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True Stories
From Nevada's
Troubled Past
Click on a story to
jump to it NEW!
Shoshone Mike vs. The Nevada State Police
NEW!The
Rawhide Stagecoach Robbery of 1908 |
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| Title: Law and Order in Ormsby County |
| 1875 by Sam P. Davis |
| In 1875 a number of incendiary fires following in rapid succession caused great excitement in Carson City and the streets were patrolled by armed men at night. Several hard characters suspected of complicity in these incendiary fires were ordered to leave the city and all but one obeyed the summons. The one who paid no attention to the warning of the "601" was a baseball player who was in the habit of sleeping in the engine house of the Curry Co. He was taken from his bed by a party of masked men on the night of the 16th of December, 1875, and hanged from the cross-beam of the cemetery gate. On his breast was pinned a placard bearing the simple inscription "601". It is claimed that some of the leading citizens of Carson were in this necktie party and it is the general belief that an innocent man was hanged. |
| Adopted from the book: History of Nevada Vol. II 1913 |
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| Title: Queho, The Renegade Indian In two parts |
| by Harry Reid, and K. J. Evans |
| On
the day of February 21, 1940 the headlines in the Las Vegas Review-Journal
read BODY OF INDIAN FOUND.
This sparked memories for many in the town of the first murder this
dead Indian had committed at Timber Mountain 30 years ago, just a few
miles away from Searchlight in the McCullough Range. Queho, a local southern Nevada Indian, had worked at various menial jobs throughout the Searchlight area. He had been cutting wood for J.M. Woodworth, a timber and firewood contractor who had refused to pay him. This made Queho fly into a rage and he beat the man to death with a piece of timber. This was the first murder of what was to become a thirty year odyssey. Queho soon struck again. The second murder took place near the Gold Bug Mine, near the river in Eldorado Canyon. The Gold Bug Mine was co-owned by Frank Rockefeller, brother to John D. Rockefeller. Sometime later, Queho admitted to Canyon Charlie, a Indian elder nearly a hundred years old, that he had killed the mine's night watchman, his former employer. The second murder occurred on the route between the Crescent area, where the woodcutter was killed, and the river. The local law thought they would have no trouble at all catching Queho, who they considered to be just a little more than a ignorant savage. They couldn't have been more than wrong. Queho stole a horse from a man named Cox and the chase was on. It was assumed by many that Queho would be easy to track, since he dragged one leg as a result of an earlier injury. The search party was led by the operator of the Eldorado mine, a lawyer educated in Washington, DC, James Babcock. Along with a contingent of lawmen from Las Vegas, Indian trackers and an Indian agent named DeCrevecoeur. The posse tracked Queho over 200 miles ranging from Crescent to Nipton, even working their way toward Pahranagat Valley, 150 miles to the north. Running short on supplies, and growing weary, the posse gave up the pursuit. At this point they began to believe this Indian was more cunning and smart than they gave him credit for. Maybe he wasn't quite the "dumb" savage they had believed. |
| Adopted from the book: Searchlight The Camp That Didn't Fall, 1998 |
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. . . Continued
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| The following is from the
Las Vegas Review-Journal The First 100 People Who Shaped Southern Nevada web site |
| One afternoon, a local miner
came into a clearing near Timber Mountain and there, seated on a rock,
his .30-30 rifle across his lap, was the "ignorant savage"
himself. Fred Pine, who had known Queho in Las Vegas, greeted him in
his most amiable tone of voice. Queho responded in kind, no animosity
in his voice. So they did lunch. Pine dug out a bag of sandwiches, and
passed some of them to Queho. When he had finished, Queho told Pine
that he, too, wanted to share his lunch, and produced a dried rodent
of some sort. Pine gracefully declined. After about a half-hour, he
decided to try and make an exit. He said good-bye and walked away, expecting
