Campfire Tales of Jackson Hole

by Various

On the occasion of this visit they spoke of building a raft to use in crossing the Snake at their workings, and Wolff tried to dissuade them from the project, assuring them that they did not appreciate how dangerous the Snake could be when on the rise; but they laughed off his warnings with the statement that they had built and handled rafts before, and knew their business.

Wolff learned little, until later, concerning the mutual relations of the 4 men on the bar, nor concerning what success, if any, they had in finding gold.

Late that summer when haying time was at hand in Teton Basin, Wolff was surprised to see a man approaching his cabin on foot. “Seeing any man, and especially one afoot, was a rare sight in those days,” commented Wolff. It proved to be the miner, Tonnar, and he asked to be given work. Curious as to what was up between Tonnar and his partners, Wolff quizzed him but received only the rather unsatisfactory statement that Tonnar had left the 3 miners while they were making plans to raft the Snake in order to fetch a supply of meat for the camp.

With hay ready for cutting, Wolff was glad to hire Tonnar for work in the fields. For a month the two men slept together, and during this time Wolff noticed that Tonnar invariably wore his gun or had it within reach, but while he suspected that all was not right he made no further investigation. Wolff retained a mental picture of Tonnar as being a small, dark-complexioned man of rather untrustworthy appearance and manner.

Once Tonnar instructed Wolff to investigate a certain hiding place in the cabin, and he would find some valuables which he asked him to take care of. Wolff did so and claims that he found a silver watch and a purse containing $28.

Then one day late in August a sheriff and posse came to the cabin and asked Wolff if he could furnish information concerning the whereabouts of the miner, Jack Tonnar (at the time Tonnar was absent, working in the fields.) Briefly the posse explained that Tonnar’s 3 partners had been found dead, that Tonnar was believed guilty of their murder, and that the posse was commissioned to take him. Horrified to think that for a month he had sheltered and slept with such a desperate character, Wolff could only reply, “My God! Grab him while you can!” Tonnar was found on a haystack and captured before he could bring his gun into play.

From the posse Wolff learned that a party boating from Yellowstone Park down the Lewis and Snake Rivers, under the leadership of one Frye (Free), had stopped at the workings of the miners but had found them unoccupied. Just below the encampment, at the foot of a bluff where the Snake had cut into a gravel bank, they had come upon 3 bodies lying in the edge of the water, weighted down with stones. They had reported the gruesome find, and the arrest of Tonnar on Wolff’s place resulted.

Wolff, Dr. W. A. Hocker (a surgeon from Evanston), and a couple of Wolff’s neighbors from Teton Basin hurried to the scene of the killings, a place which has ever since been known as Deadman’s Bar. They readily identified the bodies, Tiggerman by his size, and Kellenberger from the absence of two fingers on his right hand. They found that Kellenberger had been shot twice in the back, that Welter had an axe cut in the head, and that Tiggerman’s head was crushed, presumably also with an axe. Wolff gave it as their conclusion that the 3 men must have been killed while asleep; and that their bodies had been hauled up onto the “rim” and rolled down the gravel bluff into the river, where they had lodged in shallow water and subsequently been covered with rocks. Probably the water had fallen, more fully exposing the bodies so that they had been discovered by Frye’s men.

Wolff and Hocker removed the heads of Welter and Tiggerman and cleaned the skulls, preserving them as evidence. Wolff denied that they buried the bodies, but claimed that they threw them back in the edge of the water and covered them again with rocks.

Tonnar pleaded not guilty and was taken to Evanston, the county seat of Unita County (which then embraced the westernmost strip of Wyoming Territory), and here he was tried the following spring before Judge Samuel Corn. Wolff was called to testify at the trial, mentioning, among other things, the incident of the watch and the purse, both of which he was positive Tonnar had stolen from his murdered partners.