As is common for frontier regions, in the Owyhee laws were often observed in the breach, and for non-violent crimes law enforcement acted at a distance from the town limits only when there was a complaint. Some crimes were even viewed as reasonable under the circumstances. Two such offences were the manufacture of illegal liquor and the rustling of livestock, so long as it was limited to a single animal or two for one’s own consumption. For some these activities were an integral part of putting sustenance on the table, important means for those of limited resources and a supplement to the incomes of the better off.
Moonshining probably came to the Owyhee Canyonlands from the South. Leonard Duncan makes a point of mentioning that “Old Man Moody,” who ran a still up on Haggerty Trail, came from South Carolina. If the provenance of others were traced, many would probably have similar origins. The Owyhee country offered an environment suited to the growth of moonshining. Aside from the numerous draws and canyons where stills could be concealed and access made difficult, Oregon had prohibition before it became nation-wide. As early as 1844, while Oregon was still a territory, prohibition was adopted, though it was abandoned the following year. Then in 1915, when Oregon had been a state for more than fifty-five years, prohibition was again adopted–five years before the Eighteenth Amendment enforced it throughout the country.
As the rest of the country would do later, the Owyhee country responded to being made dry in two ways: importation and production. Importation was primarily from Nevada, though no doubt Idaho was a source as well. As Ethel Raburn recalled
They were bringing it up from Nevada as well as making it here. That was before the United States went dry. You see, Oregon went dry before the whole United States did. It had voted dry in 1914. That’s why Nevada was bringing it through. They [Oregon] had a longer siege of being dry than some of the states did.1
Prior to Prohibition, the Nevada whiskey was likely of legal manufacture. Before long, however, the majority of the liquor consumed in the Owyhee was probably manufactured locally, and within a short time, Owyhee whiskey was being shipped to other parts of the county and exported to Idaho.
The reasons for taking up moonshining were elemental: good drink, a means of exchange and a source of cash. According to George Palmer, “Some on the river made it for themselves–what they wanted to drink. If they made very much, they made it for a living.” As a good drink, it was cheaper and considered better than anything one could get from the liquor store. It sold for $3.00 to $10.00 a gallon, whereas the “good stuff” from a liquor store–”if you could get it”–ran $10–$12.00 a quart. Palmer would sell it to “different people, anyone who’d bootleg it out.” Bootleggers who got ahold of the local product could sell it for as much as $25.00 a quart. Its share of the local economy is impossible to judge, but for some it was important. As Palmer said, “It was legal tender.” Well, “illegal tender” perhaps. But he used it to barter for groceries in Ontario, exchanged ten gallons for a set of work harness, traded some for hay, and used it to pay mechanics. Another reason was the Owyhee dam: According to Joe Beach, once farmers saw it was going to be built, they didn’t work too hard on the land and began making moonshine and raising turkeys.
A complete list of the Owyhee residents who made moonshine would probably constitute a head-of-household directory for the entire area. While denying that he had done any, James Page named the Palmers, the Maupins and my godfather Conley Davis, though the only still he ever saw was Leonard Goodwin’s. Others mentioned in the interviews included Ray Nelson, Old Man Moody, Fred Scott, Wes Halford, Frank Davis and Chesley Blake’s Uncle Ed. Perry Maupin received several mentions. There were also those who invested in the stills. Ray Nelson ran a still with Perry Maupin up in Dry Creek that was paid for by an unnamed man in Vale. “He bought it and we took it out there and set it up and went to work. We’d known each other a long time, and we just happened to meet in Vale and got to talking about it, and decided we’d make a run.”
The Owyhee Canyon was ideal for concealing stills. According to Kirt Skinner, “The canyon has some pretty unaccessible spots all the way down, and they had several moonshiners along it.” Bill Ross agreed: “There were a lot of moonshiners; practically one in every gulch,” and Leonard Duncan claimed, perhaps with some exaggeration, “You could get a drink in any canyon around.” As noted, Ray Nelson and Perry Maupin had a still up in Dry Creek, Frank Davis ran one at Robber’s Roost near Bogus Creek, Old Man Moody ran his at a spring at Haggerty Trail, and Frank Swisher and Judd Wiseman ran one on the Owyhee river Middle Fork at the Fenwick homestead, which became known as Moonshine Hole. It seems that no one had to go very far to find a drink.
