The Shooting of Thaddeus Purdy
In the Fall of 1853 a miner known as “Muntz” knifed and fatally wounded “Baltimore Jack” over a game of cards in Forest City. Muntz was taken to Downieville and held upstairs in the Craycroft Building for want of a jail. The next day a Forest City mob armed with “great clubs, knives, and revolvers” and “yelling like demons” attempted to take and hang Muntz. A shot rang out and Thaddeus Purdy, Sierra County’s first District Attorney fell with a bullet to his brain. He died on a table in the saloon. The victim of a friend “handling the hammer of his revolver when it slipped through his fingers”. The astonished crowd “slunk away”. Muntz was acquitted on the grounds of self defense.
Marker is on Main Street east of Commercial Street (California Highway 49).
Courtesy hmdb.org
