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The Killing of Willie Nickell

Post author By searim
Post date December 31, 2021
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_{This post is a part of our series on Tom Horn – full collection of links at the bottom of the page.}

“I Think the Intention Was To Get Me In Place Of The Boy”
-Kels Nickell, Willie’s father.

Kels Powers Nickell, Willie’s father, had come to Wyoming in the mid-1870s, as part of General George C. Crook’s command. Crook’s force was part of the pincers movement ordered to entrap Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse in the ill?fated strategy that led to George Armstrong Custer’s defeat at the Little Big Horn on June 25, 1876.

Kels P. Nickell and Mary Mahoney Nickell, Willie’s parents (WY State Archives)

Nickell fought under Crook at the Battle of the Rosebud in southern Montana, north of Sheridan, Wyoming. Crook lost the battle, which forced his retreat to the south just days before Custer’s annihilation.

Confederate Army deserters, guerrillas, had murdered Kels’ father, John DeSha Nickell, on February 7, 1863, eight years after Kels was born in 1855. He was killed within earshot of the family on their farm in Licking River, Morgan County, Kentucky. The killer was John Jackson Nickell, a second cousin, who also murdered Logan Wilson. Wilson was shot in his bed while recuperating from wounds. John Jackson Nickell was hanged for the two murders on September 2, 1864, following court martial.

Kels’ mother, Priscilla, and his five siblings remained on the farm in Kentucky for a period until the county circuit court sold it to satisfy a surety bond the elder Nickell had signed for a county elected official, whose name is unknown.

Kels remained in the area and went to work cutting timber that was assembled into rafts to be floated downstream to sawmills. He married Ann Brown of Greenup County, Kentucky, in 1873, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1877. One son was born of the marriage, John DeSha Nickell II, in 1874.

In 1875 he enlisted in the U.S. Cavalry and was assigned to the West. After the Battle of the Rosebud he was one of two men ordered by Crook to the Little Big Horn battle site before the dead were buried.

Nickell was counted as part of the force at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, in the census of 1880. After his discharge that year, he moved to Camp Carlin on the northwest outskirts of Cheyenne, and opened a blacksmith and farm machinery repair shop. He married Mary Mahoney, an Irish immigrant then 16, in Cheyenne on December 27, 1881. The daughter of a railway construction worker from Cork, Ireland, she had immigrated to the United States in 1868. Kels was ten years her senior.

The Laramie County Census of 1900, in which the Nickell family was enumerated at Iron Mountain on June 3 by Hiram G. Davidson, reflected the two parents and other members of the household:

Julia, born in 1883
Kels P., junior, born in 1884, whose occupation was a farm laborer
Willie, born in 1887, also a farm laborer
Katie, born in 1889
Alfred (Freddie), born in 1891
Beatrice (Trixie), born in 1892
Maggie, born in 1894
Ida McKinley, a daughter born in 1896
Hiram Harlan, born in 1899.

Nickell had filed a homestead claim, of which he took possession, in 1885, in the Iron Mountain region. At the same time he filed for an additional 480 acres of government land, which could be acquired for $1.25 per acre. Over the course of years, he bought, sold and filed desert claims (a common way to acquire arid government tracts by going through the motions of irrigating them) on land in the area.

Nickell was a hothead with an explosive temper, according to two of his granddaughters who are friends of the author. Testimony in the coroner’s inquest that followed Willie’s murder indicated that he was always in some kind of a “jangle.”
The homes he built both in Iron Mountain and later in Encampment, Wyoming were located close enough to streams to provide his family with running water, a rare convenience in rural country. The Iron Mountain home had water piped into it from North Chugwater Creek, which was a few feet to the south of the structure.

The Nickell home locale sat in a canyon.

Rock formation northwest of where the homestead sat (author’s photos).

The Nickell family at the homestead. Willie’s father is not in the photo.
(WY State Archives)

It is incorrect to believe that all homesteaders were barely literate and not interested in their children’s education. The Nickell and Miller families worked together to build the school located about halfway between their homes. Nickell was concerned for his children’s education, as was manifested itself in the fact that Kels Jr. was away at a private school at the time Willie was killed. The father intended to send all the children to private schools, in order to provide them with a better education than they could obtain in rural Wyoming.

The prologue that resulted first in the killing of Willie Nickell on July 18, 1901, and Kels’ wounding on August 4, was the result of feuds in which Kels had become embroiled as far back as 1890. On July 23 of that year, he tangled with John Coble and Coble’s foreman, George Cross, at the western edge of Nickell’s homestead, over some cattle. He knifed Coble, seriously wounding him in the abdomen.

Nickell continued to display symptoms of paranoia, manifesting itself in a conviction that the Iron Mountain people were out to do him in.

The feud was acutely bitter between the Nickell clan and Jim Miller’s, who lived about a mile south of Nickell. Both fathers and Willie Nickell plus Gus and Victor Miller, the two older boys, were involved to one degree or another.

Miller had established a homestead in the spring of 1883.

The Miller home as it looked ca 1900 (author’s photo)

Miller was born in Galena, Illinois in 1855. He was married to Dora Cora Lemon, who was born in 1864 in Greeley, Colorado. They had moved from Greeley, where the oldest son, Charles Augustus “Gus”, was born, in a covered wagon.

Left, Jim and Dora Miller (WY State Archives)
Gus, Eva, Victor and Maude Miller (author’s photos, courtesy Ruth Miller Ayers)

After building a log cabin where they lived the first winter, they established themselves by setting up a sawmill and raising a few head of stock. Miller sold logs and posts to neighbors below their homestead, which was at 6,800 feet elevation, such as the Jordans and Underwoods.