Perhaps the most notable of the Owyhee Canyon distillers was Ray Nelson, who wrote a book on the subject and spent ten months in jail for possession of a still.2 Nelson described in some detail the process:
Get a copper can–we had a sixty-five gallon one–dig a trench, put the can over that, build a fire in the trench. You have a metal jacket comes around the outside of the still, and the smoke goes around and under that and up through a stove pipe. The fire heats the can. When you put the mash in there, then it gets so hot and comes out through a coil. The coil comes out of the can and makes several turns in a barrel of cold water. You have a spring piped into the bottom, and warm water comes into the top, and it condenses the steam back into liquid form. Well, that’s the alcohol; it makes the whiskey. You keep testing until it gets to 100 proof.
The mash barrels: You take a fifty gallon wooden barrel–you can’t hardly get them nowadays, but you could get lots of them then–and take about forty pounds of rye and about forty pounds of sugar and a wooden tub–half a barrel cut in two–and put warm water in that and let it dissolve into a syrup, and we’d pour that into the mash along with the rye and put a yeast cake in and cover it with a cloth to keep the flies out and leave it in a warm place, and about the third day it began to bubble. About the fourth day it was really rolling, like it was boiling, and you didn’t want to fill the mash barrel too full, because it would boil over. It’d do that for about a week, and then go to settling and get clear. It had a real sour taste–almost bitter. Then it was ready to run. You put it through your still.
If it was cold enough, you had to put them in a dugout, a hole dug in the ground about half the size of a room. It was big enough to stand up, and it was roofed over, and you had your barrels in there. Sometimes you had to have an oil heater–kerosene to keep it warm. You had to have a vent in the top of it to open when you went down in there when that mash was working. Otherwise the fumes would overcome you.
We had just an old-time pitcher pump and a hose going down into the mash barrel, with a screen on the end of it to keep the rye out of the still, and we’d just pump that mash out of there into the still until it was about three-quarters full. You put a plug in there so no steam could get out of the still–only into the coil–and you kept your fire going, and you kept tasting the liquor that ran into the wooden barrel. It first came out about 188 proof. We shut it off at 100 proof, and what was left, we’d pour back into the mash barrel and run it over again. All the time it produced a stronger grade of alcohol with that weaker alcohol being put back. We’d run the same mash, with more sugar, about five or six times before it was wore out, and you had to make yourself new rye.
I don’t know how much we made at Maupin’s–probably about 100 gallons [a batch]. It was a small operation. What two people could handle.3
The quality of the product could vary, though for some strength rather than quality was prime. Chesley Blake recalled his dad asking Clyde Bethel to run off a ten gallon keg for him. “He must have burned it or something. The most doggone powerful stuff you ever tasted. We kept it for the buckaroos, and they’d be climbing trees and everything else. Aunt Cecil and the kids were scared to death…..” Color came from putting the new moonshine into charred oak kegs, which were buried to age it and perhaps mellow it a bit, though the month they allowed it couldn’t have taken out much of the bite. Some distillers added a cigar to the batch for color.
Equipment for the still was of local manufacture.4 A copper and tin smith–“an old Swede”–made stills all over the region, including in Idaho and Nevada. He could produce whatever size was need up to 500 gallons. The oak kegs for aging were purchased from a couple of wholesalers in Ontario. Unlike the stills, it was not illegal to sell oak casks. Transporting all the paraphenalia was a challenge. Ray and Perry packed their still out to the Maupin place on pack horses. Each took a saddle horse and led a pack string. With pack horses, they could carry 100 pounds of sugar on each side of the animal; a mule could add another 100 pounds on top to make a 300 pound load. A hundred pound sack of sugar would produce ten or eleven gallons of whiskey; the pack horses carried a ten gallon keg on either side back into town. The moonshiners used cars as well, but the new balloon tires posed another problem: loads could be so heavy that they “rim cut” the tires if they weren’t pumped up tight. Moreover, cars didn’t fair well in bad weather, forcing the men to resort to pack animals. Another advantage of the pack horses was that they were gentle. “We didn’t have to tie supplies too tight. You could just hang stuff on them,” said Ray Nelson.
The finished product found a ready market. Closest was Vale, which according to Ray Nelson, “For a little old sagebrush town, it was what we called a bad one. All the law lived there and the church members run things. There were lots of stool pigeons.” But ranchers and businessmen could hold a party with whiskey at the Drexel Hotel, and the sheriff and county attorneys would not bother them, “because they could cause them a lot of trouble come election day.” Ontario was considered more wide open, and as we’ve seen, George Palmer even used moonshine there as “legal tender” for purchasing groceries and other items. The whiskey Frank Davis produced at his place on Bogus Creek was sold in Boise. But the liquid’s value also made it the target of robbers and thieves. Bill Ross recounted, “There was always someone holding up a moonshiner and stealing his whiskey. They couldn’t complain to the law. But it was just like they were taking his calf crop now.”
