Thomas J. Dimsdale
1831– 1866

Inducted October 20, 1962

Thomas Josiah Dimsdale was a versatile reporter. During his career in Virginia City he wrote calmly of shootings in dance halls, a hanging in Idaho, scalpings near Helena and the activities of the vigilantes. He gave a wonderfully detailed report of a prize fight – 185 rounds to a draw – between Con Orem and Hugh O’Neil.

As the first permanent editor of Montana’s first newspaper, the Montana Post, in Virginia City, from 1864 to 1866, he compiled a remarkable record in both his professional and civic activities.

He was born in England in 1831, attended Rugby and Oxford, and left the University in his second year to seek his fortune in the gold fields of Canada and Montana. In Virginia City, he covered the historic flour riots. Deep, early snow in the Rockies cut off supplies desperately needed along Alder Gulch. Actual hunger resulted when flour ran short and the price went up to $100 per hundred-pound sack. Newsprint ran short, and the Montana Post printed on brown, blue or pink paper for several weeks.

In March, 1865, the first flour riot took place after a band of angry men forced the sale of flour at their own price. Dimsdale ran two editorials on this. One was called “Speculation,” and the other “Two Wrongs Never Make a Right.” A “flour committee” had inflamed the populace and 23 armed men barricaded themselves in a store behind sacks of flour. Dimsdale reprimanded both sides and favored peace and order.

After bitterly criticizing a new book, “The Banditti of the Rocky Mountains,” he began writing and publishing in serial form on Aug. 26, 1865, when he believed were the facts about the Montana vigilantes. He explained to people outside Montana why the vigilantes had taken the law into their own hands and why men had been executed with no public trial. Dimsdale’s articles were collected in “The Vigilantes of Montana,” the first book published in the territory.

He taught a subscription school in Virginia City in 1863-64 and was appointed the first territorial superintendent of education. He served in this capacity until he died of tuberculosis on Sept. 26, 1866, at the age of 35.

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