Already convicted of murder in 1903, pair of prisoners were held in the jail in Basin, Wyoming, as they waited for the Wyoming Supreme Court to rule on their appeals.
While the murderer were willing to wait on the possibility of further delaying — or overturning — their deaths, the folks in Big Horn County weren’t.
One of the men had killed his brother with the help of his brother’s wife, and the other shot a wealthy widow who had spurned his advances while she was walking with her 11-year-old son.
At least 30 men from Big Horn County decided they’d waited long enough.
So just after 1 a.m. on Sunday, July 12, 1903, they got their guns, put on masks and headed for the county jail to dish out a little mob-rule Western justice.
They riddled the jail with bullets and caught some collateral damage with two deputies guarding the prisoners, killing one.
“After accomplishing its deadly mission, the body of masked men mounted horses and dispersed as quietly as it came,” the July 20, 1903, Buffalo Voice reported. “But few citizens of the little village were awakened until after the mob had completed its work. No arrests have been made as of yet, although indignation runs high, principally on the killing of Leslie Price, the guard who was well known and a very prominent citizen of the Basin country.”
Many newspapers incorrectly called the guard “Leslie,” instead it was Christopher Earl Price, 26, who had served as deputy county clerk and was deputized as a prison guard along with Basin Marshal George Mead.
Mead was a well-known pioneer in the region who, according to a Nov. 3, 1904, Big Horn County Rustler news story, knew famous frontiersman Jim Bridger. Mead arrived in Wyoming as a teen in 1877 and lived for several years in Lander.
Newspapers around the region and West carried stories of the “lynchings,” which in reality were shootings.
Sheriff Had A Tip
A report in The Kalispell Journal of Kalispell, Montana, on July 23, 1903, reported that Big Horn Sheriff John Fenton earlier had been tipped off that a mob was probably headed his way from Hyattville and Ten Sleep to lynch prisoners Jim Gorman and J. F. Walters.
Both men had been sentenced to hang.
Gorman had been convicted of killing his brother, Tom Gorman, a Big Horn County rancher on Brokenback Creek. Jim Gorman’s collaborator was his brother’s wife, Maggie, who “he had been paying undo attention to … which had caused problems between the brothers,” The Newcastle News Letter Journal reported Friday, June 20, 1902.
Tom Gorman disappeared, and the pair told neighbors Tom had gone to Canada. The neighbors became suspicious and notified the sheriff. He found Tom Gorman’s body in a shallow grave on the ranch. Meanwhile, Jim and Maggie had fled in a wagon with household items trying to make it out of state.
They were arrested and charged with murder. Maggie testified against Jim and was released.
The Main Street in Basin, Wyoming, year unknown. In 1903, a mob rode through the streets to the county jail. (Courtesy Wyoming State Archives) 
The grave of Christopher Price, who was acting as a deputy guarding two convicted murderers when a mob attacked the Big Horn County Jail. He is buried in Basin. (Courtesy Find A Grave) 
Basin Town Marshal George Mead, also acting as a Big Horn County deputy, was grazed in the attack at the Big Horn County Jail. He was a pioneer who was reported to have known Jim Bridger. He is buried in Cheyenne. (Courtesy Find A Grave)
Wealthy Widow
Walters, according to news accounts starting in spring 1901, had tried to woo Otto, Wyoming, widow Agnes Hoover after learning that she was well off. Her husband, John Hoover, was a respected Otto merchant who had died from pneumonia Jan. 30, 1901.
Agnes Hoover rejected Walter’s attention.
In the summer of 1901, Walters intensified his efforts and Hoover, in an effort to avoid him, went to Thermopolis with friends, taking her 11-year-old son Fred with her. Walters followed.
At a camp Sept. 7, 1901, she was walking with her son when Walters walked up and shot her in the heart.
The July 20, 1902, Buffalo Voice reported that Walters was arrested and saved from death at the hands of an angry mob then by the prompt action of a “Mr. Gregg,” who persuaded the vigilantes that law should take its course. Walters was tried in October 1901, convicted and sentenced to hang. He appealed to the Wyoming Supreme Court.
