Lynch mob kicked off Prineville vigilante rule

It was the Ides of March — March 15, 1882. A man named A.H. Crooks had filed a homestead claim on a piece of land near Prineville. He and his hired hand, Stephen Jory, were out on the land now, cutting blaze marks on trees along the property line.

Except, it wasn’t the property line. The clerk in the county seat, way up in The Dalles, had made a mistake and tried to give Crooks a big slice of the homestead next door, which was owned by a cantankerous fellow named Lucius Langdon. Crooks and Jory were actually on Langdon’s property.

When Langdon figured out they were there, he came out to have a “git off my land” conversation with them. To help make his point, he brought along his Winchester.

There are several detailed accounts of this encounter, but none of them can be trusted, because nobody who was there lived long enough to tell the full story. All we know for sure is that a few noisy, smoky seconds later, Crooks and Jory were dead — and their killing marked the start of two years of rule by masked gunmen and lynch mobs in Prineville that sounds, today, like the plot of a Louis L’Amour novel: The Rise of the Prineville Vigilantes.

“When a band of men went outside the law … to revenge the killings, they also hanged an innocent man, and started a rule by gun and rope that is one of the blackest chapters in Oregon’s history,” local rancher and future sheriff James Blakely told a Morning Oregonian reporter, many years later.

Blakeley, by the way, was no unbiased observer of the Vigilante outbreak. He would, two years later, become the leader of the community group formed to oppose them — the Citizens Protective Union, a.k.a. “The Moonshiners.” More on him — and them — shortly.

The killing of Crooks and Jory was like a cigarette in the gas tank — the explosion of violence it set off was way out of proportion to it.

The real source of trouble was a simmering range war. Established ranchers in the Prineville area wanted to be able to use the public rangeland, but every year more “sodbusters” showed up to file homestead claims on it. It felt, to the ranchers, like something that was theirs by right was being stolen from them.

For example, Lucius Langdon wasn’t very welcoming to his new neighbor. But that wasn’t entirely because of their boundary dispute. If it had been, one or the other would no doubt have gone to The Dalles and investigated, rather than escalating straight to death threats.

But before Crooks filed his claim, the land next to Langdon’s place had been part of the public range, and he’d probably gotten used to running his stock on it. Now that someone lived there, he’d have to find new pasturage for the cattle and horses that he’d had grazing there. Many small-plot landowners, back then, depended on nearby public land to pasture large herds of stock, often more than could survive on their property alone. So when a greenhorn showed up and claimed a choice piece, it could be a real source of trouble.

Also, for the established ranchers — cattlemen especially — stock theft was a huge problem. Cows and horses found running on the public range were easy and fairly safe to steal, and if they didn’t have a brand on their rump, it was finders-keepers. Even if they did have a brand, rustlers found it pretty easy to drive them off across a couple of state lines and sell them someplace where the brand wasn’t known, or hide them away for a couple of years to let the brand scars heal. Plus, of course, hungry sodbusters sometimes stole cows off the range to eat.

Then, too, not all cows and horses that vanished from public-range pastures were rustled. Plenty more of them died of natural causes — falling down a mountain, getting eaten by bears, etc. Their owners, though, would naturally assume when they disappeared that they’d been stolen.

So, all the stock owners, especially the larger ones, were utterly convinced that they were being robbed blind all the time by sneaky gangs of thieves, some of whom were now “squatting” on federal land they thought should still be available for their use.

As it happened, the big cattle ranchers of the Ochoco Valley had been talking about doing something about this. Their leader was a ruthless, amoral Southerner named William “Bud” Thompson, who owned one of the larger cattle operations in the Hay Creek area.

Bud Thompson was one of those people who inspired the maxim that “only the good die young.”

In 1934, as he passed peacefully away at the ripe age of 92 in his lovely home at Alturas, Calif., honored and revered by the whole community as a brave and noble pioneer, Thompson could look back on a life peppered with chaos, violence, and murder. Oregon history buffs will remember him as the belligerent Roseburg newspaper editor who started a gunfight with a rival newspaper’s owners, which he barely survived, in 1871.

By the time he came to Prineville, a decade later, Thompson had made quite a bit of money and had friends in high places back in Salem. He was an all-in Democrat of the touchy old Southern type. Like an old antebellum Southerner, he called himself “Colonel” and carried a heavy walking cane, which he at least once used (a la Sen. Preston Brooks) to punish a rival newspaper owner who was mean to him in print.

New homesteaders quickly learned to fear “Colonel” Thompson, and with good reason. His combination of friends in high places and high social standing, not to mention his violent temperament, made him a fearsome person. But more and more he was starting to fear them — to fear that they would hem him in with their little land claims and maybe even get together and take away his power.

Lucius Langdon was one of a few established locals who actively disliked Bud Thompson, and the feeling was very mutual. So when Langdon got himself into trouble over this double murder, Thompson used it to galvanize the movement that became the Prineville Vigilantes.

Now, before we continue, I have to talk about the quality of sources for this story. They are terrible. There are quite a few from different secondary sources — newspaper writers, Wild West pulp mags, etc. But basically, all of these are based on just two sources: A brazen, mendacious memoir written by Bud Thompson in his golden years which reads in places like a Vigilante manifesto; and a detailed eyewitness account by James Blakeley, the former sheriff and head of the anti-Vigilante movement, given several times to different newspaper reporters over the years. It’s chiefly from these two men that we have the story of the Vigilantes, and their stories, as you can imagine, diverge wildly in places.

