P a g e 4 G h o s t T o w n s a n d H i s t o r y GEORGE IVES JAIL While hunting for grouse, William Palmer, a Nevada City saloon keeper, came across a frozen corpse. Palmer had shot a grouse and was running to find where it had fallen and located it on top of Nicholas Tiebalt’s body. The man’s body had a gunshot wound above the left eye and marks around his throat from rope used to drag him away from the road behind some sagebrush. Tiebalt had clumps of sagebrush in his hands indicating he was alive when he was being dragged away. Palmer loaded the body onto his wagon and brought him to Nevada City. The citizens could not believe the brutality of this and a group of men rode back to where the body was found. They went to Long John Franck’s wikiup and interrogated him about the robbery and murder. Long John pleaded that he did not commit the crime but rather George Ives, who had been staying in the wikiup, was the culprit. The men found Ives and took him to Nevada City and he was put on trial on December 19, 1863. Photo by Jolene Ewert-Hintz Ives was convicted before Judge Don D. Byam by a 24-man jury in the outdoors makeshift courtroom of wagons in Nevada City. Ives pleaded with Prosecutor Col. Wilbur F. Sanders to put the execution off until the following day. Sanders felt the impact from the crowd after his plea but did not want to put it off a day with the chance of remission of the sentence. Luckily at that moment, X Beidler, who volunteered as a guard during the trial, shouted to Sanders from the Richard’s Cabin rooftop, “Ask him how long he gave the Dutchman!”1 This outburst gave Sanders time to remember how cruel Ives was in killing Tiebalt, so he only allowed Ives paper and pencil before he was brought to be hanged. Sanders also announced that Ives’ property would be seized to pay for the trial expenses and anything left over would go to his mother. Ives last words before the hanging were: “I am innocent of this crime. Aleck Carter killed the Dutchman.” He was then hanged on December 21, 1863, with hundreds of witnesses in Nevada City, Montana. George Homer Ives (1836-1863) was the first man to be tried by jury and hanged in Montana. Wilbur Sanders is owed a lot of credit for going forward with the trial and pushing to convict a criminal. This trial led to the start of the Vigilantes and the hanging of many more road agents. This building is where George Ives was held before he was hanged. It is assumed that although the building has been called a “jail” throughout history, Ives was likely its only prisoner. Archaeology was done around the building in 2011 and yielded that there were charcoal inclusions in the soils and samples of slag and clinker were collected. With these discoveries, it is believed that the building was used as a blacksmith shop with a forge still inside it today. 1 Sanders, Helen Fitzgerald, and William H. Bertsche, Jr., eds. X. Beidler: Vigilante. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1957. Photo by Jolene Ewert-Hintz -Interpretive Sign on site, Courtesy of The Montana Heritage Commission and The Montana History Foundation.
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