The Thompson-Hickman Museum is the best place to read the history of Virginia City in depth. The collection covers the 1863 gold rush, the founding of Montana Territory, and the brutal winter of 1863–64 when the Vigilance Committee — a group of miners who had had enough of the road agent gangs terrorising the goldfields — hanged 21 men in a matter of weeks, including the sheriff himself, Henry Plummer, who turned out to be the gang's leader.
The museum holds original documents, photographs, weapons, and household items from the gold rush period. It is a small museum by any standard but densely informative. The story it tells — of instant wealth, lawlessness, vigilante justice, and rapid collapse — is one of the most dramatic in American frontier history.