to meet with John Ellingson, a respected Montana historian and Mason. John very graciously allowed us to see the inside of the Virginia City Masonic lodge room (the oldest, he said, in the country). We looked through the relevant registers they had on site (there are apparently more in other locations), but we were unable to find Larrabee. Jim thought he might have been involved in the Virginia City vigilance committee that hung several “road agents” in 1864. Larrabee had helped found the first Masonic lodge in California while he was there and is the only person who essentially admitted his involvement with the vigilante group that perpetrated the massacre on Indian Island in Humboldt Bay. It seems unlikely now, though, that he had anything to do with what went on in Virginia City. We’ll see what we turn up tomorrow.
