← Before Today: A History of Holt County, Nebraska
Outlaws, Vigilantes and Sheriffs Chapter Eight Reading accounts of illegal activities in Holt and adjacent counties in pioneer days readily gives one the impression that the area had more than its share of such goings on. Men who lived outside the law naturally tended to keep beyond the reach of its officers if they could. Consequently the frontiers of the nation usually had a surplus of outlaws and their followers, at least until sheriffs, courts and jails caught up with them. Another reason the Niobrara country had more lawbreakers than contemporary localities was its rugged topography.
Numerous crooked streams were tributary to the river. All cut their way through deep and convoluted canyons, forming a maize of timbered hideouts, ideal for rustlers and men on the run. Such men were quick to see the possibilities of the Niobrara, Big Sandy, Beaver, Brush, Spring, Turkey and Eagle Creeks and a dozen more. In the hidden fastnesses of this vast canyon country they found near perfect hiding places for themselves, and grass and water for the stolen livestock they drove by night and concealed by day in the narrow, steep-walled gorges.
During those early settlement years law officers were too few and too far away to cope with the situation. Therefore, when the depredations against the cattle and horses of vast regions that depended on livestock for livelihood and transportation grew to proportations that could no longer be tolerated, the obvious answer was— vigilantes. Thus, in the rugged country of Holt County, the stage was set for a several-years-long drama that would be played out to its bitter end.
The first outlaw to become famous, and probably the one whose notority was to spread farthest abroad, was Doc Middleton. Doc, whose range was the upper Elkhorn and Niobrara valleys, was something of an outlaw paradox, a modern Robin Hood who was referred to by John Carson as “The Unwickedest outlaw.”* Although he stole more than two thousand horses during his brief career, he was popular throughout his territory and numbered his friends there by the scores. Most of the ranchers and many of the merchants and homesteaders there even helped hide and protect him from “the law.” While it is true that horse thievery was the worst of all crimes in Doc’s time, and in a country that moved on horse power, the factor in his favor was the belief that he stole only from Indians or the government. Although this was largely true, he would occasionally take a horse from a homesteader or a business man if it was an unusually fine animal, for Doc was a lover and a connoisseur of good horses. And even then the animal was safe if its owner was a friend of Doc’s, or had done him a past favor.
Furthermore, Doc often helped a man who was down on his luck by giving him a good horse, stolen of course. When a minister and his wife were traveling through the country by team and buggy and one of their horses laid down in the trail and died, the poor couple, miles from anywhere, sat in their buggy in utter dispair. Then a handsome, mysterious stranger, riding a good horse and herding several others, came along, heard their sad story and gave them one of his loose horses.
Doc Middleton, whose real name was James M. Riley,** came up the Texas trail to Nebraska about 1876. One night that fall, in a saloon in Sidney, he had to shoot a soldier in self defense. He would undoubtedly have been acquitted had the affair gone to court, but the dead soldier’s drunken friends were determined to see that it didn’t, and Doc fled the town that night. Apparently he went north, fell in with a gang of Niobrara horse thieves, popularly known as the “Pony Boys,” and became their leader.
Doc and his boys were only one of several gangs that rustled horses in northern Nebraska, and no doubt the crimes of other men were often laid at his door. So successful were these outfits that, before long, most citizens gave up trying to keep good horses and resorted to broken down plugs the rustlers wouldn’t have. Those who held on to good horses went to great pains to protect them.
Two German brothers, who owned some very fine draft horses, put up a long log building on their place near the Niobrara, partitioned off one end of the building for themselves and stabled the horses in the other end. After putting the horses inside for the night, they locked the barn door on the inside, then entered their own quarters through a door in the partition. The brothers boasted widely of their fool-proof precaution, but made one big mistake— they kept their guns just inside the front door of their end of the cabin. One morning while they were at breakfast an armed man stepped inside the door, between the brothers and their guns. This left them no choice but to obey his orders and bring the horses out. He left with the horses and the guns. Doc’s modus operand! was simple. He knew the country thoroughly and he stole only horses. Slipping up on a herd or a corral full, he and one or two helpers could have the herd on the run in a matter of moments. Usually he took the owner’s saddle horses as well, leaving him afoot. Traveling at night and laying up in a canyon by day, he could soon have the herd down in the sandhills north of North Platte where an associate, a prominent Platter, took all the horses Doc could deliver and sent them on south toward Texas, selling them off at good prices along the way.
Doc was a handsome man, tall, well-dressed, mannerly and very straight, (one Holt County settler thought he must at one time have been a West Point man because of his military bearing) with dark, curly hair and beard. He frequently showed up at dances in soddy homes and schoolhouses, where he laid aside his guns and holster and danced as lightheartedly as anyone, or looked after the little folks while their mothers danced.
For approximately two years Doc came and went in Holt and neighboring counties. When meal time caught him on his travels he stopped at the nearest settler’s home and ate with the family. According to Tom Richardson, his brother-in-law, the tall outlaw was popular with the settler women, especially “them Irish down on the Elkhorn. When he’d stop at their homes they’d tell him what they needed from town, thread and such, and when he went through O’Neill or Atkinson he’d get the articles and leave them off on his next trip around.”* He usually carried candy for the children of these households, and sometimes he left a pony in payment for meals or some favor received.
Al Wertz, a Willowdale homesteader, told of building a house for a From the book by that name, (The Press Of The Territorian, Santa Fe, 1966) Doc Middleton, by Harold Hutton (The Swallow Press, Chicago, 1974) Ibid, pp 76, 77.
56 Doc Middleton family on the Missouri River near the mouth of the Niobrara. One night a stranger came to the door and asked if Mrs. Wertz could prepare meals for two separate crews of men. She got up and did so and the stranger told her a horse would be left in payment. The Wertz couple then heard the sound of horses on the run, and the splash they made when they went into the Missouri. The next morning they found a young mare tied outside. The John O’Dempsey Nightengale family, who came from Minnesota to the Atkinson community in the fall of 1878, had a rather startling first meeting with Doc. At the request of a neighbor who was very ill and wanted John to help him make his will, Middleton went after him. When the Nightengales saw a tall cowboy, wearing two guns, striding toward their door they felt sure he had come to steal their only horse, and perhaps perpetrate even more desperate deeds. When they found it wasn’t to be that way, John went with Doc to help the neighbor, who wasn’t on his deathbed after all, and when the Nightengales finished building their big new house, Doc and his friends often came to dances there.
An old Inman history states that “Doc Middleton, though he rustled horses, visited many homesteads throughout the valley and his kindness and courtesies were told by many people.” Another settler, H. W. Tomlinson, who was a boy at the time of his first meeting with Doc, tells this story: Mr. Tomlinson had been killed in a well cave-in and one evening a little later a good looking man, riding a good horse, came to their door and *lbid. p 97 **Frances Sims Fulton, To and Through Nebraska, asked to stay all night. This seemed odd to the Tomlinsons, for their house was rather seedy looking and they lived well off any main road, but they took him in. That evening, as he visited with the widow and her sons, Mrs. Tomlinson told him that she had only one horse, a very good one, and that she was afraid it would be stolen. The man told her not to worry, that horse thieves did not steal from widows. After their guest was gone they inquired around the neighborhood and learned they had entertained Doc Middleton, who had good reasons to keep off main roads. Stories are also told of how Doc, when he learned that thieves had worked a particular hardship on certain settlers by stealing an only horse or team, sought out and brought back the livestock. An 1879 Frontier, in the editor’s weekly items, carries this notation, “Doc Middleton and two of his men paid us a friendly visit last Thursday.” By this time so many outlaws (one account says one hundred and fifty) were making off with livestock that the citizens were vowing to put a stop to such wholesale thievery. Farther west some of the big ranchers had put up a reward for the capture of Middleton, the acknowledged leader of the rustlers, and more and more law officers had a burning desire to take the notorious outlaw. Doc could see that, as a dealer in other peoples’ horses, time was running out for him. Furthermore, he had fallen in love and wanted to get married. His sweetheart was Mary Richardson, daughter of Henry Richardson, a settler near Carns, on the Niobrara in Keya Paha County, and he did not Doc Middleton once told Hurley Jones that if he stood in the middle of the old Whiting Bridge and looked down the Niobrara to where his line of sight met the curve of the north bank he would be looking at the site of his “hide-out.” (Lincoln: Journal Co. 1884) want to marry her while he had a price on his head.