Moonshining was of course against the law, but Ray Nelson and Perry Maupin were pretty safe. It was over fifty miles from Vale to Dry Creek. The law didn’t drive out to Dry Creek and in any case would have had to go through the Maupin place to get to them. Sometimes lookouts were posted to give the alarm if the law came. But it was when they had finished running a batch of moonshine and were bringing their equipment back that Ray got caught at the mouth of Dry Creek with the still. The law was pursuing a jailbreaker they thought might be in the Dry Creek area and just happened to stumble upon him.5
The attitude of local law enforcement toward moonshining was ambivalent. Ray heard that they did not destroy the confiscated still but put it to work. “They had guys making whiskey for them and selling. Twice when I was in jail, they brought whiskey into the cellar at the jail when they confiscated it …. Twice about 2:00 in the morning I saw a big black sedan pull in and load up something out of that cellar. Had to be contraband whiskey.” Ethel Raburn recalled when Prohibition was adopted, “The revenuers showed up quite often, but the news would always get here before they did. They were always tipped off. I knew a man down here at the ranch who made a lot of it, and they caught him, and they put him in jail. When they turned him loose, they said now get back and make enough to pay your fine. So he came back and got to making it again, and he ended up the same thing. They come back and arrested him again. I knew him. He was on the election board.”
Even during Prohibition, the law normally did not go searching for moonshiners, unless someone got mad at a moonshiner and reported him. Then the sheriff would go looking for the operation. Walter Perry recounted a particularly amusing anecdote about Conley Davis’ still.
Conley Davis used to make a lot of it out there. Charlie Glenn, and Charlie Leavitt was the sheriff at that time, come out there–someone turned Conley in–come out there to look for his outfit. They knew right where it was at and all that, but they drove up to the...they lived at the Griffith place–and they come out there in a car. ‘Course they lookin’ around the house, the barn and for whiskey. They had cache for it. Stacia, she’s Conley’s wife, knew damned well where the outfit was running at the time. So what’d she do? She went out there and looked in Charlie’s car and it had the keys in it. So she just steps in the car and took off. Away she goes to the still, and left Charlie and Charlie’s men and Charlie Leavitt at the house there afoot. Well, they didn’t have no car, so the only thing they could do was go out to the barn and get ‘em a saddle horse. They figured they’d [unclear] the river right and try to overtake her. They knew damn well where she was headed. She was headed for the still, to get them boys away from there. Well she did. She did…. And the still was across the river from where they could get to it with a car. Of course she gave them a warning that them guys was headed up there, and they all just scattered just like a bunch of quail that was workin’ around there. And, uh, I know Conley swum the river three times that day a horseback getting away from ‘em.
And, uh, ‘course Stacia, she come up to the end of the road, that was the end of the road where she went up to. Charlie Glenn and Leavitt they got ’em a horse apiece outta the barn and saddled them up and took up and rode after them. They got up there, well Charlie Glenn and Charlie Leavitt rode up there, and they was going to swim the river there where the still was at– the still was across the river at what they call the old Basko place–and Stacia told Charlie, says, “Now listen Charlie, says, we don’t want no bloodshed over this here deal. But I never tried to swim that horse across the river there. ‘Cuz he’s just a young horse, and didn’t know anything about swimming the river. I’d advise not to cross the river with that horse, ’cuz if you swim him across, I don’t know whether he can swim or not.” So Charlie took her at her word and went down the river a little ways where he could ford the river. And they went up and they tore the still up. They never did do nothing to Stacia.
Apparently they did nothing to Conley either, and several years later (according to my mother) he fed me my first cocktail at the age of two months.
Moonshining was a crime primarily against Federal law, though of course it might also be governed by state and local codes. (Ray Nelson’s comments suggest that some in Vale may viewed it as a violation of God’s laws as well, but the sheriff probably didn’t concern himself with enforcing those.) But the act itself did not deprive one’s neighbors of their wealth or property, and by many it was viewed as acceptable and even meeting a social need. The same cannot be said of the other major criminal activity–rustling. Rustling was the theft of another man’s property, specifically his livestock, including cattle, horses, sheep and perhaps occasionally hogs. The men who did it were said to have a "long rope." These were the source of the victim’s livelihood and the meat that went on the table to feed family, friends and hands. But even so it does not seem to have been viewed as seriously as in earlier times or popular literature when rustlers might be hanged. According to Bill Ross it wasn’t really a big problem, and Kirt Skinner considered it not so widespread as people thought, “Sometime someone would get a notion he could steal a few and get away with it.”