The 1900 census showed that the household consisted of, in addition to the parents:

Charles Augustus (Gus), born in 1882, described as a farm laborer
Victor Henry, born in 1883, also a farm laborer
Eva Jane, born in 188
Frank, born in 1887
Maude S., born in 1891
Raymond, born in 1893
Ina S., born in 1895
Robert L., born in 1897
Ronald Andrew, born in 1899
Benjamin F., Jim’s brother, who was born in 1858 and was a railroad laborer.
One daughter, Bertha May, was born in May 1889 and died of diphtheria when she was eight or nine years old, in 1898.

Left, center and right: The Miller home sat beyond the remains of this barn, at left-center.
Right, scene where a corral and outbuildings sat at the Miller ranch.
Right, a small grave at the Miller ranch.
(Author’s photos)

Nickell’s disputes, however, were not limited to the Millers alone. In Tom Horn’s words, the Reed brothers (Joseph and William, who lived about three miles northeast of Nickell) were “about the only friends he had.”

The feud with Jim Miller and his boys reached a boiling point a year before Willie was shot. As the men in the family began carrying guns, a tragedy resulted in May 1900 from the accidental discharge of a shotgun in Miller’s spring wagon. It hit 14?year?old Frank Miller in the head, killing him instantly, and severely injuring Maude. Maude carried buckshot and scars from the incident for the rest of her life….

More about Tom Horn:

Tom Horn (main page)

The Tom Horn Story (summary)

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“More Trouble Ahead”

_{This post is a part of our series on Tom Horn – full collection of links at the bottom of the page.}

Yet another man was to be executed in Brown’s Hole in 1900.

Isam Dart was born in Texas 1855 and had arrived in Colorado in the 1870s or early 1880s. By one account, he first bore the name Ned Huddleston, who may have been the slave owner who owned Huddleston/Dart’s parents. He supposedly had lost an ear in a knife fight with an Indian with whose wife Dart had become involved.

Dart rode with the Tip Gault gang, according to the same source, while it was attempting to escape with stolen horses belonging to Margaret Anderson’s outfit south of Saratoga, Wyoming in 1875. In that episode, a previous Carbon County sheriff owned a ranch through which the horse thieves were pushing the herd. An evening shootout occurred, leaving all the thieves except Dart dead around a campfire. Dart spent an uneasy night next to the unburied body of one of the luckless thieves, and then stole money belts and whatever other loot he could gather up before he escaped on foot. He was wounded by a rancher when he attempted to steal a horse, and was found by an accomplice on the prairie.

Isam Dart (Museum of Northwest Colorado, Craig, CO)

It is known that he was an accomplished horse breaker and all-around top cowhand, and superb at cutting out and roping cattle.

Dart ran for election as constable in Sweetwater County, Wyoming in 1884. The position was to be in Coyote Creek Precinct, forty-five miles southwest of Rock Springs and a few miles north of Irish Canyon, an eastern access to Brown’s Hole. Dart won the election, with eight votes.

Dart was not without sin. Three indictments for branding neat cattle in Sweetwater County were brought against him by the Territory of Wyoming in 1889, but were discharged.

Dart was acquainted with one of the robbers of the Union Pacific train at Wilcox that took place north of Rock River, Wyoming on June 2, 1899.

Dart’s involvement was described in a letter from Rock Springs to U. S. Marshal Frank Hadsell dated August 12, 1899. Little did Dart know that Tom Horn would investigate the robbery, and that Horn’s scrutiny of Brown’s Hole a year later would lead to his own death.

After the Wilcox heist, D. G. Thomas, the county and prosecuting attorney for Wyoming’s Sweetwater County, wrote Hadsell that Angust McDougal had arrived in town from roundups south of Rock Springs and Powder Springs. He said that McDougal met a man “faged [sic] and worn out by hard riding, having six horses well shod, and one of the [sic them] packed.” Thomas continued that Isam Dart was accompanying McDougal and had known the man for many years. McDougal, too, knew the man.

The man, however, apparently Dart knew better than he did McDougal and therefore felt he could confide in him. He asked Dart what he knew about “the condition” of the country. Dart replied that everyone knew the area was in an uproar over the recent robbery of the Union Pacific. The man told Dart that at the time of the robbery he was in British Columbia.

Dart persisted in talking about the robbery. The man, inquiring about McDougal, and on being told who he was, said, “don’t tell, for God’s sake don’t tell any one you saw me.” As Dart pursued the matter of the holdup the man “virtually admitted that he was one of the parties, as he remarked, ‘I had a hell of a time keeping away from the hounds… Dart, you must not give me away.’

“This man’s name was Joe Curry, Joe Southerner, alias Tom McCarty, who used to work with Joe Hazen on the range.”

D. G. Thomas continued in his letter that McDougal would be interested in apprehending the man as long as he was in the company of a deputy sheriff and was paid for his work. He added that Hadsell could actually meet the man in Thomas’ office or should send a “discreet” man to do so, and that Hadsell should keep the matter a “professional secret.”

He concluded by saying that Tom O’Day (of the botched 1897 Belle Fourche, South Dakota bank robbery) along with Charles Stevens (a.k.a. White River Charley) and John Jinks (alias John Ray) “are in this neck of the woods.”

It is not known but apparently Hadsell did not follow up on this golden opportunity, or the man may have disappeared. He may well have been George Curry, whom a number of authorities believe was one of the robbers and whom the Union Pacific wanted to apprehend. Curry ended up being killed in a shootout with a posse in Utah.

A fateful development for Isam Dart occurred two months after Matt Rash’s murder. Boldly dropping his alias, on September 26, 1900, Tom Horn signed his own name to a complaint naming Dart as a horse thief.

Dart suspected that trouble was ahead for him after Matt Rash’s murder. He holed up in a cabin with six other individuals, including Sam and George Bassett, Louis Brown, Billy Rash, Larry Curtin and Elijah B. “Longhorn” Thompson, on his ranch on remote Cold Spring Mountain in Brown’s Hole. The whole bunch had been friendly with Matt Rash, and figured their names were on the list of those to be exterminated. Some may have been right.