About this time William H. H.
Llewellyn and L P. Hazen put their heads together to figure a way to capture Middleton, who was notoriously fast with his guns and no man to fool with. Llewellyn seems to have been a government special agent at this time and Hazen, who knew Doc slightly, had earlier served time in the Iowa state penitentiary. The two, who had no desire to face Doc’s guns, decided to try to lure him into their toils by pretending to secure for him a pardon from the governor (for the killing of the soldier, the only state offense he was then charged with) on condition that he would then enlist on the side of the law and help stamp out rustling on the Niobrara. When this information was relayed to Doc he was eager to accept. Llewellyn was to arrange a meeting and deliver the bogus pardon.
On this assurance Doc went to Paddock on May 24, 1879 and purchased License No. 12 from Judge William Maloy. He gave his name as “James M. Sheppard,” (a title he used occasionally) his age as twenty- five and his bride’s as eighteen.* They were married on the night of May 28 by the Rev. I. H. Skinner, who had come to the Niobrara only a few days before and was living in a tent across the river from the Richardson place. Mrs. Skinner described the event as follows: “. . . James Shepherd requested him (Mr. Skinner) to come to the little house across the river and perform a marriage ceremony. On the apointed evening Mr. Skinner forded the river and united him in marriage . . . The room was crowded with armed men . . . the groom laid his arms off while the ceremony was being performed.”** Doc and Mary spent a week-long honeymoon in Atkinson, and all the while Doc was waiting for word of the meeting at which he should receive his pardon and become a free man. But not until July did Llewellyn make his move. With Hazen he met a third man, William C. Lykens, a Wyoming Stock Growers Association detective who had arrested Doc two years earlier for horse stealing in Wyoming and lodged him in the Sidney, Nebraska, jail. He had escaped that night and had never been caught again.
The three rode to Frenchtown on the Elkhorn where they parted company: Hazen and Llewellyn riding on up the Elkhorn to a point near Atkinson, while Lykens struck off through the hills northwest, keeping out of sight, and went into hiding 57 Mrs. Skinner agree with those told by local residents who knew it best. If seems that the plan was for Lykens to fire the fatal shot that would topple the outlaw from his saddle. Llewellyn would then take back the fake pardon and report that Middleton had fired the first shot.
Things happened fast when the party reached the appointed spot. Lykens had waited until his target was very near, then tried to shoot him with his revolver, rather than his rifle. But the gun only snapped, twice, and Doc heard the sounds and whirled— to receive a ball, from Hazen’s rifle, about two inches below his navel. Doc still managed to fire two shots from his own pistol at Hazen, wounding him in the neck and chest. When the shooting started Kid Wade drew his revolver and fired on Llewellyn from the rear, upon which that worthy took off at full speed up the side of the hill. The Kid chased him, firing until his gun was empty. Llewellyn, wounded slightly in the arm, did not stop until he reached Fort Hartsuff, eighty miles away.
Lykens, too, was putting all the distance possible between the Nio-brara and himself, heading for Columbus. Doc and Hazen were left, wounded, on the battlefield. Doc made his way to the nearby home of a settler. Hazen either walked or was helped to the Skinners’ tent. Mrs. Skinner, a competent nurse, ministered to both the wounded men until doctors could be summoned.
The day after the ambush H. M. Uffley, an O’Neill attorney who had not yet heard of the fight, wrote a letter to Governor Nance in favor of granting Middleton the pardon he desired. Uttley wrote with contempt of the “ten or twelve who have been skulking around, seeking blood money,” and stated that it would be “an act of humanity and justice to help this man all that is in our power to, to become a citizen and reform from his old ways.”* Doc was taken to a camp in a deep canyon in the Pony Boy country, where his wife, friends and Dr. Daggett of O’Neil attended him. Hazen was taken to Omaha. Both recovered.
Llewellyn fold his story in Fort Hartsuff, and soon afterward left there with sixteen soldiers under Captain Munson, bound for Doc’s camp. They eventually found their way there and took the wounded outlaw prisoner. Only Middleton’s wife and two of his men were with him when Llewellyn, his seventeen near Atkinson. On July 17 Llewellyn waited in Atkinson for Middleton to meet him, but Doc had become suspicious and did not show. Llewellyn then hired a man to ride forty-five miles to Doc’s “camping place” on the Niobrara with a note. The man brought back word that Doc would meet Llewellyn at “Peacocks,” a place about six miles from the river. Picking up Lykens, the three rode some forty miles on northwest to the meeting place. According to their plan, Lykens was then to ride on ahead under cover of darkness and hide in some bushes near the spot where the other two were to meet Doc. The detective, however, kept getting lost and it was with some difficulty that he finally carried out his part of the ambush plan.
At the Peacock place Doc and three of his men met Llewellyn and Hazen. Doc held a long consultation with Llewellyn, then all had supper, after which the Pony Boys and the government men rode on to the Skinner tent. There Doc and his men crossed the river to their camp and, after dark, Llewellyn sent Hazen to take Lykens to a hiding place in some brush beside the trail over which Llewellyn was to ride with Doc the next morning.
At ten o’clock on Sunday morning, July 20, Doc and a friend, Kid Wade, arrived at the meeting place, arranged the evening before, where Llewellyn and Hazen waited. At about the same time three more of the Pony Boys rode up. Llewellyn is supposed to have given Doc a fake pardon and he was about to ride off with it. To keep him on the trail until they reached the ambush site, Llewellyn told him they were to meet some other men a little later, where Doc had to sign one more paper.
The party then started on down the trail, Doc and Llewellyn riding side by side and one of the Pony Boys riding beside Hazen. While Llewellyn’s account of the affair tries to make it look like an honorable attempt to capture a much wanted outlaw, the government men had actually planned a cowardly assassination, hence the hiding of Lykens in the brush beside the trail. The rewards read “Dead or Alive,” and Lykens was to shoot Doc as he rode by— and so avoid, any necessity of facing his deadly guns.
After it was all over the three sleuths fold conflicting stories, each frying to justify his part in the ambush and make himself look as good as possible. Middleton’s story and that of *Middleton, p 128.
**lbid. pp. 133-34.
***Pen and Plow, Oakdale (Antelope County) Nebr. *Call of the Range, by Nellie Snyder Yost, (the Swa soldiers and three more government men surrounded the camp. The only shots fired were by the government force, who fired into the tent and in all other directions as well. Llewellyn, however, reported to the Department of Justice that there was sharp firing by Middleton’s force. After Doc and the others were in custody the tent and all supplies, books and food, were piled and burn ** ed. “Doc was wounded and on his back, otherwise they wouldn’t have taken him,” stated the Oakdale Pen and Plow on July 31, 1879. *** When the cavalcade, with Doc under arrest and lying in a buckboard, arrived in Atkinson the people lined the streets, shouting “Hurrah for Doc Middleton.” In O’Neill, when Pat Hagerty saw he was hatless under the hot July sun, he went into his store, brought out the best hat he had and put if on Doc’s head. Doc was ultimately lodged in the Cheyenne, Wyoming, jail. And afterward Llewellyn, Hazen and Lykens each bragged loudly about his part in the capture, causing the Pen and Plow editor to observe, “There is nothing so remarkable about the affair as the amount of blowing that has been done.” In September Doc pleaded guilty to stealing three horses in Wyoming and was sentenced to five years in the Nebraska penitentiary, as a fire in the Wyoming institution had rendered if uninhabitable. Three years and nine months later, on June 18, 1883, he was released on his good behavior record. There was not a single black mark against him.
