The sheriff who robbed his own roads

Documented history; the unrecovered gold is the open question

Bannack elected Henry Plummer sheriff in 1863. By night his gang, the Innocents, robbed the very stages and gold trains he was sworn to protect on the Virginia City road; the toll is put at over a hundred holdups. The vigilantes hanged him on his own gallows in January 1864 without a trial, and he never said where any of it went. The takings, in raw Alder Gulch gold, were never accounted for.