On the morning of October 4, 1900, Dart died of a single gunshot wound as he and the others filed out from the cabin toward a corral. In the cold and windy dawn, none sighted the killer. They bolted for the cabin where they barricaded themselves until nightfall. The next day they found two thirty-thirty caliber shells at the base of the tree that had hidden the assassin. Tom Horn was known to pack a thirty-thirty Winchester.

More about Tom Horn:

Tom Horn (main page)

The Tom Horn Story (summary)

Other

Murder: “Acting for the general welfare”

Post author By searim
Post date December 31, 2021
No Comments on Murder: “Acting for the general welfare”

_{This post is a part of our series on Tom Horn – full collection of links at the bottom of the page.}

Lodore Canyon in Brown’s Hole,
the locale of two murders attributed to Tom Horn (author’s photo)

An ominous killing in the northwestern Colorado Brown’s Hole region struck the area in mid-1900. Even more sinister was the plot that lay behind it.

Two small cattlemen, Matt Rash and Isam Dart, had been in Brown’s Hole in northwestern Colorado for a number of years. In July and October 1900 both were killed. Their previous actions, along with those of other small ranchers, had led to conflict and a conspiracy on the part of three prominent ranchers to eliminate them. Tom Horn was their agent.

The prologue of their murders was the developing cattle business as the new century began.

By the mid-1890s the cattle business in Wyoming and Colorado was changing in major ways, in large part because consumer tastes had started to gravitate toward more tender and flavorful beef from breeds other than longhorns. And while longhorns are hardy and calve easily, they do not add weight as rapidly as other breeds.

Another major reason for the changes in the range business was an influx of homesteaders. The homesteaders, “nesters” or “grangers” as they were referred to disdainfully by the big operators, had moved over a period of time into some of the best bottomlands. By doing so they decreased the availability of water for the herds of the dominant, larger ranchers, or “cattle barons,” as they became known.

One major operator was Laramie’s Ora Haley, who had enormous holdings both in northwest Colorado and southeast Wyoming and who acted to adjust to the changing conditions.

Ora Haley (American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming)

Haley, who was born in Maine in 1845, had come to Wyoming at a young age, and become a force in the Wyoming cattle business and in territorial politics. Through his foreman, Hiram “Hi” Bernard, he brought in white-faced Herefords to improve the grades of beef that markets now demanded.

Bernard, a Texan who had driven cows to northern reaches as a young man, observed that as cattle operations evolved, overheads increased. It became necessary to purchase or lease land from the railroads, to fence bull pastures in order to produce summer calves of uniform weight, and raise hay to feed stock. Bernard purchased several large hay ranches for Haley in Colorado’s Routt County area, which comprised Brown’s Hole. It was enormously profitable in spite of the depredations of locals. Bernard described the range and Haley’s success. He commented,

These ranches extended over a wide scope of the county, with both winter and summer ranges on all sides. It was open public domain, all choice range, and with few fences to hinder the movement of cattle for a distance of about 100 miles in all directions. That constituted a pretty layout, and easy to handle.

It proved to be good. Haley made over a million dollars profit on his Routt County investment in less than ten years. And in that time he never saw the range end of the business but three times. He did not know a thing about it for he was not a range man.

Haley was a smart and lucky financier. He came to Wyoming a bullwhacker, and started in the cow business at Laramie with three old dairy cows. He was smart enough to see opportunities and capitalize on them, lucky to find a sucker to handle a range cattle business better than he could, and he was wise enough to keep from meddling with the range end, where the payoff came from. That is a rare combination of human character.

Ora Haley’s Two Bar Ranch in Brown’s Hole, where Tom Horn stayed (author’s photo)

Conditions, however, were such that a range war was brewing in northwestern Colorado, just as one had raged in Wyoming.

But there was a difference in the situations between Wyoming and Colorado. In Wyoming, it was the cattlemen who had attempted to keep homesteaders and small ranchers from infringing on lands they felt were exclusively theirs. The Brown’s Hole locals, many of them homesteaders and small ranchers, instead resisted encroachment on their ranges by the cattle barons.

For a time, the Wyoming cattlemen were successful in holding off what they felt was wrongful encroachment of “their” lands. However, the winds of change were against them, and their strong-arm tactics had begun to go too far.

They had had gone as far as to resort to outright murder, lynching “Cattle Kate” Ellen Watson and Jim Averill in south-central Sweetwater County in 1889, and Tom Waggoner in northeast Weston County in 1891. The Johnson County Invasion followed in 1892 with the accompanying murders of Nick Rae and Nate Champion. Over time, however, the homesteaders and small ranchers were bound to prevail, simply because of their sheer numbers.

In northwest Colorado the small ranchers misjudged the changes that would occur in their own region, just as had the barons in Wyoming. In northwest Colorado, the big ranchers, whose holdings included both Wyoming and Colorado lands, were determined to move into the ranges not being put to use. Vacant, valuable land sat unused when they needed it.

The first mistake the Brown’s Hole locals made was failing to acquire ranches that were readily available along their eastern perimeter. Had they done so, they could have resisted further inroads by the large operators. The ranches were owned by Ben Majors and one Sainsbury, and were acquired in 1894 by Ora Haley.

The second mistake was allowing the area to become known as a “safe haven” for outlaws. Bernard remarked that “the reported presence of such characters helped to scare outside stockmen away from the gravy bowl. It was a ‘no trespassing’ sign, and it worked for a long time.” However, their sympathy for and assistance to outlaws inevitably created animosity toward them.
Bernard added that the nesters’ third mistake was “they were range hogs, for they were controlling a greater amount of range than they used or could use. ‘It must be kept that way’ – one of Brown’s Park’s ‘musts.’ Well, time changes things, and it ‘must’ be a hell of a shock to some of them to see things now,” he said. Long-term, the range would not remain open and the big outfits would move in.