As Doc grew older he let his heavy beard grow longer. By 1894, when Bert Snyder first met him, he was working for the Spade ranch in Wyoming. He was then wearing his beard in a braid, tied down to his belt with an old necktie on windy days. Middleton took a fancy to young Snyder and often rode with him. He spoke freely of his time in the penitentiary, how he had at first vowed to kill every man who had helped put him there, “But after I’d been there a year or two I didn’t want to kill anybody, and I ain’t killed anyone since I got out,” he said.* Snyder had great admiration for him. Doc worked at a variety of occupations after gaining his freedom: ranch work, operator of shooting galleries and saloons in various towns and, in 1886, as deputy sheriff of Sheridan County under Sheriff John Riggs. He seems to have been a good lawman while he wore the badge. In 1885 or ’86 he was with Buffalo Bill’s Wild Press, Chicago, 1966, p 267.
58 West Show for a few months and in 1893 he took part in the Chadron to Chicago horse race, of which more later.
His first wife, Mary, hadn’t waited for him but had married another man. So, in 1884, Doc eloped with her sister Rene. They were married in Neligh, where he gave his name as D. D. Middleton. He was thirty-three, she was sixteen. The Fremont Daily Herald of July 3, 1884, noted the marriage as follows: “Doc Middleton and bride returned to O’Neill last week. A grand ball was given in the evening in honor of the arrival of the distinguished couple. Let him steal a few more horses and they will send him to Congress.”** In the years that followed people continued to note his acts of kindness. When he opened his saloon in the new tent city of Seneca, Nebraska, on the just arrived Chicago, Burlington and Quincy railroad, his place of business was also a tent and the only wood in town was in Doc’s bar. When a townsman’s child died he willingly sawed it up to make a little coffin. All too soon Doc was to know what it meant to lose a little daughter. Lulu B., his first child by his second marriage, was born in April, 1885. It has been said that the little girl was the apple of her father’s eye and that the bond between them was very close. The five-year-old child died in Gordon, Nebraska, and was buried there. A little monument still marks her grave, and friends said Doc was never the same after her death. By the turn of the century the Middletons were living in Chadron, where they were neighbors to A. E. Sheldon, Nebraska historian, who described Doc as “wearing a Mormon beard and having the air of a traveling Methodist minister.” He was still a strikingly handsome man. In 1903 the family moved on to Ard-more, South Dakota. In 1911 Rene died. Doc buried her in Crawford, Nebraska, and after that he drifted like an uprooted tumbleweed. In 1913 he opened a saloon in Orin, near Douglas, Wyoming, with his son Wesley as a partner.
Orin was a “local option” town and there was some question as to whether or not Doc needed a license to operate. He was finally arrested for operating illegally. Unable to pay the fine, he was lodged in the Douglas jail, where he contracted erysipelas. Removed to the pest house, he died there on December 27, 1913. Buried at county expense, in a lot donated by a friend, he lies in an unmarked grave in Douglas Park Cemetery.
With the passing years Doc Middleton legends grew and expanded. Most numerous were the stories of his great cave hideouts, caves so extensive he could hide large numbers of horses in them. But, as Harold Hutton points out in his carefully researched and documented book, large numbers of horses could not have been concealed in such caves, even if there had been any. “Anyone,” he writes, “who has ever cleaned out a stable will see how ridiculous the stories are.” No doubt there were a few caves in the canyon recesses, hard by a spring or stream, where three or four men and their mounts could put up for a day. Ralph Prill of Holt County tells of Tommy Crowe, of the Steel Creek precinct, noticing a quantity of corn cobs and horse hair that washed down Red Bird Creek after a hard rain. Investigating farther up the creek, he had found a hidden corral where horses had been cared for. Mrs. Merrill Anderson wrote in her Pilgrimage to the Prairie that the Demings found a barn dug into the side of a hill on their homestead up near the Niobrara. It was roofed with poles and hay and had been used by Doc as a hideout station on his way out of the country with stolen horses, they were told. Even today residents of the country show interested visitors the faint remains of these old so-called “hideouts.” More likely they are fallen-in cellars and dugout homes.
Holt County’s second most notorious outlaw was William Albert (Kid) Wade. Both Doc and the Kid have been the subjects of many an outlaw feature story. Kid was even the protagonist of one semi-fictitious book* and Arthur Mullen included both of them in his Western Democrat autobiography. As with the Middleton stories, many of those about the Kid are full of errors and distortions. The facts that can be documented are substantially as follows: With his parents, Mr. and Mrs. John Wade, he came to Holt County and settled east of the Big Sandy, twenty miles north of Atkinson, in the late ’70s. A quarter of a mile or so west of the Wade home a canyon fitted snugly into the tableland between Big Sandy and Brush Creeks. The deep, steep-walled canyon could not be seen from above until one stood on the very brink of it. No trails led to it and a traveler could pass within yards of it and never know it was there. An abundance of timber (including many linden trees, a rarity in that part of the state) grew in the canyon but none of the tops showed above its rim. A spring fed stream winds down the gently sloping, grassy floor of the natural hideaway.
The boy no doubt soon discovered the beautiful canyon and, when he turned to trafficing in stolen horses, adopted it as a convenient stop-over on his way to Iowa with his contraband. Still known as “Kid Wade Canyon,” it looks just as it did in the Kid’s time and is undetectable from vehicles passing on a nearby wagon trail that winds across the surrounding pasture.
John Wade and his teen-age son seem to have been under suspicion of theft almost from the first. Their place was believed to be a rendezvous for outlaws and it was said that it was always well stocked with provisions, hams, side meat, antelope and beef, hanging from rafters— far more than one family would need. The place was twenty miles from any town, and even today is not easy to reach. Little more is known of the father’s activities, but in the fall of 1883 he disappeared. Previous to this, and following the ambushing of Doc Middleton, the Kid, who was with Doc that day, had escaped or been released and had left the country. A short time later he was arrested on a farm in Iowa. Tried and convicted of horse stealing, he served two and one-half years in the state prison at Animosa, then returned to Carns late in 1882.
He was soon busy again, stealing horses on a large scale. When he went to Iowa, late in the fall of 1883, probably driving stolen horses, four Holt County men, “Capt.” C. C. Dodge, “Lt.” Peter Hansen, Charles Messenger and Michael Coleman, trailed him. There are differing tales as to how they located and captured him. The facts seem to be as follows: The four caught up with him at Le Mars on January 16. Learning that he had ridden out to a farm, sixteen miles distant, they sent Messenger, a man the Kid had never seen, after him. Messenger lured Wade back to Le Mars on the pretense of getting the money from the bank there to pay for a horse he was pretending to buy from him. As they dismounted at a livery stable the other three Holt Countians closed in on the Kid. On the promise of a fair trial in O’Neill, the Kid agreed to accompany his captors back to Holt County without waiting for a requisition. Twenty-four hours later, with their prisoner in irons, the party reached Yankton, South Dakota, and laid up for two days. According to Romaine Saunders of the O’Neill Frontier, the Kid’s captors saw a chance to make some money on the deal. Young **Middleton, p 159.
?Rim of the Sandhills by Will Henry Spindler (Educator Supply Co., Mitchell, S. D. 1941.) 59 Wade, too, was famous as a dead shot, so Dodge and the others rented a hall and advertised that their prisoner would give an exhibition of his skill with a six-shooter for an admission fee of fifty cents. They had first, of course, obtained the Kid’s word that he would not attempt to escape if his loaded guns were returned to him for the show. He kept his word, entertained the paying guests, and handed his guns back, butts first.