According to Ethel Raburn “there was lots of cattle rustling went on out in the country.” The rustled cows might have their brands changed with a “running iron”6 and then be added to another Owyhee resident’s herd. Ethel’s dad twice had his brand changed. His brand was the letters T slash C (T/C) with the T on top and C below. A neighbor took the same brand, adding a B on either side. “Dad found a lot of his cattle with the brand changed to that. They got that guy. Another guy down here was taking them off the range, and he changed the brand to a Box O. He was the son of the guy who made the double B. He was caught too.”7 As we shall see, getting caught could still earn one jail time even if it didn’t result in a hanging.
The changed attitude toward rustling is apparent in the tolerance toward taking another’s cows in certain circumstances. Ethel Raburn was not the only person to recall people saying “if you butcher beef, never butcher your own. A person would go to his neighbor’s to eat and he’d say, ‘Well, whose beef am I eating this time?’” Cattle belonging to the large cattle companies such as Miller and Lux out of California were fair game. As Leonard Duncan remarked, “A lot a fellas didn’t like them, and some was real respected citizens. Anybody who took from Miller and Lux, nobody would turn you in. They’d help you even if they hated you because Miller and Lux took away from the little guys.”
Rustling to put meat on the table as described by Ethel was probably largely opportunistic. That is, if someone found another’s animal among his herd, he would just take it and butcher it rather than bothering to return it to the owner. Those intent on building up a herd for themselves would have looked for cattle they could conveniently steal and whose brands could be readily altered. As with the case of Ethel Raburn’s father’s cattle, they might even adopt brands that would facilitate their work. They would take perhaps nine or ten head, a number small enough to avoid being too obvious but still large enough to be worth their while.
Changing the brands required somewhere the cattle could be taken and the work accomplished unnoticed, a secluded spot where brands could be altered and animals readied to be moved to where they could be sold. The Brace place on Juniper mountain was the hangout of one gang of rustlers. According to Bill Ross, they were “cattle thieves and holdup artists” headed by a “Calamity Jane type.”8 But the most notorious–Robbers’ Roost–was on the river about a mile upstream from the mouth of Bogus Creek, where there was a stone cabin and stone corrals, ruins of which remain. According to Clinton Anawalt, it was originally built perhaps before 1900 by Joe (José) Navarro, though Kirt Skinner said Navarro bought it from the Horn family. Navarro raised sheep there.9 It is unclear whether there was a particular group associated with Robber’s Roost or whether it was used by whoever needed it. It was there that the Raburn cows had their brands changed and were retrieved,
Now, that’s the one I’m talking about with the Box B. Yeah, the Box B. I’m tellin’ ya about… Not the double B but the Box B. That’s the one I’m talking about. And they called the sheriff and he come out there and caught them right in the act. They’d suspicioned him; they had the sheriff right there, and he caught them right in the act of changing the brand. That happened back in about 1939 or ‘40.…. They drove the cattle down there. Now that wasn’t all dad’s cattle they had. They had other cattle….They had, I think, nine or ten head brought home. Something like that.
Another name associated with Robber’s Roost was that of Frank Davis, who owned the Bogus Creek ranch where he reportedly made moonshine and had 300 head of horses. But he sold the Bogus Creek place and bought the Hole in the Ground ranch from Riley Horn in 1916. Later he sold that to his son Conley and a few years later bought a place on Succor Creek, where, according to Chesley Blake, he became the “ringleader” of a horse thieving gang that included his brother. If Blake can be believed, Frank Davis’ operation was pretty substantial. He would bring horses stolen in Nevada into Oregon, take horses from Oregon into Idaho, Idaho horses into Wyoming,10 and then bring horses from Wyoming back to Oregon and Nevada. An operation of that size could not go unnoticed, and the outcome was rather ironic,
He run that out of Succor Creek. And the farmers up there, they were losing their horses so fast that they got the law out there, and they came along and told old Frank that he was losing as many horses as they was. Better come along, they had ‘em trapped in a box canyon out there, and they surrounded them. An’ old Frank’s brother was there, so he had to send his own brother to the pen for ten years. (Laughter.)
But Frank wasn’t the only horse thief. In Blake’s words, “There was lots of horse stealing going that nobody knowed anything about.”