Bernard’s further observations brought proof of Tom Horn’s complicity in the murders that were to come.

Late in 1899 or early in 1900, Ora Haley ordered Bernard to meet him at Haley’s Denver office. At the time Haley was fifty-five and married with grown four children living in Laramie. Three other cattlemen were present: Charles E. “Charley” Ayer, Wilfred W. “Wiff” Wilson, and John C. Coble.
Ayer, forty-three, was born in New York, married with five children and lived in the Four Mile area of Routt County, Colorado.

Wilson was born in Utah in 1857 and was living with his wife, three children and mother-in-law near Baggs in southern Carbon County, Wyoming. Both Ayer and Wilson had significant livestock holdings in southern Wyoming and Brown’s Hole.

John C. Coble was born in 1857 in Pennsylvania and was a partner of Frank Bosler in the prominent Iron Mountain Ranch Company of Bosler, Wyoming, north of Laramie. Tom Horn was on Coble’s payroll at the time.

By January 1900 Tom Horn had wrapped up his investigation of the Wilcox, Wyoming train robbery of the previous June.
At the Denver meeting in Haley’s office Ayer and Wilson bewailed the lawlessness that infested Brown’s Hole, condemning “the place as an outlaw hangout and a threat to the Haley interests,” Bernard said. Both recounted their cattle losses and named Matt Rash and Jim McKnight as rustlers.

Matt Rash (courtesy Museum of Northwest Colorado, Craig, CO)

Coble had like grievances in his part of the country, and he offered a solution to the problem that would wipe out the range menace permanently. He would contact a man whom he knew with the Pinkerton Detective Agency, a man that could be relied on to do the job, with no questions asked.

Tom Horn was the man chosen by Coble.

Coble continued that Horn was to be paid five hundred dollars for every known cattle thief
he killed….

More about Tom Horn:

Tom Horn (main page)

The Tom Horn Story (summary)

Other

The Wilcox Train Robbery

_{This post is a part of our series on Tom Horn – full collection of links at the bottom of the page.}

Tom Horn was discharged from civilian service in the army (he had served with distinction in the Spanish-American War) in the early fall of 1898. A period of recuperation from the “Cuban fever” no doubt followed.

Tom Horn at left, sleeping under a rail car in Cuba (courtesy Larry D. Ball)

As he healed, in the meantime he developed an interest in a major event to the extent that he was used as an investigator. It was the Wilcox train robbery of June 2, 1899.

At the time of the robbery, the Union Pacific Rail Road’s tracks ran north and east of present-day Rock River, Wyoming. (In 1900 the railroad embarked on a track-shortening project that moved the line to its present location. The location of the robbery today is on privately owned land.)

It was known that the railroad moved large shipments of currency, gold and silver, and other valuables on specific trains, the identity of which were supposedly well guarded secrets. However, information leaked out that high-value cargo, including unsigned bank notes and silver would leave the UP’s headquarters at Omaha to points west. One theory was that “Elzy” Lay, one of Butch Cassidy’s associates, arrived in Medicine Bow the day before the 2:00 a.m. robbery with word for his confederates that the evening train would be carrying loot in the express car.

Three robbers (some accounts, not well verified, pointed to six men) stopped the train just east of a bridge on the rainy morning of June 2. After uncoupling the passenger cars behind the locomotive, tender, mail car and express car, they ordered Engineer Jones to pull past the bridge for a moment. They then dynamited the bridge with charges they had already put in place in order to block the second section of the train from following them.

The train pulled ahead about two miles. They first ordered the mail car opened, after which they learned that any valuables on board were in the locked express car. When the expressman, Charles T. Woodcock, refused to open the express car, they blasted the door open. Woodcock was dazed from the explosion, and either could not remember the combination to the safe or pretended he could not. At that the robbers blew the safe, using such an excessive amount of the “giant powder” that the entire car was destroyed. They escaped on horses they had hidden nearby with over $50,000 in loot.

UPRR express car after the dynamiting. (WY State Archives, American Heritage Center)

They headed north toward Casper, secretly crossed the North Platte River and continued north toward the Big Horn Mountains. Stopping to rest overnight, they killed Douglas Sheriff Josiah Hazen when his posse discovered their horses and where they were. In the shootout that followed, they escaped on foot and reached the Big Horns. There they acquired fresh horses from “Black Billy” Hill, a local rancher known to be sympathetic to rustlers and others of their ilk.

Billy Hill (Jim Gatchell Museum, Buffalo WY)

Another posse, that included railroad officials, U.S. Marshal Frank A. Hadsell and others followed the robbers but lost them west of the Big Horns and south of Thermopolis. Investigations by subsequent groups failed to learn who the robbers were and where they headed.

It has been learned that Tom Horn quietly investigated the robbery. He may have been working in some capacity for the Pinkertons as well as the UPRR simply because of the agency’s relationship with the railroad.

Joe LeFors, who later plotted Tom Horn’s downfall, was a member of the Wilcox posse, and was himself a Pinkerton operative with the cipher (code name) of “Pulet.” Other prominent figures in turn-of-the-century annals who were Pinkerton operatives were assigned various ciphers. A few were Frank A. Hadsell, U.S. Marshal, who was assigned “Log;” Peter Swanson, Rock Springs sheriff, was “Stone;” Creede McDaniels, sheriff in Rawlins, was “Hamper;” Thomas Horton, also a sheriff in Rawlins, was “Muff;” R. D. Meldrum, deputy sheriff in Dixon, was “Cigar;” and Charles Ayres, stock association inspector, Dixon, was “Stamp.” There is no record of Horn’s cipher.