John AAoler of Eagle Creek was present at that exhibition. He said they hung up a frying pan and the Kid wrote his initials, K W, in the bottom with his gun. The distance was not given. AAoler talked with him afterward and the Kid told him he had gone to Moler’s yard one night to steal his team of matched black horses, but that AAoler came out with a lantern to check on the horses and he (the Kid) had decided to move on. It appears that, in the end, the young outlaw was the only one involved who kept his word. At Paddock, on February 1, Dodge, Hansen, AAessenger and Coleman took their prisoner to Back Perry’s place, where delegations of Holt and Brown County Vigilantes showed up to “examine” him. * The Kid’s frank statements there implicated several prominent citizens in the unsavory goings on along the Niobrara. That his whole testimony, if given in public, would have proved damaging to certain “respectable” men of the area seems certain.
Henry Richardson, AAiddleton’s father-in-law, was there and extremely uneasy. He and his son Tom had spent the winter helping lawmen recover stolen horses and arrest the thieves. When the Kid told Richarcson bluntly, “You are as big a horsethief as I am,” Richardson came near shooting his accuser right there, but AAike Coleman relieved him of his gun before he could fire it. According to Saunders, the majority of the Holt County delegation favored turning Wade over to the Brown County bunch that night. Whereupon Coleman and Hugh O’Neill, fearing the Kid would never reach O’Neill alive unless help arrived, rode at once to the county seat and swore out a legal warrant for his arrest. Turning the warrant over to Holt County Sheriff Ed Hershiser, they sent him post haste to bring the Kid in. The sheriff trailed the prisoner and his captors to Long Pine and took custody. Then, accompanied by two Brown County vigilantes, a “Capt.” Burnham and a Mr. AAatson, they rode on to Bassett, thirty miles west of Atkinson, to spend the night of February 6. The hotel was full, so they made themselves as comfortable as possible in the barroom. Some time that night a band of masked men stormed the room and took the Kid from the sheriff at gun point. The rising sun shone upon the young man’s frozen body, swinging from a railroad whistle post just east of town. Katie Sullivan of O’Neill was working for a Bassett family that winter. When she got up that morning and looked out of her bedroom window she saw the body hanging there, a sight she would never forget.
When Sheriff Hershiser got back to O’Neill and told his story, he said the Kid’s last words to the hangmen were, “I have been feeding you fellows, and now you are going to hang me.” The impression gained from most of the old accounts of Kid Wade’s life and death is that some of his co-workers, knowing they had more to lose than their lives, had decided he must not live to go to court. That spring, as the ground thawed and the snow melt ran off, the body of John Wade was found on the bank of the Big Sandy. A single bullet hole in a vital spot showed the manner of his demise. Romaine Saunders says the township gave the body a decent burial, but that neither his grave nor that of his son were ever marked. The old Wade place is now owned by the Harry AAitchell family and is a popular resort for campers and sightseers. Picnics are held in the lovely hidden canyon.
Stone barn on the old Berry place where Kid Wade is said to have stayed overnight. Another family suspected of livestock rustling was that of Ralph Hill. The family lived on Brush Creek and the oldest daughter was reputed to be Kid Wade’s sweetheart. According to Saunders the father and his son, Charlie, were finally arrested for cattle stealing by James Gregg and a Mr. Bigler, who carried a warrant issued by Justice of the Peace Putnam. Gregg and Bigler secured the prisoners and were on the way back to the Justice’s place for arraignment when they were suddenly surrounded by a dozen masked and heavily armed men. The vigilantes took posession of the prisoners and ordered Bigler and Gregg to move on, which they did. * Will Spindler writes that the masked riders hung the two Hills in the Burbank Grove, one-half mile northeast of his old Holt County home, which was twenty-five miles northwest of O’Neill and only four miles south of the Ni ** obrara. He adds that they we’re buried so well that their last resting place has never been found.
Still another suspected horsethief was Al Heilman who, at one time, kept some of his horses in a stable built onto the east end of the old Rock Falls mill. Al, a race horse fancier, owned quite a string of fast horses which he raced at county fairs and local matched races. He was supposed to have had a hideout in the Eagle Creek canyons, where he ran a ranch and dealt in stolen stock. He was reported to be a crony of Doc AAiddleton, Kid Wade and others of that fraternity.
The following story is told by Albert Sterns, whose father, Bill, a neighbor to the Heilmans, was one day asked by Mrs. Heilman to ride to O’Neill for the doctor. One of her children was very sick and her husband was not at home, she said. She told Sterns to take one of their horses and, reluctantly, he did so and set out on the long ride. Heilman’s horses, always kept in topnotch condition, were noted for their speed, and Sterns also noted that the animal had been well trained— it would not travel in the trail where its hoofs would leave tracks.
Sterns’ reluctance to ride the Heilman horse is understandable. In those days a man was usually known by the horse he rode, even before he was near enought to the beholder to be recognized by the naked eye. Had Heilman or one of his friends seen an unknown rider streaking down the road on a Heilman horse he might have shot first and investigated later. * Another account claims the “examination” took place at Long Pine, eastward in Brown County. *Holt County Scrapbook No. 1 at the State Historical Society, Lincoln, p. 67. **Rim of the Sandhills, p. 237. 60 For this reason honest settlers preferred to own conspicuous teams or saddle horese, while most questionable characters used horses not easily recognized from a distance. Since Heilman was semi-respectable, at least in the racing field, and owned very good horses, his were well- known.
The most tragic of all the Holt County vigilante episodes was probably that of the death of Barrett Scott; a tale that, even today, eighty years later, is mentioned reluctantly by Holt Countians. Barrett Scott, a fine looking man of imposing appearance, was a natural leader. He owned a good farm some twenty miles northeast of O’Neill between Red Bird and Louse Creeks. Near his home a little town grew up and both the town and its township were named in his honor. In 1889 Scott was elected county treasurer, along with a solid slate of other Republican candidates for county offices. He served his first term and was elected to a second. In 1893 hard times fell upon the county. The terrible drouth of ’93 and ’94, coupled with severe financial troubles in the east, made for a tight money situation everywhere. For these reasons some of the county’s foremost citizens, in danger of losing their farms and businesses, appealed to Scott to loan them county funds until times should get better. And Scott, “impetuous and generous,” did so.* Romaine Saunders, an admirer and close friend of Scott’s, wrote that the county board was “composed of men lacking both the experience and the ability to supervise the affairs of the county, but richly endowed with factional bias. Had there been more watchfulness in the interests of the county and less blind hatred of Republicans, Scott and his bondsmen would have made good the $32,000 a jury in district court on September 15, 1894, found to be the sum that Scott was short.” Other accounts set the shortage at sums ranging all the way to $100,000.
The John Boshart family history states that John Hopkins, a well educated Democrat farmer, was retained to check into the shortage in the county funds. He could find no accounting for the tax monies and Scott was arrested, then released oh bail. Arthur Mullen* writes that the Director of the County Board set John McHugh of the O’Neill bank to investigating the matter and that, after the Board impeached him in July, Scott absconded on July 18, “leaving a shortage of $87,000, and Romaine Saunders, O’Neill Frontier, Diamond Jubilee Edition, June, 1949. Arthur Mullen, Western Democrat, Wilfred Funk, Inc., New York 1940, p. 68. Ibid. p. 69 exactly twenty-two cents in the treasury.” On July 19 the County Board sat in session to determine what to do. Scott had offered to turn over securities to the amount of $50,000 and another man, Joe Bartley, had agreed to add $5,000 in cash. Attorney Harrington had advised the Board against the offer, on the grounds that the securities were “shakey” and consisted largely of “promises to pay,” made by some of the individuals who had “borrowed” the county funds in the first place.