In July 1903, to preserve his prisoners from the mob he heard was coming, Big Horn Sheriff Fenton reportedly took the detainees including a horse thief, out of the jail Wednesday, July 8, and hid them in a gully under the guard of Price and another deputy. While there Gorman escaped.
“He swam the Big Horn River, an unprecedented feat, and made for the mountains,” The Kalispell Journal reported.
Sheriff Fenton pulled together a posse, and Gorman was recaptured early Saturday morning and brought back to Basin. The prisoners went back in the jail.
Early the next morning the mob arrived with telephone poles to bash through the doors and fired a volley into the jail.
One news account has a bullet passing through Price’s heart and hitting Mead. Another account has a bullet grazing Mead’s shoulder and passing into Price’s heart.
The mob could not get break into the jail cells, so they shot both prisoners. Walters died instantly. Gorman, with five bullets in his body, “lingered” until Sunday afternoon
Charges Brought
A grand jury charged seven Big Horn County ranchers for the killings.
On April 22, 1904, county Prosecutor John P. Arnott dismissed three murder charges against L. Taylor, a man named Hardee and another named Ralph Mercer for lack of evidence. Two counts against Dan Lee Morse were also dropped, but he was charged with murdering Price.
“In order to make the cost of the prosecution as light as possible, the authorities propose to concentrate their entire efforts to convict alleged leaders of the mob,” the Newsletter Journal reported April 22, 1904. “Colin Mackenzie, a well-known rancher and sheepman of Shell; George H. Saban, sheepman and rancher of horse Creek; and James G. Tatlock have been chosen to bear the brunt of the prosecution.”
Price’s uncle, described in the paper as a stockman of means, vowed to spend “$10,000 if necessary to ferret out Price’s slayer.”
But in the end, there was no justice other than the justice achieved by the vigilantes. Seems nobody around were willing to aid in prosecuting the mob leaders.
The Butte Miner newspaper on April 28, 1904, reported that Morse was acquitted by a Basin jury.
“The prosecution dropped the case owing to its inability to get witnesses to testify and the court instructed the jury to find for the defendant,” the newspaper reported. “Indictments were last fall returned against George Saban, James Tattlock, and five other ranchmen who were alleged leaders of the mob but owing to the failure of the prosecution in the Morse case, it is thought the entire matter will be dropped.
“It is alleged that thousands of dollars were expended by members of the mob in getting witnesses out of the country and closing the mouths others.”
Killer Again
Saban would return to court in 1909 as one of the ranchers accused in the infamous Spring Creek Raid and was sentenced to 20-26 years in prison for the murder of a sheepman. In 1913, while working on a road gang, he escaped from the custody of a guard. The Casper Daily Tribune on Feb. 22, 1922, reported it was thought Saban was living in South America.
Saban left a wife and seven children, including one born in 1909. His wife would continue to be mentioned in social columns of local papers. He was never heard from again.
The mob violence was rejected by Wyoming’s Attorney General Josiah Van Orsdel who wrote a column printed in the Wyoming Stockgrower and Farmer on Aug. 11, 1903.
Van Orsdel said the mobs needed to know that the legal system did work. He also blamed the press for inaccurate information that could have led to the mob violence and deaths.
“Gorman was convicted of murder in the first degree at the May term of the Big Horn County court this year, less than 60 days ago. He was sentenced to be hung. A stay of execution was granted by the district court upon notice of appeal, as is required by statute in every criminal case,” Van Orsdel wrote. “And a leading newspaper of the state immediately published the news broadcast that Gorman had been granted a new trial — that justice had again been miscarried; while in fact, his case has not yet been presented to the Supreme Court. … Such loose, unreliable, criminal jumbling of news is not only dangerous, but in all probability is largely responsible for the condition that now exists in Wyoming.”
Mead, the survivor and pioneer, died in 1940 and is buried in Cheyenne.
Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.