At some time after the robbery Horn embarked on his investigation. He generated a report to the division superintendent of the Union Pacific in Cheyenne on the identity of the three robbers who had headed north from Wilcox into the Big Horn Mountains:

“I told him that he had some information that I wanted and he must give it to me,
or I would kill him and be done with him.”
Iron Mountain, Wyo.
January 15th, 1900

E. C. Harris, Esq.
Cheyenne, Wyo.

I have this to report in regard to my investigation in Johnson County:
On January second I went to the house of old Bill Speck, and stayed all night with him. In the morning it was snowing and I stayed all day.

Bill Speck (Courtesy Hoofprints of the Past Museum, Kaycee WY)

Occasionally I would bring up the train robbery, and he never wanted to talk about it, so on the morning of the fourth when I was going to leave I told him that he had some information that I wanted and he must give it to me, or I would kill him and be done with him. Well, that was just Speck was looking for, and he commenced to cry and said the rest of the rustlers would kill him if he told. I told him I was worse than they, because I would surely kill then and there if he did not tell me, as no man was within eight miles of us.

“he could blow Christ off the Cross with dynamite”

Speck asked my protection from the rest of the rustlers, which of course I offered him, and then he told me as follows:

The morning of the killing of Joe Hazen, George Currie came to Billy Hill’s ranch on Red Fork of Powder River about one o’clock in the morning, and wanted to get some of his own horses that were at Hill’s ranch in charge of Alec Ghent. Currie had four horses there, but there were only two of them in the pasture, the rest being out on the range. Ghent had been looking for these other two horses for three weeks, but could not find them. Currie got his own two horses, and Hill gave him two. Currie told Hill, Speck and Ghent of the robbery, and said it was himself, Harve Ray and a stranger in Powder River country [who had committed it], but Currie would not give his name, saying only that the stranger came from the British possessions and that he could blow Christ off the Cross with dynamite….

More about Tom Horn:

Tom Horn (main page)

The Tom Horn Story (summary)

Other

The Murder of Fred U. Powell

Post author By searim
Post date December 31, 2021
No Comments on The Murder of Fred U. Powell

_{This post is a part of our series on Tom Horn – full collection of links at the bottom of the page.}

“That’s the man that killed Daddy.”

William Lewis was not the last name tied to killings allegedly carried out by Tom Horn.

The second homesteader to be killed was Fred U. Powell. Old timers have argued whom deserved killing more, Lewis or Powell, and Powell is usually the choice. There was a reason for it, simply that he got into more trouble with more people. It seemed that during his entire tenure in Wyoming he went out of his way to find trouble, and perhaps trouble found a way to find him.

Powell was born in Virginia and became well known in the area virtually from the time of his arrival in the mid-to-late 1870s, simply because he seemed to want to become a sort of pariah in southeast Wyoming. He had married Mary Keene in December 1882, the daughter of John and Mary Keene, well?known pioneers who had come to Laramie from Colorado in 1868.

Fred and Mary had a son, William E. “Billy,” who was five years old when he supposedly witnessed his father’s murder on September 10, 1895. Fred was only thirty-seven at the time of his death.
T. Blake Kennedy, who became a key player on Tom Horn’s legal defense team and later a U.S. District Judge, mentioned in his memoirs, “It had been reported that at a coroner’s [Powell’s] inquest the small son of the murdered man, who was perhaps five years old, made the remark in identifying Horn, ‘That’s the man that killed Daddy.’”

Fred had lost an arm in an accident working for the Union Pacific, and was given a job as a night watchman with the railroad before being fired for robbing a traveler (probably a drifter), who was working his way across the country, of twenty dollars.

He then took up ranching on the west side of the Laramie Range in Albany County, upstream on Horse Creek about seven miles southwest of the spot where William Lewis had been shot. He became proficient with a rope and horse in spite of his handicap, and was generally considered a rustler. Supposedly he was the only person in the area who was friendly with Lewis. Fred, however, was in most ways an anathema to the ranching community and even the populace in general because of his continuing propensity to steal, trespass and destroy property. He thought it was fun to taunt his neighbors – in a manner he felt was more humorous than did they – with invitations to have their own beef for dinner at his place.

The charges leveled against him read like a sad litany to his seemingly endless pursuit of breaking the law. From pre-statehood days before 1890, they read like a self-defeating chant:

Territory of Wyoming v Fredrick U. Powell, Stealing and Killing Neat Cattle, Albany County
State of Wyoming…Grand Larceny, Cheyenne Justice of the Peace
State of Wyoming… Stealing Live Stock, Albany County
State of Wyoming… Malicious Trespass and Destruction of Property, Albany County
State of Wyoming… Incendiarism and Malicious Trespass, Albany County
State of Wyoming… Criminal Trespass, Albany County

First he stole four horses in Albany County in July 1889. He was arrested and jailed in September, and after the grand jury held its proceedings, the charges were dropped and he was never brought to trial.

In August 1890 he was charged with grand larceny in Cheyenne. The justice of the peace sustained a motion by Powell’s lawyer that there was not enough evidence to show any crime had been committed, and Fred was released.

In January 1892 Mary Powell filed for divorce on grounds that for seven years he had not supported her or their son, who was then seven. The divorce was granted the next month. Mary however continued to live with Fred for years after that, although perhaps on an intermittent basis.

The summer after the divorce he was charged with stealing a horse in Albany County. Fred pleaded not guilty, and after four days of legal arguments he was bound over for trial. At the trail in September the jury returned with a verdict of not guilty.

In July the next year Fred was charged with malicious trespass and destroying fences belonging to Etherton P. Baker. First he was convicted but filed an appeal, and in September the jury found him not guilty.

That was not the last Fred U. Powell had heard from Etherton P. Baker, however.
The next spring, in April 1894, he set fire to personal property belonging to Baker and another neighbor, Joseph Trugillo, who was apparently living with Baker. Powell was hauled into court but this was not to be his figurative best day in court. He appealed the light sentence that was meted out and was released on a hundred-dollar bond.

