On hearing of a gold strike in the northern Rocky Mountains, Edwin Ruthven Purple, a still-fortuneless California forty-niner, saw his second chance and headed north from Utah to present-day Montana.  With three wagon loads of staples, hand tools, and whiskey, Purple came searching for gold-from the ground and from selling his wares to his fellow miners.  What he encountered were the trials and exhilarations of the trail and a lawless, wild-open mining frontier, replete with wanton murder and vigilante justice in Bannack City, Montana

With an introduction and thorough annotations by Kenneth N. Owens, Perilous Passage offers Purple's never before-published, first-person narrative of his encounters along the trail from Salt Lake City to Montana and at the Bannack City goldfields, where he prospected and peddled in the first year of the town's existence.  On hand for the crimes that led to vigilante justice, Purple tells of witnessing the election of Henry Plummer as sheriff of Bannack City, of Plummer's murder of Jack Cleveland in Bill Goodrich's saloon, and of rising tensions in the gold camp just a few months before Plummer and more than twenty others were hanged by vigilantes.

Purple was part of a generation of young men who, lured to the West during the California gold rush, participated in opening Montana to settlement and commercial enterprise.  In this period of high expectations, reckless living, and intense social turmoil, Purple chronicled the story of a raucous, sometimes murderous life among the bonanza miners.