Wilbur Fisk Sanders
American
1834 – 1905
Wilbur Fisk Sanders was a lawyer who prosecuted road agent George Ives in 1863 and helped found the Montana Vigilantes during the Alder Gulch gold rush. A founder of the Montana Historical Society, he later served as one of Montana's first U.S. senators.
Biography
Wilbur Fisk Sanders was born on May 2, 1834, in Leon, New York. He taught school, read law in Ohio with his uncle Sidney Edgerton, and was admitted to the bar in 1856. After Civil War service as a first lieutenant in the 64th Ohio Infantry, including the Battle of Shiloh, he went west in 1863 with Edgerton, the newly appointed chief justice of Idaho Territory, and settled at Bannack amid the Grasshopper Creek gold rush.
That December, when miners near Virginia City captured road agent George Ives for the murder of a young German named Nicholas Tiebolt, Sanders volunteered — at real personal risk — to prosecute him before an open-air miners' court. Ives was convicted and hanged on December 21, 1863, and within days Sanders helped organize the Vigilance Committee that over the following weeks hanged Sheriff Henry Plummer and some two dozen alleged "Innocents." The episode made Sanders the most famous lawyer in the territory, though the vigilantes' summary justice remains controversial to this day.
Sanders went on to a long public career in Helena: a leading Republican in territorial politics, a founder and longtime president of the Montana Historical Society (organized in 1865), and, upon statehood, one of Montana's first two United States senators, serving from 1890 to 1893. He died in Helena in July 1905. Sanders County, Montana, bears his name.