In July Powell stole a horse, was arrested and tried. The judge found him guilty and fined him forty-five dollars. Again he appealed and was released on bond. When the next trial for incendiarism came up in September, he was convicted and sentenced to four months in jail. The charges were dropped in the horse-stealing charge.

When Powell was released in early 1895 he started to receive letters. The letters bore the now-familiar theme to stop stealing, leave the country or be killed. For a while he seemed to disregard them, at least until William Lewis was murdered.

There were reports that the Lewis murder threw a fright into him, and he started selling his stock.
Powell met the same fate as Lewis the morning of September 6, 1895….

Fred Powell’s homestead (author’s photo)

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The Killing of William E. Lewis

Post author By searim
Post date December 31, 2021
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_{This post is a part of our series on Tom Horn – full collection of links at the bottom of the page.}

“whenever everything else fails, I have a system which never does.” -Tom Horn

No better man could have been better than Tom Horn to investigate the cattle thievery that was occurring northwest of Cheyenne along Horse Creek.

The years before and after the Langhoff episode reflected continuing problems with rustling for the cattleman. The Langhoff case of cattle theft, which resulted in only Louis Bath being jailed, was simply another in which the middle class and associated riffraff once again prevailed.

For years the courts had been lenient with cattle thieves. The Wyoming Stock Growers Association (WSGA) and large independent cattle ranchers had hired as brand inspectors and stock detectives reputable men like N. K. Boswell and W. C. Lykins – and others carrying dubious reputations — in an effort to gather evidence and arrest the thieves. However, their efforts were frustrated by juries that were often made up of the lower and middle classes — including rustlers — and by lenient judges. The judges, being elected, understandable played to their own electorates.
Thomas Sturgis, secretary of the Association had said in 1886,

Whenever a special case [of cattle stealing] comes to our notice, we always push it if the evidence is sufficient to get even a hearing before the proper authorities… [but] it is very difficult to get an indictment from a grand jury [even] with pretty definite evidence as to the guilt of the party charged with stealing cattle. Unfortunately, it is almost completely useless to bring matters to the court even after an indictment has been obtained and the evidence pretty well gathered. There seems to be a morbid sympathy with cattle thieves both on the bench and in the jury room….

As matters turned out, even hiring independent, private detectives to procure evidence of rustling to present in court was wasted effort. WSGA Secretary Thomas Adams, describing the frustrations and sorry financial situation in which the large outfits found themselves said:

It would be impossible for the Association… to undertake to bring the parties referred to, to justice. In the first place, we have no money at our disposal. In the second place, if we had the means to enter into any investigation of the matter, we would be obliged to act through private detectives. We already have tried this system, and have been thrown out of court and laughed at for our pains. Circumstances have forced cattlemen to look to themselves for protection outside of any association….

“Looking to themselves” meant taking whatever measures became necessary. William Lewis invited those measures upon himself….

The site of William Lewis’ murder (author’s photo).

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April, 1895

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“no better man could be found for the work”

Frank M. Canton, who had himself been a deputy U.S. marshal and sheriff of Johnson County and who subsequently lost an election to rustler sympathizer William “Red” Angus, is believed to be the murderer of John Tisdale in Johnson County. Tisdale was gunned down in a wagon as he drove toward home in December 1891. He was an honest homesteader who had gone to Buffalo to handle some business matters and purchase Christmas gifts for his wife and children.

Canton participated in the Johnson County Invasion in April 1892, siding with the cattlemen. That alliance added to the enmity the homesteading community had already developed toward him. He then moved to Oklahoma which, in terms of geography, provided him with a measure of safety from the homesteader/rustler element in central Wyoming.

Canton was working as an undersheriff in Pawnee County, Oklahoma Indian Territory. In 1895 he was in pursuit of John “Jack Smith” Tregoning, who had escaped from the penitentiary in Laramie on November 15, 1894.

Frank M. Canton and his family (Jim Gatchell Museum, Buffalo, WY)

Canton wrote to William A. Pinkerton in Chicago on April 7, 1895, asking for help from Pinkertons in the form of a man who would be a good tracker and sleuth.

On April 12, William Pinkerton replied:

I am in receipt of your very full and complete letter of April 7th and note contents. As we have not got the right kind of man for this rough work out there, I have referred the matter to Supt. McParland at Denver, sending him a copy of your letter. I was greatly pleased to hear from you and did not know of your change of place. I imagine that whoever goes out on this work will find it rather difficult to do and we have not got at this office available such a man as I feel satisfied would fill the bill in every particular.

Tom Horn who used to be with our Denver office would be a good man for the place, and I will ask McParland to communicate with him and see if he cannot be got for the service and for the length of time you want him. He is not in our service now. You probably know of him. He is well acquainted all through the western country among cattle rustlers and all that class of men, and is a thorough horseman and plainsman in every sense of the word. I note particularly that you want to get Jack Treganing (sic.) who escaped from the Laramie penitentiary where you sent him for life and that he is down in that country. I should be very glad to hear of his capture….

James A. McParland wrote to Canton in Pawnee from Denver on April 13, discretely avoiding the mention of any names:

Yours of the 7th to Mr. W. A. Pinkerton has been forwarded to me with instructions that if any of the Operatives at this office who were capable of doing work of this kind were available that I should at once send him forward to you.
You are well aware that it will take a peculiar man to do this work, in fact a man as it were, to the Manor born. I have such men at this office but at the present time they are engaged on other operations. In fact I have three that could do this work or that I could detail upon it but at present they are unavailable and it is impossible for me to say when they would be at liberty. I know of a man although not working for me but I could recommend him as he formerly did work for me. I have not got his address at the present time but he is liable to write me at any time and as soon as he does I will suggest to him the fact that this matter is ready to be taken up and will have him communicate with you. I can guarantee the man. If he undertakes this matter no better man could be found for the work that you wish to have done. I, like you, would very much like to get hold of Tregoning as poor Henderson was an intimate friend of mine.