When the board learned that Scott had gone to Mexico it offered a $2,500 reward for his return and sent a Holt Countian, Frank Campbell, to the border to negotiate his capture. Campbell was successful and, according to Mullen, brought Scott back to O’Neill in October. “The town and half the countryside were lined up on the sidewalks to see them as, with an armed man on either side of him, Scott was taken up the middle of the street from the train to the jail.”** Mullen’s story implicates the state treasurer and other officials all the way up to the Supreme Court in the embezzlement, and states that the Court let Scott out on a supersedeas bond. M..D. Long* writes that, after his return from Mexico, Scott was granted a change of venue to Antelope County and there was found guilty as charged and sentenced to five years in the penitentiary. And that he appealed to the Supreme Court at Lincoln and was admitted to bail, pending the disposition of his case in that court. He had many friends who willingly went his bail. Some said he was using his bail bond freedom to collect the money owed the county. Saunders wrote, “The court record is hazy as to the legal steps taken against Scott and his bondsmen. In one court action the judge ruled that his bond had been invalidated because the County Board authorized additional signatures, and entered judgment against Scott in the sum of $76,000.** Scott remained in O’Neill, awaiting trial. It was rumored that he was trying to collect the borrowed money and that he had told his friends he would reveal their names if they didn’t pay up by the trial date. If 1894 had been a normal year Barrett Scott would likely have collected the money, but it hadn’t rained in Holt County since April 15 and there was no money in the dried out country, and no way of getting any.
On the last day of that tragic year of ’94 Scott, his wife, his daughter Fannie and a friend (or niece) Etta, or Ella, McWhorter, drove to Scottville to spend the day. They made the drive in a carriage, with Henry Schmidt as driver. On the return trip at the end of the afternoon they had reached a point known as Parker, about twelve miles northeast of O’Neill, when a group of masked men came out from behind a sod house near the road. The band either immediately fired and killed the Scott team, or else the driver tried to flee and the horses were killed to stop the carriage. One of the bullets struck a steel stay in Miss McWhorter’s corset, injuring her slightly. Another bullet struck Scott who, also slightly injured, was dragged from the carriage, bound and loaded into a wagon which drove off toward the Niobrara.
Another of the masked men took the women and the little girl into another rig and drove about the countryside for a long while. He finally stopped in sight of the lights in the Frank Brittell home near Antelope Slough and told his passengers to get out and go to the house. They did, and Frank immediately hitched up his mules and took them to O’Neill, to the home of J. H. Meredith, where Mrs. Scott told her fearful story. Mr. Meredith then left the house to gather a search party and try to find and rescue the county treasurer. Nineteen days later the search ended.
And during all that time fear, tension, hatred, hope, the whole gamut of emotions, held the county in their grip. When the sad and sordid story was all told, or as much of it as would ever be known, it seemed to add up to the following details: The Vigilantes had taken Scott to the Whiting bridge and there hung him from the railing. When he was dead someone cut the rope, letting the body fall into the river. It was the remainder of the rope, still tied to the railing, that led the searchers to that portion of the river.
Search parties relayed each other continually until the evening of January 19, when, quite suddenly, the river gave up its dead. The noose and severed rope were still around the broken neck, the hands and feet still bound. Romaine Saunders wrote that Bill Hudson of Mineola was kneeling on the ice, fishing through an opening above an eddy with a long, hooked rod. “The hook caught something and he gave a hard jerk. The body came up right in his face. I saw him two days later and he looked like he had been through a sick spell.” *M. D. Long, A Condensed History of Northwest Nebraska, O’Neill, 12-6-01. Saunders, O’Neill Frontier, Diamond Jubilee, June, 1949. 61 Barrett Scott Charles Harding of the Saratoga community, a deputy under Sheriff Hamilton,* was with the relay of men searching the river at that time. He said several of them had paused to eat some sardines from a can when the body surfaced, about 120 feet below the bridge and ten feet from the north bank, “and for the only time in my life I lost my appetite— and kicked the can of fish into the water.” Returning to Saunders again,* we read, “The body of Barrett Scott was laid out on the ice while brave men sat down on the bank of the river and wept.” Many years later Margaret McGreevy recalled that she was at a children’s party in O’Neill on January 20 when the cavalcade came by from the north, bringing Barrett Scott’s body home. Tena Gatz, another twelve-year-old, said the body was taken to Biglin’s mortuary and “school was let out so the children could go see him. The thick rope was around his neck. We cried.” Elsie May Mills remembered Mrs. Scott as a “refined lady with pretty black eyes. She always wore gold earrings.” Since the body was found on the Boyd County side of the Niobrara, a coroners jury was selected from that county. Indictments were brought against George D. Mulihan, Mose Elliot, Mert Roy “and others.” Drusilla (Boshart) Reichert’s account of the affair also names a Dave Harries as one of the indicted men. All, she said, were Democrats. Mulihan was the only one brought to trial, and so high was the “feeling” in the region that the attorneys and other officers of the court went armed with six-shooters during the proceeding. The trial was held in Butte, and one midnight a Sam Nelson came with a team and buggy to take Drusilla’s father, John Boshart, there in case he should be needed as a witness the next day. Drusilla gives us the only account we have of the trial. Miss McWhorter, she writes, said she had scratched one of the men. Mulihan had a scratch on his hand but said a cat did it. Hank McEvony** also had a hand wrapped up at the trial. But they could prove nothing and Mulihan and the others were freed. . . I always thought someone on their deathbed might enlighten us, but now all of the men old enough to have been in that dreadful mess must have passed on. I leave it to the readers to decide who would have benefited most by Scott’s death— the Democrats for revenge or his Republican ‘friends’ to whom he loaned the money, with no record of who they were.” A feature obviously written by a sorrowing and dismayed citizen of O’Neill and published in the Omaha Evening Bee on January 3, just as the search for Barrett Scott’s body was getting into high gear, further depicts the attitude of most of the county’s residents at the time.
“New Year’s Day was perhaps the saddist ever witnessed in O’Neill. ‘I wish you a Happy New year’ was rarely heard, and even then it lacked the proper ring. The minds of our people dwelt tearfully upon a lonesome home, a widowed lady and an orphan child, made so by man’s inhumanity. It seems as though a funeral pall had been thrown over our little city and silenced the merry greetings of the aged and the joyous shout of youth. None could be found hearty enough to justify the atrocious deed and only regrets were heard. Even the breeze seemed laden with sadness.
“Although the remains of poor Scotty probably lie buried in some yawning canyon, or sunk in the dismal and treacherous depths of the Niobrara, the sadness shown in O’Neill was an honor and worthy tribute to a man who was more sinned against than sinning, and a rebuke to his murderers. The dead and the deep are always giving up their secrets and we earnestly hope that an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth may be exacted before the friends of justice and fair play allow this crime to become a reminiscence to be related upon winter evenings when the ciaks glow upon the hearth. “To Scotty we say ‘rest.’ To his murderers we say that we hope there is something in the theory of spiritualism, that Scotty may be able to materialize before them at the most uncanny times and in the most uncanny places, and laying bare before them his gaping wounds, remind them of the heart-rending appeals of his little child for mercy, and then haunt them to perdition. This is what we think of mob law as applied in this instance.” And, finally, we come to the Vigilantes, those mysterious masked men who played such frightening parts in the lives of pioneer Holt County people. M. D. Long writes that this “secret, weird and ubiquitous organization,” known as the Vigilance Committee, became active about 1884 and remained the scourge and terror of the area until 1896. He states that no less than twenty-five men met their deaths from violent causes in Holt County during this period. The following excerpt is taken from the Holt County Banner, January 5, 1884: “The platform of the vigilanters is substantially this: Any person on whom suspicion is thrown, they require that he prove himself innocent; if he does not he is turned over to the authorities to be dealt with according to law. After ‘pulling’ parties on whom suspicion is thrown they are usually taken to the ‘pen’ on the Niobrara River near Paddock. The pen has two rooms and into one of these the men are taken and examined by a committee of regulators and if sufficient evidence is deduced to justify, they are taken before a justice, who occupies the other room, and have an examination and are usually bound over. If no evidence is found to justify holding a person, he is dismissed without further ceremony. The vigilanters evidently have no intention of persecuting an innocent party— and if there is anything out of place in this we fail to see it.” However, before long it was said that almost no one ever left the “pen” alive, once he was unlucky enough to be taken there. This was no doubt the place where Kid Wade underwent his “examination,” and in several accounts of the affair writers expressed surprise that he came away alive.
