While I did not as yet know that he was Henry Plummer, there was something about him that told me he wasn't just another novice miner or merchant aiming to make his riches fast in the gold town boom. He wore a revolver in a scabbard at his hip; a shotgun with a bolted stock lay loosely across his saddle.

Larger-than-life characters and the drama of gold-rush days in Bannack, Montana Territory, come to life in this suspenseful, fact-based historical novel. While the Civil War raged in the East, a war of a different kind was being played out in the new settlements of the Wild West—a war for political power and for control over the vast wealth of the new territories. The noose and gallows were the weapons of that war, wielded in the name of law and order by future senators, governors, lawmen, and copper barons.
Revealed through the eyes of five young men caught up in the Montana Vigilantes’ hanging of the infamous sheriff Henry Plummer, A Stout Cord and a Good Drop offers fresh perspectives on one of the most intriguing periods in western history.

James Gaitis is a trail lawyer, arbitrator, editor, and writer. Born in Chicago, Illinois, he received degrees from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Iowa. For more than ten years he lived in Montana's remote North Fork of the Flathead overlooking Glacier National Park.