Levi Boone Helm, known as Boone, was raised in Missouri and moved through the mining country of the American West and British Columbia in the 1850s and early 1860s. Writers of the vigilante era and later attributed killings to him in Missouri, in California, at Florence in what was then Washington Territory in 1862, and, in local British Columbia accounts, in the Cariboo district the same year. No court verdict against him for a killing is on record as having stood. On January 14, 1864, he was hanged by the Vigilantes of Montana at Virginia City, Montana Territory, with four other men. No court sentenced him.
Almost everything said about his life before that day comes from a small group of writers: Thomas Dimsdale, who wrote about the Montana vigilantes in the Montana Post, Nathaniel Langford, whose Vigilante Days and Ways was printed in the 1890s, and popular authors such as Emerson Hough, who wrote in 1907 from their books. What they wrote is claim, not record, and it stands apart from the few court and police records that survive.
Ron Young, in an account written for the Barkerville historic site in British Columbia, says Helm was born in Kentucky in 1828 and taken as a small child by his parents to a new settlement in Missouri. As a young man he was known for his strength, his rowdiness and heavy drinking. Hough's 1907 account also begins in Kentucky and Missouri, on the edge of the frontier, and describes him as violent and quarrelsome long before he reached California. The names of his parents are not on record.
Helm married. Hough says he did so before he went to California. The year, the wife's name and what became of the marriage are not on record.
The earliest killing laid to Helm is in Missouri. Young's account names the man as Littlebury Shoot, a neighbor, and says the two argued over a plan to move to Texas. The year is not on record.
Young says Helm was convicted of murder in Monroe County, was sent to a lunatic asylum, escaped and went to California. The table of contents of Langford's book, in the 1893 printing, carries the same outline: murders in Missouri, "tried and convicted," and an escape "by stratagem" to California. No court document, docket entry or newspaper report of a Monroe County trial is on record. The conviction rests on Langford and the writers who follow him.
Hough adds that, after the Vigilantes took him in 1864, Helm privately admitted a killing in Missouri. That is Hough's report of a statement made to men who were about to hang him, and no court heard it.
After Missouri, the accounts follow Helm west. Hough says that in the California gold fields he killed several men in fights, number unknown, and that one killing forced him to leave the coast. Langford's table of contents lists "several persons" killed in California, a flight to The Dalles on the Columbia River in Oregon, and a murder at Salt Lake. Hough places two killings in Salt Lake City at the wish of others, and several more in Oregon.
None of these has a name or a date, and none is tied to a court record. Hough himself writes that no count is possible. They are claims about a man who had by then a reputation, and they are not findings of any court.
By 1862 Helm was at Florence, a mining camp in the Salmon River country in what was then Washington Territory and is now Idaho. A Forest Service history of the camp says gold was found there in August 1861, that the town reached about 9,000 people in 1862, and that a resident's diary of June 1862 recorded no effective law to punish crime. The camp had a city justice of the peace, Jaspar Rand, who in 1862 heard cases from cattle theft and murder to weddings, and the Forest Service counts 32 cases heard in November and December 1862 and 58 from January to August 1863. Florence was also the first county seat of Idaho County, created by the territorial legislature in December 1861.
In that setting Langford and Hough attribute to Helm the killing of a man known as "Dutch Fred." The man's full name and age are not on record. Langford's table of contents describes a fight and a killing in Washington Territory. Hough describes the man as unarmed, and says Helm acted at the urging of an enemy and perhaps for pay. The month is not on record. The two writers disagree on whether it was a fight or something closer to a hired killing, and neither cites a court record.
A list of Florence court cases compiled by volunteers for the Idaho County genealogy project does carry an entry, Territory of Washington against "L. Boone Helm," dated September 29, 1862. The list gives only the parties and the date; the court, the charge and the outcome are not given. The same list has a civil entry of January 18, 1862 in which "L.B. Helm" is one of three men named as defendants by a plaintiff. Whether either entry concerns the man later hanged at Virginia City is not stated.
Helm's next appearance is in British Columbia, where the Cariboo gold rush was under way. Young's account, drawing on the memoir of W. T. Collinson, written about thirty-one years after the events, says that in July 1862 three men in the Cariboo district were killed, and that Collinson believed Helm and a companion were responsible. A. Browning, quoted by Young, wrote that at Quesnelle Forks "everybody said in whispers it was Boone Helm." Barry Sale, writing in the Williams Lake Tribune in 2014, tells the same story and adds that Helm was never tried in British Columbia for those deaths. The victims included a man named Sokolosky; the other two are described only as his companions. These are attributions from a later memoir and from talk in the mining camp, and no inquest or court record is cited for them.
On October 13, 1862, the Victoria Colonist reported that "Boone Helm, said to be a dangerous character, was arrested by Sergeant Blake last evening." Young says that at a Police Magistrate hearing on October 17 witnesses described him as a bad character, and the magistrate ordered him to post security for six months of good behavior: $50 from himself and two sureties of $20 each. Sale says the charge was running up a saloon bill without paying and gives the bond as $90. Both say Helm did not pay and instead served about a month working on Victoria's streets. Young adds that Sergeant Blake said he understood Helm had killed a man at Salmon River, which is Florence, and that the authorities held Helm three or four weeks while they waited for a request from the United States for his return. No request arrived in time, and he was released. By the time one came, Helm was gone.