to be felled at any moment. He wasn't. "I guess he just wasn't in a killing mood that day," Pine later recalled. If the newspapers were to be believed, he got into a "killing mood" again in 1913, when a 100-year-old blind Indian known as Canyon Charlie was found dead, a pickax wound in his head. In recalling the crime, the Las Vegas Evening Review-Journal of 1938 waxed sensational: "Charlie's meager supply of food was gone; mute testimony of the terrifying fact that this ghost-like maniac would kill for anything -- or nothing -- since he might easily have stolen the old man's belongings without resorting to murder." The fact is, this crime probably wasn't Queho's. The elder in question, Canyon Charlie, was his friend and confidant. Within the next two months, two more miners who were working claims at Jenny Springs on the Arizona side of the river, were found dead, shot in the back. Their provisions and personal items were taken. Shortly after that, an Indian woman was found dead, still clutching a bundle of the wood she had been gathering. She hadn't been robbed. Queho got the blame. He was also accused of slaying one James Patterson, who turned up some days later unhurt, though Reid says that during the course of the search for Patterson, another man had been found murdered. Queho got credit for his demise, too. As Queho hysteria grew, large rewards were offered for the villain's capture, eventually reaching $2,000. And the Searchlight Bulletin reminded its readers of the principle that guided most European/American Indian relations in the 19th century. "A good Indian is a dead Indian," it thundered. Between 1915 and 1919, Queho kept his head down. Even so, anytime a prospector disappeared in the desert, or a miner spent too long at the bar and fell asleep, and his wife began to panic, the demonic name of Queho was invoked. He was the bogeyman. Child won't behave? Tell him Queho will get him if he isn't good. On a cold January day in 1919, two prospectors named Hancock and Taylor set out from their camp near St. Thomas on the Muddy River, upstream from Eldorado Canyon. They left behind a third man, Brown, who was ill. Two days later, a neighbor stopped by the camp and found Brown hysterical with fear. His partners were gone, and he was unable to go search for them. A posse was rounded up in St. Thomas, and it set off downstream. It was a short trip. Hancock and Taylor were found four miles away, both shot in the back. Taylor's head had been smashed in with an ax handle. Nothing was missing but their shoes. Queho was, of course the prime suspect. About a week later, Maud Douglas, the wife of an Eldorado Canyon miner, woke up to hear some peculiar noises coming from the larder at the rear of the couple's cabin. She rose to investigate. She may have seen the figure of her killer, or the blinding flash as he fired his shotgun at close range and filled her chest with buckshot. It was Queho, everyone decided, doing his winter grocery shopping. On the floor, canned goods and cornmeal were piled, evidently left behind by the fleeing killer. Reid believes that Queho was indeed the killer, but points out that there is room for doubt. Maud Douglas had two children of her own, and responsibility for two others, Bertha and Leo Kennedy. The boy was but 4 years old at the time of the murder, but he later stated that Arvin Douglas, Maud's husband, had killed her. Bertha said that she had awakened Maud Douglas and asked for a glass of water, and that was the reason she was in the kitchen at the time. Still, authorities had all the evidence they needed -- Queho's footprints at the crime scene. It was an atrocity that truly motivated Southern Nevada. Sheriff Sam Gay ordered Deputy Frank Wait to round up a posse, hire the best trackers and once and for all kill or capture Queho. The party included several Indians. The posse tracked him north to Las Vegas Wash, to Callville, and on to Muddy Mountain, where they lost his trail in a snowstorm. Wait picked up more men in Moapa Valley, including five Indians, and the group split into two parties, one going in each direction, encircling the mountain. They found the remains of two freshly killed desert bighorn sheep, but not their man, whose trail eventually led back to Las Vegas Wash. At Black Canyon (current site of Hoover Dam) Wait awoke one morning and saw a blazing fire in the distance. He counted his posse and discovered that two of the Indians were gone. They were signaling Queho. When they returned, Wait sent them packing. By this time the exhausted and demoralized posse had dwindled to three men. Wait caught influenza and had to return to Las Vegas. It was the end of that phase of The Hunt for Red Queho. But he remained a very wanted man. In the early 1930s, Clark County Sheriff Joe Keate was an ardent Queho-chaser. He had first been sent to Southern Nevada in quest of Queho while serving as a state policeman, and seems to have developed a grudging admiration for his quarry. Reid said he once remarked that Queho was "able to starve a coyote to death and still have plenty of strength to continue." Keate had one close encounter with someone he believed to be Queho, when a bullet whistled past his ear one dark night. The shooter eluded him. Queho was not without friends. His countrymen certainly assisted him, while at the same time unanimously declaring that he was long dead. And, despite his fugitive status, many whites helped him as well. Murl Emery, the legendary