In nineteenth-century Montana, roads were nearly as important as gold to the success of mining camps because they enabled supplies, people, and precious metals to move between the remote territory and the States. The Road Agent Trail grew from older Indian paths later adapted by miners and freighters, and over time developed into a route lined with stage stations and ranches that offered food and rest for passengers and animals while also serving as hangouts for desperadoes. Established in 1863, it linked Bannack and Virginia City as an extension of the Montana Road connecting mining camps with settlements in Utah, crossing a landscape of frequent streams, canyons, mountain passes, rocky ledges, willow thickets, deep valleys, and the grassy Beaverhead and Ruby river valleys that fed the oxen, horses, and mules pulling wagons. The seventy-mile trip between Bannack and Virginia City could ordinarily be completed between sunrise and sunset. The trail became closely associated with Sheriff Henry Plummer and his outlaw gang, which for eight months beginning in the spring of 1863 terrorized travelers through intimidation, robbery, and occasional murder, aided, according to Montana legend, by spies at ranches who marked horses, wagons, and stagecoaches to signal where gold could be taken through a system called horseback telegraphy. In December 1863 and January 1864, vigilantes from Bannack and Alder Gulch violently ended that reign of terror by apprehending and hanging more than two dozen road agents, including Plummer. Today, Montana Highways 41 and 287 closely parallel the old route, and in the 1920s Madison County designated Montana 287 the Vigilante Trail and marked it with the vigilante sign 3-7-77.