The “no better man” was, of course, Tom Horn.

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1893: The Langhoff Gang

_{This post is a part of our series on Tom Horn – full collection of links at the bottom of the page.}

“there had been considerable cattle stealing”

From deputy U.S. marshal to stock detective and sometime-sheriff was not a big jump. It may have been that Tom Horn was first hired as a stock detective and graduated easily to deputy marshal, without leaving the first job.

When first hired by the Swan Land and Cattle Company, Tom Horn was based at the Two Bar Ranch. The Swan’s headquarters were and remain in Chugwater, thirty-five miles north of Cheyenne. The Two Bar home ranch is another twenty miles or so northwest of Chugwater, off and to the north of present?day Wyoming Highway 34.

The Swan’s other ranches, the Mule Shoe, TY, M Bar and 40 Bar, were major operating centers of one of the largest livestock operations in the history of the West, controlling over five hundred thousand acres of land and tens of thousands of cattle by 1885. The empire stretched from Sidney, Nebraska, ninety miles east of Cheyenne, to Rock River, Wyoming, ninety miles to the northwest.

The first documentation of Tom Horn’s work as a stock detective involved the Langhoffs, a small cattle outfit. He had been specifically directed to gather evidence that could be used to obtain legal convictions against rustlers like the Langhoffs. At the time, John Clay was manager of the Swan operations.

Ferdinand “Fred” Langhoff (WY State Archives).

Ferdinand Albert Langhoff (a derivative spelling of the original German “Langholf”) was born in Wisconsin in 1856. In 1869 he moved to the Dakota Territory and by 1878 was working as a cowhand in North Park, CO. His employer at the time was Charley Hutton, a pioneer Laramie Valley ranchman.

By 1880 he was in Wyoming, living at Dale Creek, fifteen miles south of Ames Monument to the west of Cheyenne. In 1882, he settled on the main Sybille Creek forty miles southwest of Wheatland and northwest of Iron Mountain. He was married to Evalina “Eva” Farrell, a woman from near the Little Laramie River whom he had married in 1881 at her family’s ranch in the Little Laramie Valley.
Eva’s father, a Civil War veteran, had moved to Wyoming shortly after the war. By 1870 he was one of the largest cattlemen in Albany County.

Within a short period of time Fred and Eva had developed a substantial operation on 360 acres they owned outright. They were in the process of proving up on another 160 acres. They had three children.

Fred’s brother, Henry (Hank), had moved from Wisconsin with their mother and lived for a short period with Fred and Eva. Hank worked at times with young Gus Rosentreter for people moving into the Sybille Canyon valley. There was reason to believe that Hank and Fred did not get along, and Hank and their mother moved to another cabin nearby. Hank ended his own life in 1892 when he hanged himself in a shed on his brother’s place. Their mother died shortly thereafter.

The Langhoff spread, along with other homesteads that were springing up in the area, were located between large ranch operations in the Laramie Valley to the west and the vast Swan holdings to the east, primarily the Two Bar. Other substantial cattlemen also were situated near Langhoff’s outfit, including William L. “Billy” Clay, whose place lay to the southeast on Mule Creek.

Other early settlers on the Sybille included many whose names later turned up in the Tom Horn/Willie Nickell episode. The included Mike Fitzmorris and many of German descent: Rudolf and Raymond Henke; the Plaga brothers, Otto and Albion; and the Berner and Waechter clans, who all homesteaded there in the 1880s. To the southeast were the families of Jim Miller and Kels Nickell, the former on Spring Creek and the latter North Chugwater south of Clay.

Fred Langhoff was perhaps a focal point and an example of the larger struggle between the so-called cattle barons and more recently arriving homesteaders. The homesteaders who had legally filed on their land felt they had a right to use of the land and water resources. The big outfits believed otherwise, and did whatever they could to squeeze the “nesters” out. Their actions, including the lynching of Cattle Kate and Jim Averill in 1889, the lynching of Tom Waggoner shortly afterward and the Johnson County Invasion in April 1892 developed a spreading animosity toward them on the part of an increasing middle class.

Fred developed a reputation as a horse trader, but was arrested for horse theft in 1892. He had shipped twenty-six horses to Owensboro, KY in June 1892. His problem was that he did not own them. The owners included John C. Coble, a prominent cowman and two other major outfits.

The law pursued him to Kentucky, only to learn he had fled after selling the horses. A deputy sheriff remained in Kentucky to reacquire the horses, while a sheriff pursued Fred to Wisconsin. Fred was returned to Cheyenne to await prosecution. Also charged were Eva and two hired hands, Thomas Boucher and Louis Bath. Bath was the son of a prominent Laramie Valley family whose place was near the spread of the Farrells.

While Fred was engaging in casual or more serious thievery, and his neighbors, including Leslie Sommer, knew what was going on. Sommer wrote, “There were whispers that the Langhoffs’ prosperity far exceeded their visible livelihood”.

Fred’s log house and spread became a gathering place for various purposes. People from as far as Chicago and farther east arrived to take advantage of the horse-trading opportunities at the LF Bar, as his place was known. At first Fred’s business seemed to be legitimate, but as time went on there was talk that Fred seemed to do far better than one would expect, considering his modest start and assets.

There were other aspects of the Langhoff operation that attracted attention. It appeared that Eva’s charm and charms diverted customers away from obtaining a clear title to the horses they acquired. Leslie Sommer continued.

There were rumors of the lure Mrs. Langhoff had for the strangers that came within their gates with horses or cattle to sell. Some of these strangers, falling under her spell, fell so deeply in love with her they figured they had received value personally, regardless of the profitless deal they may have made on their business arrangements….

