Butte, America’s Story Episode 37 - Miles Fuller

“Feeble, old prospector executed in early morn.” Thus was the hanging of Miles Fuller reported in the Extra Edition of the Butte Miner on Friday May 18, 1906.

Of the ten men who have been executed on the gallows at the Silver Bow County courthouse, Miles Fuller is probably the best known, not least because his ghost reportedly haunts the present courthouse. The ghost’s steps are said to trace out the floor plan of the older county building that stood at the corner of Granite and Montana in 1906.

Fuller was convicted of the brutal murder of Henry J. Gallahan, an “old-time placer miner,” whose bullet-riddled body was found near the McKinley School on Park Street on October 24, 1904. Fuller had reportedly threatened to kill Gallahan several times. The pair, both in their 60s, were known to have feuded over alleged ore thefts in their placer claims just south and west of the School of Mines (Montana Tech). Gallahan reportedly lived in a cabin near the west end of Silver Street, and Fuller’s cabin was out west, toward the Bluebird Mine. Witnesses described a man matching Fuller’s description fleeing the scene, and they even reported seeing the murderer slash Gallahan’s throat after emptying the five chambers of a 44-caliber revolver into the victim. Testimony at the trial suggested that Gallahan did get one shot off, but died when Fuller’s bullets found their mark.

Fuller maintained his innocence through the trial and appeals that ultimately reached the Montana Supreme Court, but the jury’s guilty verdict was upheld consistently. Fuller became the seventh man to be “jerked into eternity” by the gallows that was set up at the northwest corner of the courthouse yard, approximately at the corner of Quartz and Montana Streets, where once stood the boarding house in which Marcus Daly lived in the mid-1880s. The hangman’s hemp rope, three-quarters of an inch thick and acquired from Chicago, was tied by a sheriff’s deputy into a regulation noose with nine wraps.

Although reported as the “quickest ever” execution in Montana – two minutes – the Miner newspaper called hanging “the most inhuman and the poorest method of execution now in vogue.” Firing squads and electrocution were thought to be preferable. Hundreds of people witnessed the 5:30 a.m. hanging, including those with special passes to the courthouse and many “morbidly curious” who watched from the streets. More streamed into the White & Krebs Funeral Parlor on South Main (north of today’s Silver Dollar Saloon) to view Fuller’s body, including a woman who claimed he killed a man in Texas and threatened her life if she spoke of it.

Fuller was buried in Mt. Moriah Cemetery. The last hanging in Butte took place in 1926.

As writer Edwin Dobb has said, "Like Concord, Gettysburg, and Wounded Knee, Butte is one of the places America came from." Join us next time for more of Butte, America’s Story.