Colorado River boatman, who operated a ferry at Nelson's landing in Eldorado Canyon for many years, never hid the fact that he saw Queho often, liked him, and wasn't slow in lending him a hand. "Why don't you let the poor Indian rest?" he was once quoted as saying. The hunt for the renegade Indian finally ended in February 1940. Charley Kenyon, along with brothers Art and Ed Schroeder, were prospecting along the Colorado about 10 miles below Hoover Dam. Charley and Ed were working the high sides of the steep canyon when they discovered what appeared to be a low stone wall. The spot was about 2,000 feet above the river and commanded a total view of the canyon. There was a trip wire, which was rigged to an alarm bell inside the cave on the other side of the wall. Inside the cave were the mummified remains of an American Indian male. He was in a fetal position, which suggested that he had died in pain. He had been bitten by a rattlesnake, which may have been the cause of death. "Some of his old pursuers," said Reid, "not wanting to acknowledge that they had been outsmarted, tried to say he had been dead since 1919." Not true. Blasting caps, dynamite and sheets of plywood, evidently stolen from the Hoover Dam job site, confirmed that the man had been active as late as the early 1930s. (He used the blasting caps to reload his own cartridges.) Also in the cave were the badge of the old night watchman from the Gold Bug Mine, a .30-30 Winchester saddle rifle, a repeating shotgun, a high-quality bow and a quiver of steel-tipped arrows, probably used for fishing. There were several pairs of eyeglasses, a clue that the Indian's eyesight failed in his old age. There also were numerous pairs of shoes of various sizes, which were used to patch the pair on Queho's feet. But was the corpse actually that of Queho? Old timer "Uncle" Joe Perkins insisted that the man was actually an Indian named Long Hair Tom, who was a close friend of Queho's. Tom, able to move among the white men and gather supplies, kept Queho supplied, and may have shared the cave with Queho -- perhaps even died in it. However, Indians who had known Queho since youth told authorities that he had double rows of teeth, something he had in common with the cave corpse. Wait, then Las Vegas chief of police, went to the cave, along with a party of 10 others, including Coroner A. J. Nelson, who held an inquest on the spot. The verdict was death by natural causes. Wait told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 1948 that before leaving the cave, he had picked up the corpse and "planted a resounding kick on its posterior," then added that he had been waiting 20 years to do that. Charley Kenyon and the Schroeder brothers were paid $300 by the Las Vegas Elks Lodge, a far cry from the $2,000 once offered for the dreaded outlaw. "But," added Ed Schroeder, "we did get a bonus of a can of coffee out of the affair. We found it in the cave with the body. It was good coffee. We took it back to camp and used it down to the very last grain." A squabble then erupted over who owned the remains. The option of simply burying them doesn't seem to have been considered. Sheriff Gene Ward put the bones and artifacts in a display case in the county courthouse. Meanwhile, Wait sought out a man named Archie Kay of Moapa, who claimed to be Queho's next of kin. For $25, he gave Wait a bill of sale for Queho's remains and all artifacts found in the cave. The old lawman then presented the bill to the Boulder City justice of the peace, and demanded that Queho be released from county custody. The magistrate was evidently horrified at the entire notion, and refused to honor the bill. At the next election, a new justice of the peace was elected. The bones and artifacts then came into the possession of the Las Vegas Elks, who produced what was then the city's biggest public celebration, Helldorado. The Elks built a replica of Queho's cave, and furnished it with what was left of him and his effects. The bones and plunder were later stolen from Helldorado Village. The bones were scattered in Bonanza Wash and later recovered, but the artifacts remain missing. Roland Wiley, a former district attorney of Clark County, finally obtained a skeleton said to be that of Queho and respectfully interred it beside his Cathedral Canyon desert grotto near Pahrump. To some, the story of Queho is no more than a tale of a brutish killer. To others, American Indians in particular, it is the story of a man who was abused, hounded for his entire life, then, in death, rendered into a cheap carnival attraction. "Indians were granted no respect," Reid wrote. "And they were harassed and discriminated against in increasingly offensive ways. It is no wonder that Queho's fellow Indians helped him. Nor is it surprising that he became known among the few Indians of the area as someone who had stood up to the white man." |
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