In all the criminal lore of the country there is no record equal to that of Harry Tracy for cold-blooded nerve, desperation and thirst for crime. Jesse James, compared with Tracy, is a Sunday school teacher.
— Seattle Daily Times, July 3, 1902
Harry Tracy was a native of New York. In 1896, only twenty-seven years old and already wanted for murder in Utah, he joined Butch Cassidy’s notorious “Wild Bunch’’ at its hideout in Wyoming. He felt right at home with the other gang members, among them Harry Longabaugh (the Sundance Kid), Harvey Logan, and George Curry. Although his life of crime was short-lived – less than ten years – its brevity was punctuated by dishonesty, murder, and terror.
June 9, 1902, proved to be a momentous day at the Oregon State Prison in Salem. Three guards -- Ferrell, Tiffany, and Jones -- were busy counting prisoners in the courtyard and, satisfied that all of them were present and accounted for, ordered the captives to march to the foundry for another hard day’s work. One of the inmates, Harry Tracy, must have been a bundle of nerves. He knew that an accomplice had hidden a pair of guns in a toolbox just inside the foundry door. Tracy planned to use them to escape.
Inside the shadowy foundry, Tracy spied the toolbox, identified with chalk markings on its lid. He maintained his place in the orderly procession until he came close enough to the box to seize it. He threw open the lid and pulled out a rifle and a sawed-off shotgun. Passing the shotgun to Dave Merrill, the prisoner in line behind him, Tracy opened fire with the rifle, killing the three guards instantly. Pandemonium ensued. Before the surrounding guards knew what was happening, most of the other prisoners had flooded back into the courtyard, screaming and attacking every guard in sight.
In the confusion Tracy and Merrill scaled the prison wall and dropped to freedom on the other side, shooting several guards along the way. The pair then vanished into the thick brush. Behind them the sirens of the prison wailed like frenzied banshees. Telegraph and telephone wires hummed with orders. One of the greatest manhunts in American history had begun.
Soon after their escape, Tracy and Merrill accosted two deputy sheriffs and commandeered their horse-drawn carriage. Then they stole some more guns and headed for Portland. At Gervais, a small village a few miles north, a fifty-man posse surrounded the escapees, but they managed to slip through the lawmen’s fingers. By the time the pair reached Portland, the governor had called out 250 militiamen to join the search. Tracy managed to escape by forcing a local boatman to take him and Merrill across the Columbia River to Washington.
If the two believed they were safe in Washington, they had another thought coming. As they continued northward toward Tacoma, both the reward for their capture and the size of the posse chasing them grew.
The governor of Washington ordered his officers to shoot to kill. Near Chehalis, Washington, Merrill came to the end of his road when Tracy killed him after learning that Merrill had testified against him years earlier in exchange for a lighter prison sentence.
Now alone, Tracy arrived on the Puget Sound where he captured a fishing craft and forced its captain to carry him to Seattle. At a farmhouse there, the elusive killer once again escaped capture, turned eastward, and headed for Spokane. When he reached Lincoln County, he decided to hole up for a while and let the furor die down.
During August, rumors about Tracy’s whereabouts were as thick as the ripening wheat in the golden fields outside Creston, Washington. The town marshal, Charles Straub, dismissed most of the tales, but when an eyewitness claimed to have seen Tracy on a nearby farm, the lawman decided to investigate. Straub deputized four men—Oscar Lillengreen, Maurice Smith, Joe Morrison, and Dr. E. C. Lanter—and the small posse saddled up.
At the farm the lawmen found three men working on a barn. Tracy’s photograph had been all over the front pages of the local newspapers lately, and Straub noticed that one of the workers bore a striking resemblance to the fugitive. He identified himself as a law officer and ordered Tracy to surrender. Instead, the outlaw grabbed his rifle, fired a few shots, and disappeared into the billowing wheat fields that surrounded the farm.
When darkness came, the five lawmen took up positions around the edges of the wheat field where they planned to wait until morning. Sometime during the night, the posse heard a single shot. At dawn they found Tracy dead, the victim of his own hand. They also could see that he had bled copiously from a leg wound during the night. Obviously, he had opted for a quick death rather than to slowly bleed to death or be captured.
And so ended the career of the outlaw whom eminent Western historian, James D. Horan once described as the “mad dog of the Wild Bunch.’’ After a few weeks as the biggest news story in the United States, Tracy was largely forgotten.
James A. Crutchfield can be reached at TNcrutch@aol.com