Although the “blood and carnage” began with the shooting of Sheriff Barnard J. Kearns in March of 1881 and virtually ended with the hanging of Barrett Scott in 1894, the first known execution by masked men was that of John Wade, the Kid’s father, in the fall of ’84. The Kid himself was next, and the Hills were two of their victims.
References to the activities of the vigilantes are vague in the county today. Will Spindler states that the old Nollkamper Mill was one of their meeting places but that the miller himself managed to stay neutral, uninvolved with either the rustlers or Hamilton took office in January, 1894. Ibid.
McEvony was sheriff from January 1, 1888 to January 1, 1894. 62 the vigilantes. The “Stansberry Place” was said to be another meeting house. This was on Section 32, range 13, in Saratoga township and was homesteaded in 1885 or ’86 by Stans-berry. While no one admits to being a member of the vigilantes, some explain why they were not. Fred Tesch started out one evening to attend a meeting. He stopped on the way to pick up a neighbor, a Mr. Steabner and, in turning his rig around to leave, the front wheel struck a stump and threw Steabner out, knocking him unconscious. So they didn’t make it to the meeting. Solomon Gallentine may have favored the masked riders but his wife, Martha, did not. When a party of men came to the house to take him to a meeting she met them at the door with a gun, and they quickly departed for other destinations.
Most historians agree that the group was made up of solid citizens and was needed at first. Certainly the thieves were skimming off all the livestock profits in the region and the settlers were desperate. The few lawmen of the area, brave and able though they were, simply could not cope with the many outlaws and the vast and rugged country in which they operated. Then too, there is something about a bevy of mysterious masked riders that intimidates a wrongdoer, making him fearful that the neighbor he talks to by day may be one of the avengers by night. The very existance of the vigilantes may have kept some men honest, and persuaded others to abandon the outlaw trail.
One of the tragedies of vigilante law was that innocent men sometimes lost their lives in the night forays, too many of which turned out to be “grudge” killings. The following is an instance of what could happen under vigilante rule. Young Leon Tompkins was sent to Norfolk to pick up a team of horses his father had purchased. On the way home, in the Tilden area, he was stopped and warned that the vigilantes, believing that one of his team was stolen, were after him. He was then directed through s shortcut that would get him home, to Inman, by ten o’clock. Arriving there, he put the team in the livery stable and was eating “taters and eggs” at his mother’s table when the “Vigs” rode up. They examined the team, decided that neither horse was the one they were looking for, and rode off into the night. “In those days it was more serious to steal a horse than to kill a man,” and this had been a close call for young Tompkins.* “Harvey Tompkins, Footprints on the Prairie, Inman, Saunders, Diamond Jubilee Edition, June, 1949. Taken from the Ewing Item of February 26, 1890. Timothy Hanley, returning from Eagle Creek to his home in the Michigan settlement above O’Neill with a load of wood, stopped to water his team at a homestead. A little boy came out of the house and said, “Mister, do you know the Vigs are going to hang —————- tonight?” Hanley knew the man mentioned but thought the question was the imagination of a child. In O’Neill, a week later, he heard that the man had been hung. He was sorry, then, that he had not warned the victim.
The vigilantes usually gave an intended victim a warning by mailing him a piece of rope in an envelope, meaning he had only so much time to be “long-gone.” If he didn’t heed the warning the nearest cottonwood tree was his fate. A man named Elliot (Mose?) was said to be the head of the vigilantes. But even where justice was served and the thieves, as Charles Martens of Emmet wrote, “were caught redhanded, it was a cruel justice and the whole thing would be ‘hush-hush,’ but later on we kids would hear little hints of what had taken place.” An affair that took place ahead of the dates listed by Long doubtless predated the Vigilantes and may have helped lead to the inauguration of that outfit. It began when Al Heilman took a timber claim in Saratroga precinct. Al was then living near his father-in-law, Orlando Dutcher, and his three sons, Al and the Dutchers were under suspicion, anyway, of various unlawful activities. Presently one Perry Dewey contested Al’s timber claim and, to help prove his case, he engaged B. S. Gillespie to survey the land for him. Gillespie lived near the feuding parties and did a good deal of surveying in the county. After he had surveyed the contested property Heilman accused him of having put Dewey up to contesting the claim in the first place. On the night of November 1, 1880, a mob came to the Gillespie home and tried to lure B. S. outside by representing themselves as land seekers. When he refused to come out they broke in a panel of his door and fired into the house, badly frightening Mrs. Gillespie, his sick wife, and their small children. Gillespie took down an old double-barreled shotgun and aimed it through the broken door. The first barrel failed to fire, the second fired and a man named Stephen Keys was killed. Gillespie then crawled through a back window and fled. The next day Gillespie gave himself up to the law in Keya Paha County and was quickly discharged as having fired in self defense. Shortly afterward Nebraska.
Heilman, the Dutchers and another man were arrested and charged with attacking the Gillespie home. Heilman was put under $500 bond and ordered to stand trial in district court. The others were discharged. Other incidents followed, for “they were still seeing red out there in the gulches.” Eventually Heilman and the Dutchers were brought before Judge William Maloy. All but Heilman were indicted by a jury, convicted of unlawful assembly and fined one hundred dollars each.
Heilman was later arrested again on Eagle Creek and brought before Judge Maloy a second time, with H. M. Uttley of O’Neill as one of his attorneys. He was bound over for trial on a charge of grand larceny and bail set at three hundred dollars. “Whatever became of the case, wrote Saunders in conclusion, “(I) did not think it worthwhile to look up. Al went into the race horse business, at which he was a howling success, and Mr. Gillespie became County Judge and a U. S. land office official. The Dutchers and the others faded away.”* As time went on the Vigilante Committee began to fall into almost as much disfavor as the outlaws they had helped eradicate. It was believed by many that some of the Committee’s members were outlaws themselves, operating under cover of the vigilante name, and instances such as the following did not help their standing in the community.
On Saturday, January 25, 1890, William H. Willis, of Gresham, Nebraska, rode north from Ewing with one Charles Brady to the latter’s place. He stayed over Sunday with him and started back to Ewing on Monday morning. Shortly after he left Brady missed his pocketbook containing quite a sum of money. He at once suspected Willis. Organizing a crowd of neighbors, he started in pursuit. Willis was overtaken about three miles down the road and searched, but no stolen property was found. The mob then tried by threats and violence to extract a confession from Willis. A revolver was thrust in his face, a rope thrown around his neck, and he was struck, pounded and otherwise mistreated. After searching him twice, all the while threatening to kill him, they took him to a house and put him under guard. Brady then went home to search again for his wallet. He soon returned to report that he had found the missing article in his boot. The victim was released.* So common, indeed, was mob psychology in those years that, a year or two after Scott’s hanging, a man 63 at the hotel and there was already bad blood between them. When Reed and other cowboys came to town and amused themselves by shooting down clothes lines where hung family washings, Kearns ordered them to cease and desist. The meeting in the hotel followed, where Reed drew his revolver and Kearns struck him over the head with his (Kearns’) gun and Reed shot the sheriff with his.* Another story has two cowboys in a saloon holding Kearns while Reed “pumped lead into him.”** Reed fled on horseback. A posse of seven or eight men pursued and captured him. The cowboy secured a change of venue and was tried in Oakdale in Antelope County. The jury found the shooting was done in self defense and acquitted him.
Other murders startled and briefly upset the county from time to time. There was a Captain Dodge, his wife and son, who lived on a quarter section on the south side of the Niobrara and east of the present Parshall bridge. The quarter was a mile long by a quarter mile wide and Dodge attempted to widen his holding by homesteading a sizable island in the river (now known as Cedar Island). Another man contested his claim and the conflict ended in a shooting. The captain was the victim and the other man stood trial in Butte. Michael and James Harrington of O’Neill cleared him with a plea of self defense and Captain Dodge filled the first grave in the new Butte cemetery.
