The history of Bannock County, Idaho

by A. C. Saunders

The stage line through Bannock county passed from the hands of Ben Halliday to the Wells Fargo Express company, and later to the firm of Gilmore and Salisbury, who continued the service until the opening of the Utah and Northern railway made stages a thing of the past.

The mountain fastnesses along the Portneuf canyon, made this the most dangerous stretch of road between Salt Lake City and Butte. It was very difficult to trail men over the lava rocks that abound along this route, and the wild nature of the country beyond them offered road agents a fair chance of safety. The gold bullion brought down from the Montana mines made a tempting prize, and encouraged highway robbery to such an extent that the outrages in time gave birth to the vigilantes, who gave the robbers short shrift and in time succeeded in practically ending their operations.

The first hold-up in Bannock county occurred in 1863, about a mile and a half west of Pocatello creek, when Jack Hughes, a Denver man, was robbed of $6,000 by Brocky Jack, at that time a well-known character along the stage road. The trick was easily turned and Brocky Jack escaped with his booty without firing a gun.

In 1865, a far more serious affair was perpetrated near Robbers’ Roost Creek, a few miles west of the present town of McCammon. A stage of the Concord type, carrying several passengers and $60,000 of private money, was betrayed by its driver, Frank Williams, to a gang led by Jim Locket. As he rounded a steep hill, Williams turned his horses suddenly, breaking the reach of the coach, and the road agents, concealed in the brush, which was so thick at this point that it scratched the sides of the stage, gave the word to halt. Among the passengers were two wealthy St. Louis merchants, David Dinan and a man named McCausland. These men were apprehensive of being held up and carried their guns in their hands, ready for instant use. This precaution probably caused their death. At the cry, “Hands up,” the passengers discharged their guns into the brush, shooting too high to wound their opponents, but thereby bringing upon themselves a volley that killed both Dinan and McCausland and two other men, one of them being Lawrence Merz, a passenger who was sitting by the driver. Charles Parks, a messenger, riding within the coach, was shot in the foot, while one man, whose name is variously given as Brown and Carpenter, escaped unhurt. The murdered men were buried in a gulch near the scene of their death and the coach, riddled with bullets, was taken to Malad.

None of the members of this gang were apprehended, but Williams, the driver, was arrested and hung. He retained his position for some ten days after the hold-up, and then, actuated perhaps by a guilty conscience and the fear of detection, resigned and went to Salt Lake. Here it was noticed that he spent money very freely, and he was seized later in Denver. Jim Locket was a man of such notorious character that no attempt was made to trail him, the few settlers in the neighborhood at that time preferring to give him as wide a berth as possible.

Three men, named McCay, Jones and Spangler, followed a stage out of Malad City in 1870, and held it up some six or seven miles from that city. Spangler and Jones were afterward captured, but Jones escaped from jail, and Spangler cleared himself by giving information that led to the recovery of $6,000 of the $9,000 taken from the coach.

Two weeks later, in 1870, a very daring hold-up was made by two men near the top of the Malad divide. One of the men was variously known as Ed. Flag, Frank Long and Frank Carpenter. The other, whose name was Stone, was said to belong to a good family in Louisville, Ky.

These two men placed three dummies in a half-exposed position near the road and succeeded in making off with $36,000 in gold bullion without firing a shot. The stage carried no passengers.

The driver returned to Malad and said that he had been held up by a gang of five men. After some deliberation, J. N. Ireland, now a resident of Pocatello, Tom Oakley, Daniel Robbins and four others, set out to trail the bandits. This was not a difficult matter in the early days, provided the fugitives took to the brush, which they were obliged to do in most cases in order to find concealment. Their horses, in pushing a way through the growth, left a well-defined track that a child could follow, and as travelers were few, there was little danger of hitting the wrong trail. But while it was sometimes an easy matter to follow up a gang of robbers, few men cared to undertake the task. A road agent knew that capture probably meant death and his very occupation was a sufficient guarantee that he would kill without scruple. He had the advantage, too of being able to ambush his pursuers, and shoot them before they could seek cover.

The posse of seven men took up the trail of the bandits at the spot where the hold-up occurred and traced them to Birch Creek. As evening came on and darkness closed in, and when they had ridden some twenty miles, the pursuers came within a half mile of the robbers, whom they found to be on the opposite side of the creek. In the early morning they crossed the creek, and were close upon Flag and Stone, before those men were aware of their proximity. Not expecting pursuit, the highwaymen were not on their guard. They concealed themselves in a steep hollow, where slender willows, about the thickness of a man’s finger, and seven feet high, grew in such profusion that they formed an impenetrable hiding place.