He was arrested again in the spring of 1863 at Fort Yale, in the Fraser Canyon, and brought to Victoria. Young quotes the Colonist as saying a special officer sent from the American side took charge of him, and both Young and Sale say he was taken to Port Townsend, in Washington Territory, and escaped from the jail there. Collinson says he then reached Boise or Bannack. Hough tells it differently: British authorities sent him back and held him in Portland, Oregon, for safekeeping. The two versions of where he was held cannot be reconciled.
Hough says that Helm was tried at Florence for the killing of "Dutch Fred," but that the witnesses had disappeared and public interest had faded, so he escaped justice, and he was supposedly bound for Texas. Langford's table of contents says he was acquitted at trial, with help from a man the book calls "Old Tex," after witnesses were bought off. The word "acquitted" and Hough's "escaped justice" are not the same result, and no verdict is on record in a court document. The time of the trial, the court and the judge are not on record either. In neither version was Helm convicted.
By 1864 Helm was in the gold camps of what became Montana. Young's account says he allied himself with Henry Plummer at Bannack, and Dimsdale lists him among the executed members of the road agent band that Plummer was said to lead. Plummer himself was hanged by vigilantes on January 10, 1864.
The existence of such a gang is disputed. In a 2010 University of Montana master's thesis on the legacy of Plummer and the vigilantes, Melissa Poindexter Thomasma writes that "no evidence of this organization of highwaymen exists," although the episode remains part of Montana's popular history. Helm's membership in the group therefore rests on the same writers who supplied the rest of his reputation.
According to Gregory Aydt's 1999 study of Dimsdale and the vigilantes, the vigilante executive committee condemned six men on the evening of January 13, 1864. One of them escaped. The other five, Helm, Jack Gallagher, Frank Parish, Haze Lyons and George Lane, were hanged together the next day at Virginia City. The vigilante bylaws provided that the only punishment the committee would inflict was death. A Montana historic property record for the building later known as the Hangman's Building says that on January 14, 1864, while it was under construction, it was used for the hanging of five men.
No court tried the five. Aydt's study gives no account of a hearing for them. Hough says three Vigilantes took Helm into custody at Virginia City and that before the vigilante court he swore on a Bible that he had never killed a man, and later privately admitted killings in Missouri and California. Hough also says he denied belonging to the road agents and accused former friends of it. Aydt reports that Dimsdale claimed all five men admitted their guilt when questioned, while an eyewitness diary quoted by the historians Mather and Boswell recorded that "all of them maintained their innocence to the last."
Helm is on the list of five in Dimsdale's chapter on the executed members of the road agent band, and in the list of Montana vigilante hangings kept by James Madison University for its markers project. The Victoria Colonist, in its issue of February 15, 1864, told its readers that Helm had been "lynched, with twelve others, at Bannock Mines," a figure that does not match the five hanged on January 14.
Aydt counts 21 men hanged by the committee by early February 1864. He quotes Dimsdale calling the committee's work a "prompt and really necessary severity." Historians Mather and Boswell, again through Aydt, found that Dimsdale in fact documented the killing of eighteen people, with two more presumed. The scholar Smurr, quoted by Aydt, argued that the miners' intelligence argument was in reality an attack on the rationale of the entire American court system.
For Helm, the result is that the legal record is thin. A magistrate in Victoria placed him under a bond for good behavior in 1862. A Florence list shows a case in his name in 1862. The two killings that writers describe in most detail, one in Missouri and one at Florence, produced either no recorded verdict or, in Langford's version, an acquittal. He was hanged by a committee, not by a court, and the claims about his earlier life reached print through writers who approved of what the committee did.
The Missouri conviction rests on Langford and the writers who repeat him, and no court record of it is known. The year of the Missouri killing is not on record. The California, Salt Lake City and Oregon killings have no names, dates or records. At Florence, Langford and Hough disagree on whether the killing was a fight or a hired act, and on whether the case ended in an acquittal or an escape. The British Columbia deaths of 1862 come from a memoir written decades later and from talk among miners. The place where Helm was held in 1863 differs between Young and Sale (Port Townsend) and Hough (Portland). The vigilantes' own account of his statements differs from the diary of an eyewitness. The gang that Helm is said to have belonged to is itself disputed in recent scholarship.
1828: Born in Kentucky, according to Ron Young; raised in Missouri.
Before the 1850s West: Missouri killing attributed (Langford, Hough, Young); conviction, asylum and escape claimed by Langford and Young.
1850s: Killings in California, Salt Lake City and Oregon attributed by Langford and Hough; no names or records.
1861: Gold found at Florence.
1862: The killing of "Dutch Fred" at Florence attributed (Langford, Hough). September 29: Florence court list entry, Territory of Washington against L. Boone Helm.
July 1862: Three deaths in the Cariboo district attributed in local accounts.
October 13, 1862: Arrested at Victoria.
October 17, 1862: Police Magistrate orders security for good behavior; Helm defaults and serves about a month on street work.
Spring 1863: Arrested at Fort Yale; taken to Victoria, then to Port Townsend, and escapes from the jail there (Young, Sale); Hough says he was held in Portland.
By 1864: In the Montana gold camps; listed by Dimsdale among Plummer's road agents.
January 10, 1864: Henry Plummer hanged by vigilantes.
January 13, 1864: Vigilante executive committee condemns six men; one escapes.
January 14, 1864: Helm, Gallagher, Parish, Lyons and Lane hanged by the Vigilantes of Montana at Virginia City.
February 15, 1864: Victoria Colonist reports Helm lynched with twelve others at Bannock Mines.