The Boyd county seat fight between the towns of Spencer and Butte was going on at the time, leading to the charge that Butte would do anything for publicity— even to murdering a man to start a cemetery. The widow and her son left the country and the long strip of land was purchased by Adolph Reiser, whose ranch adjoined it. Years later, long after all this was history, another murder took place on the Reiser ranch near the spot where Captain Dodge was killed. This one happened in 1920. Abner Hotaling, who was fishing above the Parshall bridge, found the body. It proved to be that of John Mize, an elderly man who had started south from Platte, South Dakota, with a team and covered wagon. With him were a Mr. and Mrs. Dehart, who had murdered Mize at the Niobrara for his team and wagon, then gone on to Burwell where they were apprehended and confessed to the crime.
Another early day murder on the Niobrara may have had to do with the Lincoln, 1882.
named Graves was waylaid by masked riders at the spot where the ex-treasurer was abducted and put through a severe grilling, then released and told to get out of the country. It was said that Graves knew a good deal about the Scott affair and was gathering evidence to bring the hangmen to justice.
A month later twenty-one-year-old Joe Ryan, O’Neill rancher and stock buyer, in company with Charlie Bigler, another ranchman, was held up by three masked men near the Ray post office. Ryan and Bigler were unarmed. The three vigilantes, and several more masked men who rode out of the gulches to join them, were all armed. After binding and blindfolding their captives, the vigilantes adjusted nooses about their necks and then began an intensive questioning of Ryan about his cattle buying activities in the north country during the past year.
At length the masked riders removed the ropes from the ranchmen’s necks, put Ryan’s bridle reins in his hand and told him to wait twenty minutes, then take off his blindfold and “come here no more to buy cattle.” Ryan did as he was told, then untied Bigler and the two rode back to O’Neill. It was believed they had been so treated because Ryan paid higher prices for livestock than other buyers in the area, and this was the vigilantes way of eliminating competition. No one was ever punished for the holdup, which was thought to be responsible for young Ryan’s premature death a few years later. At any rate respectable men rode no more with the masked riders and, after the Barrett Scott affair, the Committee seemed to have disbanded. Since it had always been a shadowy outfit, operating in the dark, it was hard to tell, except that there were no more executions by unknown parties. It is possible, too, that some of the earlier murders had been private matters, laid at the door of the vigilantes.
The sheriffs of the region played an important, and a difficult and dangerous, part in the outlaw-vigilante history of the frontier. One of Holt County’s early sheriffs was Bernard Kearns, who was killed on March 28, 1881, in O’Neill at the old Arcada hotel by a cowboy named William Reed. Although there are differing accounts of the shooting, all agree on one point— that both parties had been drinking too much. One account states that the sheriff and Reed were rivals for the affections of a waitress * Saunders.
Arthur Mullen, p. 26.
Anderson, Pilgrimage to the Prairie. **History of Nebraska, National Publishing Company Anderson, Pilgrimage to the Prairie. island over which Captain Dodge lost his life. At any rate it concerned an island in the river where grew a good deal of timber. It had become the custom for settlers who had no timber to locate this commodity on an island in the river near a good ford, and to drive there and cut wood to haul home. A man named Carr decided to settle on the island, after which he tried to stop all wood cutting there. “Finally he got into a fight with a man who went there after wood and the man split his head open with an axe. That eliminated Carr.”* On January 24, 1881, C.S. Blanchard shot and killed a young Texan named Marion Henry Lasater in the post office at Keya Paha. Blanchard had a preliminary hearing before E.H. Doty, a Justice of the Peace, but sufficient evidence to bind Mr. Blanchard over for trial was not developed and Mr. Doty decided the shooting to have been done in self defense.** Mrs. Merrill Anderson, in her Pilgrimage to the Prairie, also tells of a man named Blanchard who put up a log store south of the Niobrara “near what is known as the Axtell place,” which was probably at or near old Grand Rapids. This was likely about 1884 or ’85.
A cowboy named Little, who came up from Texas with a cattle herd, got so badly in debt at the store that Blanchard asked for security. Little left his gun and holster. A little later he was celebrating with some friends on the north side of the river and) after a few drinks, decided Blanchard had no right to keep his gun. He told the boys he was going over to get it.
There was a toll bridge across the river at that time, tended by a man named Halsted who was very religious and did not believe in dancing. Instead of paying the toll, Little pulled his rifle from its scabbard and began plugging bullets at Halsted’s feet. Driving the tenderfoot to the middle of the bridge, he made him dance a jig- Tiring of that sport, he went on across the bridge and up the hill toward the store, taking an occasional pot shot at it as he went. None of the bullets happened to hit a window and they could not penetrate the logs, so Blanchard paid no attention. But when Little walked in with his rifle and told the store keeper he had come to kill him, Blanchard pulled Little’s gun from beneath the counter and shot him in the throat. The rifle proved to be empty— Little had fired one to many bullets on the way.* Most of Holt County’s killings were 64 done with a gun or a rope, but in 1905 one murder was done with a knife when Martin Irwin stabbed Bob Carrins during a quarrel near Badger Mills. Young Carrins, of good reputation, had lived in Holt County for fifteen years. Irwin, of Boyd County, was a middleaged man with a family. Three neighbors watched the fight, which began with fists, and did not know a knife had been used until Carrins fell.
Next in order, in connection with the county’s outlaws and vigilantes, would be the law officers who dealt with both. Barney Kearns, who met his death in front of a blazing gun in O’Neill more than ninety years ago, was undoubtedly a brave man. So was Ed Hershiser, who took office January 1, 1884. Big Ed seldom wore a coat, even in subzero weather, but kept warm in buckskin underwear and a blue flannel shirt. He was known as a “one man police force,” and held a tight rein over the lawless element of the county. On one occasion a “booted, belted, gun- toting broncho tamer” was abusing an exhausted team of ponies. When he drew his gun and was about to use it on the horses, the sheriff stepped up, took the gun away and made the broncho tamer unhitch and rest the ponies. Outside of his connection with the arrest and attempted delivery of Kid Wade to the court in O’Neill, not too much is known of Sheriff Her-shiser. The next sheriff of note was Peter Duffy. Pete was born in Genessee, Wisconsin, March 1, 1871, and his mother died at his birth. His father, Frank, came to Holt County in 1885 and settled on a homestead northwest of Phoenix in Saratoga township. Fifteen-year-old Peter joined him there a year later, and Miss Catherine Duffy, his father’s sister, made her home with them. In his youth Pete carried mail on horseback from O’Neill to the Saratoga post office, located in his own home. His route included the Catalpa post office, in the home of Benjamin Stockwell, and perhaps other little country post offices as well.
From a boy up, Peter loved horses. Early in life he began raising race horses and over the years many a fine one came from his ranch. His father died in 1898 and was buried in Calvary cemetery in O’Neill. Pete, who never married, lived on with his aunt on the ranch, carrying the mail and looking after his racers. Many family histories of Holt County mention Pete Duffy with admiration and affection. When his aunt became an invalid in her latter years, Pete moved her into Atkinson and cared for her until she died in 1911.
