Page 284 - Cornelius Hedges Story

271 The Cornelius Hedges Story

possession. The authority is somewhat conflicting, for Grand
Master Wheeler, of Nebraska, in his address of the following
year says that he had learned from Brother Langford that the
Lodge had convened and was at work. Langford surely knew best.

Grand Master Wheeler, of Nebraska, in his address of 1864, speaks
of having granted a dispensation, Nov. 17, 1863, to brothers Mark
A. Moore, Samuel W. Stanley, Levi J. Russell, and thirteen others to
open a Lodge at Nevada City (on Alder Gulch below Virginia City)
to be called Idaho Lodge. This was recommended by Plattsmouth
Lodge, No. 6, of Nebraska. Under this dispensation the Lodge
was organized and one candidate, Jerry G. Smith, late of Boulder,
Montana, received all the degrees. From the Nebraska Proceedings
of 1865 it appears that a charter was granted to this last Lodge
as Idaho, No. 10. The charter was lost in transmission and never
was received or heard of. Perhaps it adorned some Indian Lodge.

Brother Moore, who was Master of Idaho Lodge, was in Helena in
the spring of 1865 and officiated at the funeral of Brother Rodney
Peacock, a member of Virginia City Lodge, organized under charter
from Kansas. This funeral occurred March 7, 1865, and the occasion
brought together the Masons in and around Helena and initiated the
movement to organize a Lodge in Helena. Rodney Street was first
named in 1868, just four years after gold was discovered in the gulch.
(Rodney Street in Helena took its name from Rodney Peacock, a doctor
who was described as “the first man to draw his last breath in Helena.)
Nevada City soon declined and so ended the second attempt
to organize a Lodge in Montana, then Idaho. Apparently these
were failures, but not wholly so, for it brought together those
who were Masons and made them acquainted with each other,
and in the stormy events pending and ensuing, it furnished the
nucleus around which rallied the “law and order” elements.

We will not say that all the vigilantes were Masons, but we would
not go far astray to say that all Masons were vigilantes. And the
knowledge of this fact disseminated among the roughs and road-
agents gave them a wholesome dread of seeking victims among
those whose death they knew would be avenged. The story of
the struggle between these elements has been eloquently told by
Brother Langford in his book, “Vigilante Days and Ways,” and
does not belong to Masonic history especially. We hardly think
the annals of history afford a more conspicuous example of the
revelry of crime than existed in Montana from 1862 to 1866.
There were no courts or officers of law, wealth was flowing from