Moving more than a few rustled livestock without getting caught would have presented a challenge. Before the advent of large trucks and passable roads, they would have had to be herded. The preferred destination, as Clinton Anawalt described, was across the state line where it would be difficult to trace the brands. According to Leonard Duncan, “before the BLM went in, all that country there, including Rome, I could saddle up two horses, and I’d put you on one and I got on the other to take you to … the Tuscarora Fork of the Owyhee way up in Nevada without ever opening a gate.” In other words, there would have been little obstacle to getting a herd across the line. Even less so once trucks came into the picture.
Asked about how the ranchers dealt with rustlers, Clinton Anawalt replied, “The ranchers had them prosecuted when they caught them. A lot of them never got caught. Not so much then. Now you can steal a bunch of cattle and truck them and be gone. The next day they can be 200 miles away. Pretty hard to catch.” Still, that did not mean rustlers had a free ride; witness the fate of Frank Davis’ brother. And in the case of Ethel Raburn’s father’s cattle, one of the “instigators” went to the pen. But one has to wonder how much stigma was attached to doing time for rustling. When Frank Davis’ brother got out, he was immediately hired on to move a large band of sheep to Albuqerque, New Mexico. No doubt worse was the punishment meted out by the ranchers themselves, as when moonshiner Perry Maupin “and a fella named Roger Buckmaster was stealing a bunch of cattle out on the desert, and old Perry got shot through the jaw, and climbed on behind old Buckmaster’s horse, and they got away and they didn’t catch them, but Dad seen his Basko using his saddle as an extra pack saddle on the desert the next fall.” Ten years would have been a small price to have kept his jaw.
Criminal activities were not limited to moonshining and rustling. Men might arrested for poaching. In one case when a poacher was reported and the sheriff went after offenders, he found them at their still and got himself a twofer. And not all Owyhee residents were constantly on the side of the law. One Russell Boston, in jail for forging checks, escaped and turned up at Conley Davis’ place. Conley gave him a horse, saddle and bridle to get to California. Boston crippled that horse, so he stole a census man’s horse and rode it to Alturus, California where he sold it. Joe Beach thought it unlikely Conley ever got his saddle back.
Then of course there were the acts our pastors, preachers and elderly neighbors have always warned our parents would put us on the path to a life of crime. Joe Beach speaks for us all,
Halloween, us kids celebrated. Then we had to stay hid out for a few days afterward so they didn’t take the hide off us. April Fool’s day is when we turned the calves into the milk cows so they [the farmers] wouldn’t get any milk the next day. They stole chickens too. I did a little watermelon stealing. Don’t know why we did it.
Some questions are best not reflected on too deeply.
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1. Irony abounds. Oregon is one of the first states to legalize recreational marijuana.
2. Ray Nelson. Memoirs of An Oregon Moonshiner. Caldwell, ID:The Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1976.
With the narrative of the Steve Earle song “Copperhead Road” in mind, one wonders what might be growing in those canyons now?
3. The foregoing is from the BLM manuscripts, which are more paraphrase than direct record.
4. The photos in Ray Nelson’s memoir offer a good idea of what was involved. See also Mike Hanley. “Moonshine over Jordan.” In Owyhee Trails, ch 13.
5. Illustrative perhaps of the difference in town versus country attitudes toward moonshining is this anecdote from Ethel Raburn:
“One time a fella was bringing a load in from Nevada, and he got stuck right in front of the house up there. Dad said he just sat in that window all day and watched that car to see that nobody bothered it. When they got in from feeding with the feed wagon, they pulled him out and he went to town. He got arrested when he got to town. Dad knew he had a car full of whiskey.
6. In contrast to a “stamp iron” in the shape of the cattleman’s brand, a running iron was either straight or curved and used to draw a brand free hand. Thus it could be used to alter an existing brand.
7. Later in the interview Raburn corrected her statement from a Box O to a Cross O, which was confirmed by Clinton Anawalt.
8. The recording quality of the Bill Ross interviews is abysmal. I have had to rely on the BLM transcripts.
“Calamity Jane” was Jane Mason, who was infamous in the Juniper mountain area as a rustler and generally unsavory type. See Mildretta Adams, Owyhee Cattlemen 1878-1978. Revised edition. Homedale: Owyhee Publishing Company, 1979, 94-96; John P. Bieter, Jr. Showdown in the Big Quiet. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2015, 25.
9. Leonard Duncan claimed it was the Hubbell’s sometime in the early 1900’s but he is the only one who mentions the name.
10. On the Wyoming-Owyhee connection in the stolen horse trade and Wyoming as a source of un savory characters see Owyhee Cattlemen 1878-1978. Revised edition. Homedale: Owyhee Publishing Company, 1979, 94.