The 1892 incident with the stolen horse was the nadir of Fred’s questionable actions as things turned completely sour. Things had not been going well beforehand.

Hearsay indicated that earlier, a visitor, a Frenchman named Zu (or Susette), had a number of fancy horses for sale. He evidently had made some kind of a deal with the Langhoffs, since they had possession of his horses.

Susette disappeared from familiar haunts, after he had complained to the law about the rawness of the deal. It was later reported that he’d hanged himself in the area.

By this time, however, the authorities in Cheyenne had begun an investigation of the Langhoff operation’s more extensive activities. After a series of legal proceedings that ended in Eva’s being acquitted, Fred suddenly disappeared. He left Eva in charge of the ranch.

It was said that she graciously entertained the investigating committee that was trying to learn of Fred’s whereabouts, but coyly denied knowing where he might have gone.

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A Pinkerton’s Agent

_{This post is a part of our series on Tom Horn – full collection of links at the bottom of the page.}

“not the type of man one liked to argue with.”

It wasn’t long before more adventure seemed to seek Tom Horn out.

Late in 1890 C. W. “Doc” Shores, a deputy U.S. marshal, sheriff of Gunnison County, Colorado, and part-time Pinkerton agent, was on the trail of thieves that had driven stolen Colorado horses into Arizona. In December he received a letter from the postmaster of Solomonville, in southeastern Arizona. The postmaster and his brother owned the Dunlap Brothers’ Ranch, where Tom Horn was foreman. Both he and Horn had seen the thieves who had been described on a “Wanted” poster that had been distributed in the region. Shores said, “Being in the cattle business himself [the postmaster] appreciated what I was doing and would have his foreman appointed as deputy sheriff to assist… in making the arrests. He praised Tom Horn highly as a capable cattleman, rodeo star, and a former Indian Scout.”

Shores answered Dunlap’s letter, and arranged to meet Tom at Willcox, forty miles south of Solomonville. They met in the lobby of the hotel where the Colorado sheriff stayed after arriving, and he described his new acquaintance as “a tall, dark?complected man with a black mustache…. He was around thirty years of age and presented an imposing figure of a man ?? deep?chested, lean?loined, and arrow?straight. He was wearing a plaid shirt, woolen trousers and high-heeled boots. A wide-brimmed sombrero covered his head.” Shores also said Horn had “black, shifty eyes.”

As they traveled by buckboard to the location where the horse thieves had been seen, the two lawmen became engaged in discussions on various matter. Shores further described his partner as an “interesting conversationalist… [but] not the type of man one liked to argue with.”
After capturing the two robbers without trouble, the two men went their separate ways. Shores wrote a letter to James McParland, superintendent of the Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency in Denver. He praised Horn’s work in helping him run down the horse thieves, and recommended that the Agency hire Tom as an agent.

Within months Tom Horn and his partners in an Arizona silver mine sold out. He went to Denver and, as he said, was “initiated into the mysteries of the Pinkerton institution.” His superintendent, McParland, asked him what he would do if he were put on a train robbery case. Tom told him simply that if he had the help of another good man, he would catch the robbers.
Around midnight on August 31, 1891, a train was robbed on the Denver and Rio Grande Railway between Cotopaxi and Texas Creek, roughly midway between Salida and Canon City on the Arkansas River. Horn was sent out on the job, and was told that his partner would be none other than “Doc” Shores. When Shores caught up with him, he:

… asked me how I was getting on. I told him I had struck the trail, but there were so many men scouring the country that I myself was being held up all the time; that I had been arrested twice in two days and taken in to Salida to be identified.
Eventually all the sheriff’s posses quit, and then Mr. W. A. Pinkerton and Mr. McParland told Shores and me to go at ’em. We took up the trail where I had left it several days before and we never left it till we got the robbers.

F. M. Ownbey, a Pinkerton’s who worked with Tom Horn (author’s photo, courtesy Al Carr).

The robbers went west across the Sangre de Cristo range in southern Colorado. They proceeded into an iron mining area and crossed back to the east side of the Sangre de Cristos at Mosca Pass, just southeast of present-day Great Sand Dunes National Monument. Horn and Shores then chased them through Huerfano Canon, out by Cucharas and east of Trinidad near the New Mexico line. The robbers dropped down into Clayton, N.M., and “got into a shooting scrape there in a gin mill. They then turned east again toward the ‘Neutral Strip’ and close to Beaver City, then across into… a place in Texas called Ochiltree” in the northeast part of the Texas Panhandle.

The robbers proceeded toward the Oklahoma Indian Territory, and entered it below Canadian City. They then came to the head of the Washita River and followed it downstream to their final destination.

The two Pinkertons men chased the robbers on horseback to Paul’s Valley, south of Oklahoma City, and more than three hundred miles from where they had first picked up the trail. At Washita station they located and captured one of them, Burt Curtis, in a house owned by a man named Wolfe. Shores hauled Curtis back to Denver, leaving Tom Horn to wait and see if the other would come back to Wolfe’s.

After several days of waiting on my part, he did come back, and as he came riding up to the house I stepped out and told him someone had come! He was ‘Peg Leg’ Watson, and considered by everyone in Colorado as a very desperate character. I had no trouble with him.

Early in the investigation, Horn and Shores had suspected that Joe McCoy, who was wanted in Canon City by the Fremont County, Colorado, sheriff for murder, was also a party to the Denver and Rio Grande robbery. That was not the case, but McCoy and his father, Dick, had been tried and convicted of murdering a stock detective. Joe escaped from jail before he was sentenced, and Dick was out on bail at the time of the Denver and Rio Grande incident. Dick’s ranch was across the river from the place where the train had been robbed, and it was natural that the lawmen would suspect him and his boys…

More about Tom Horn:

Tom Horn (main page)

The Tom Horn Story (summary)