In 1916, when he was forty-five years old, Duffy was elected sheriff, an office he held until his death nearly twenty-eight years later. His popularity grew with the passing of the years. He knew practically everyone in the county and all were his friends. Pete himself was a friend in the truest sense of the word. He loved people and was always helping someone. As his years in office piled up, other candidates despaired of ever defeating him and, at the time of his last election, his name was listed on both the Democratic and Republican ballots. One unusual fact about Pete Duffy was that he never carried a gun. Another was that he solved every crime committed in his county while he was in office. At his death in June, 1944, he left not one unsolved case. His funeral service was attended by one of the largest crowds in the history of St. Patrick’s church and included colleagues from the State Sheriff’s office and from all surrounding counties. Probably the most outstanding crime committed during Duffy’s long term of office was the murder of Clarence Coy. Clarence and a companion, Earl Treppish, had been in camp on Otter Creek in Cleveland precinct for some weeks, engaged in trapping furs. On March 29, 1932, Coy had made some purchases in a store in Stuart. The merchant who waited on him remembered later that he had had a large roll of bills that day. The next morning Herbert Sweet, son of the man on whose land the trappers were camping, stopped at the camp. Treppish was packing up the outfit and loading it into Coy’s car. When asked where Coy was, Treppish said he was down the creek, taking up some traps. Neither man was seen again for some time.
In May someone found Coy’s bedding in Otter Creek. Sheriff Duffy was called and a search was instituted. When Duffy learned that Coy had met Treppish on a ranch in Wyoming, where both had been working, he alerted the authorities of that state to be on the lookout for the man and the car. Meanwhile, men in Holt County were searching for Coy’s remains. Early in July Treppish was picked up in Sheridan, Wyoming. He still had Coy’s car, his guns and some of his traps.
Duffy then redoubled his efforts to find Coy’s body, for he was convinced by then that the trapper had been murdered by his partner. On a Sunday a week later some seventy men from the Stuart, Dustin and Cleveland area, led by the determined sheriff, found a human skeleton in the vicinity of the camp site. Dr. Wilson of Stuart identified the bones as Coy’s. A few years earlier the doctor had treated an infection in Coy’s arm, resulting from a gunshot wound that had necessitated amputation of a part of the limb.
Treppish was brought over from the Brown County jail at Ainsworth and held for trial in O’Neill. Although he maintained that Coy had loaned him the car and outfit, and that he had last seen him on the morning he left him at the site of their broken camp, R.R. Dickson sentenced him to life for the second degree murder of Clarence Coy.
Leo Tom jack was sheriff in 1955 when another murder came to light with the discovery of a woman’s body beside a little used sandhill trail about thirteen miles north of Stuart. The partly decomposed remains were identified as those of Elizabeth (Tim-mermans) Michaelson, about forty- five and a resident of Stuart for most of her life. She had been struck on the head with a blunt instrument, then strangled with a towel.
Sheriff Tomjack at once organized a search for Moran “Sarge” Pettijohn, a forty-one-year-old World War II veteran who was known to have been the dead woman’s companion and who had last been seen with her on Monday evening, July 11, in her car near where the body was found four days later.
Pettijohn, too, had grown up in Holt County. He had, however, been confined for a time in the State Hospital in Norfolk and had been released only a month before the murder. Fearful that he might strike again, either to protect himself or to obtain food, many a north Holt County home was locked for the first time on Friday and Saturday nights and some families even went into town on those nights.
The search centered in the rugged country along the Big Sandy, around the abandoned buildings of the old Lemon ranch nineteen miles north of Atkinson, after Mr. and Mrs. Charles Shall saw Mrs. Michaelson’s car in one of the old barns as they drove by on their way to Atkinson. The case was closed on Sunday afternoon when nineteen year old posse member, George Tomlinson of O’Neill, found Pettijohn’s body near the old buildings. After killing the woman he had driven on twelve or fifteen miles, hidden the car and shot himself. Back in the fall of 1901 the O’Neill Frontier had entered into the exposure of a corrupt Holt County land deal in which the sheriff was on the wrong side, a party in a deal to defraud numerous land owners. It came about after this wise: Hundreds of homesteaders had 65 managed a bare existence on their quarter sections of land for five years or so, the time required before they could “prove up” and obtain a patent or title to the land. Most were in debt by then. With their deeds in hand, the majority promptly visited the representative of a Joan company, whose offices flourished in every little town, to mortgage the homestead. Most used the cash to pay off the debts and, if there was any left, buy needed work stock and machinery. Even-with- the-board again, they hoped to hang on and prosper. Some did, many didn’t.
When the notes came due and there was no money to pay them due to crop failures, mismanagement or other causes, the loan companies foreclosed; then sold the lands to eatern investors, often factory workers, seamstresses, widows with small inheritances to invest and other individuals attracted by the alluring advertisements of the fortunes to be made in western lands. The whole system was wrong and, in due time, the loan companies also failed. By 1901, according to the Frontier, only one such company operating in Holt County was still solvent.
The absentee owners of the land were expected, of course, to keep up the taxes. Although many managed to do so, at all times there were hundreds who were one or two years behind in their payments. It was this situation the “Land Pirates” of O’Neill were exploiting around the turn of the century. Suspicious editor Dennis Cronan sent his girl Friday, Miss Kittie Bright, to the sheriff’s office in early October to copy the foreclosure sales records to see what they might reveal. The sheriff was out and the office girl readily brought out the book. Miss Bright copied all afternoon, then went back the next morning to finish. Sheriff John Stewart met her and told her the book was “private” and she could not see if any more. When told of this the editor quickly convinced the sheriff that he had best let the public record be inspected upon request.
The story revealed by the records rated the following front page headline on October 10: INVESTIGATIONS IN SHERIFF’S OFFICE DIVULGE MORE CORRUPTION— SALE BOOK IS “PRIVATE.” The names of the “pirates,” in addition to that of the sheriff, were M.H. McCarthy and J.S. Harrington. According to state law the land could legally be sold for the amount of the faxes due, plus the “costs” of appraisal and sale. The costs were fixed by law, or supposedly so. The sheriff was to call upon two disinterested freeholders (taxpayers) to appraise the property at its real value in money. Each appraiser was to receive fifty cents a day for his services. Customarily the appraisers were land owners who lived near the land to be appraised, and the sheriff, the third appraiser, was entitled to five cents per mile actually traveled in making the approisment.
It was the violation of these provisions, as much as the patent unfairness of the sale of the lands in order to collect the paltry delinquent faxes, that made the editor see red. For the records in the sale book showed that the sheriff was charging $3 to $12 for each approisment, plus mileage to and from O’Neill for himself and for Harrington and McCarthy. Furthermore, at the following “public” sales the “disinterested” appraiser, McCarthy, was buying the land at the very low values set by the trio.
Editor Cronin noted that this question had been “passed upon by the supreme court of the state in an action brought by the Phoenix Insurance Co., against ex-sheriff H.C. McEvony and his bondsmen.” In that case McEvony had charged ap-praisers’ fees of $3 in each of ten cases. The insurance company had obtained judgement against McEvony for the illegal fees collected and a penalty of $50 in each case, as provided by law.
The editor implied that, had the land owners been rich insurance companies, owing large sums in delinquent taxes, the fraud would not have seemed so flagrant. But when ninety per cent of the owners were poor individuals, owing from $4.90 to $20.10* in back taxes, and when the value of the land (160 acres in most cases) was set at $80 to $100 by the “disinterested appraisers, one of whom buys it for that amount,” the editor was appalled. He wrote, “We have just learned from the records that they have been at their damnable work of taking peoples’ (poor women and helpless girls) property from them without their knowledge or consent as late as Monday of this week.” “It can readily be seen,” charged the editor, “from the number of cases filed on land during Sheriff Stewart’s term that the illegal fees collected by him must run into the thousands. We venture the prediction at this time, now that the corruption has been exposed, it will not be long before Sheriff Stewart and his bondsmen will have some cases to defend and judgments and penalities to pay.” Concluded Editor Cronin, “In the light of this stupendous corruption, don’t you think, Mr. Taxpayer, that this is a very opportune time for a change?” In concluding this chapter on Holt County’s outlaws, vigilantes and law-men, it is interesting to note that the three most famous of them all, Doc Middleton, Kid Wade and Barrett Scott, while outside the pale of the law, were, along with Sheriff Peter Duffy, among the region’s most popular and best liked men of their times. *Tax list published in the Frontier, October 10, 1901, p. 1
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