According to Blakely’s account, he (Blakely) was in town with Langdon’s hired hand, W.H. Harrison, when he heard the news that Langdon had gunned down Crooks and Jory. Both Blakeley and Harrison hurried to join a posse that was coming together to go out to Langdon’s ranch and bring him in. Another posse went to Langdon’s brother’s place, in case he’d gone there, but the killer was found at his ranch and arrested.

Colonel Thompson’s account is a bit different. In it, he says Harrison, the hired hand, wasn’t with Blakely and didn’t ride with the posse; instead, he was hiding out with Langdon at the brother’s place.

Thompson also claims that they found 10 men who were completely unknown to them in Langdon’s brother’s house. In this fabricated yarn, these 10 armed men are not arrested and nothing is ever heard from them again, as if they were minor characters in a Western pulp magazine story. It’s almost certain that Thompson made them up to claim the Langdons were the leaders of a gang of outlaws (a gang conveniently made up entirely of strangers from out of town) and to justify what was about to happen to Harrison, the hired hand ... more on that in a minute.

In any case, the posse brought Langdon back under arrest, with Harrison riding with them as a posse member. Langdon was entrusted to Deputy Sheriff John Luckey, and everyone went to bed.

Very early the next morning, though, as Deputy Luckey was sitting by the stove, the Vigilantes made their first move.

“The door was suddenly opened and I was caught and thrown backward on the floor and firmly held, while my eyes were blinded and immediately a pistol was fired rapidly 5 or 6 times. I heard someone groan about the time the firing ceased,” Deputy Luckey wrote in a subsequent report to his boss. “I went to Langdon and found him dead. I looked around and a masked man stood at each door, warning by ominous signs for no one to undertake to leave the room.”

The Vigilantes then grabbed Harrison — it’s not clear whether he was in the room with Langdon when the masked riders burst in, or whether he came later, attracted by the activity. Ignoring his panic-stricken pleas, the masked men put a rope around his neck and used a horse to drag him through the streets of Prineville to the bridge, where they strung his by-now-lifeless body from a banister.

Harrison, of course, was a posse member and had been in town when Crooks and Jory were killed. But as Langdon’s hired hand, his name had been mentioned on the charging paperwork as a possible accomplice, and that was good enough for the Vigilantes.

The next day, the men who’d participated in this double murder met with the top Prineville pillars of the community and formed an organization called the Ochoco Livestock Association. They voted Elisha Barnes, Prineville’s first mayor, as president, and promptly proclaimed no one was allowed to ride the range without a permit from them.

It was the beginning of the Vigilantes’ reign of their special kind of law and order in Prineville country — enforced by masked riders with drawn guns and ready ropes.

“The ‘Vigilantes’ who banded together that night to shoot Langdon and lynch the innocent Harrison stuck together for two years, getting bolder and bolder,” Blakely told the Oregonian.

The group took to sending death threats, with skull-and-crossbones emblems, to various people around town — some of whom, certainly, were rustlers and criminals, but others of whom were simply fellow ranchers opposed to their methods.

Colonel Thompson claims the escalation in Vigilante activity was in response to a bold increase in crime, apparently by the unknown gang of 10 outlaws first encountered in Langdon’s brother’s house. In truth, though, the only increase in crime was going to come from the Vigilantes. By 1884 Prineville was the murder capital of the state of Oregon.

Historian David Braly, who has done more than anyone else (present company included) to get to the truth of this story, thinks the rise of the Vigilantes was the result of an unusual combination of circumstances.

“First, the organization’s bosses were already the social and financial leaders of the region,” he writes. “Second, some members were willing to shed blood without much hesitation. Third, they became the local government, thanks to their roles in the community and because of Thompson’s influence at Salem.”

That third point is an interesting one. Residents had been very frustrated by the low quality of law enforcement in the Prineville area (part of that was surely down to the uselessness of Deputy Luckey) and had just finished up a successful push to split South Wasco County off into a new county, to be called Crook County.

When the split happened, about six months after the murders of Crooks, Jory, Langdon and Harrison, Oregon Governor Zenas Moody appointed all the government officials for the new county, with the understanding that they would serve until the next regularly scheduled election in 1884.

In making his appointments, Moody relied on advice from a friend who happened to live in the Prineville area ... a friend named Bud Thompson.

As a result, Vigilantes were installed in every single county government position. Moreover, although everyone in Prineville knew the lynching of Harrison had been a terrible mistake, nobody cared about Langdon — he was a murderer, after all — and they figured that given that the alternative was the same anarchy and chaos they’d been experiencing, it was fair and probably smart to offer a “mulligan” to the folks who’d stepped up to bring some order to their lawless community.

They’d come to regret that later. “No one, including the Vigilantes themselves, could have predicted how ruthless the group would become,” Braly writes, “or that some members would use the organization as a cover to settle scores.”

***We’ll talk about all that in Part Two of this story, next week.

(Sources: Crooked River Country, a book by David Braly published in 2007 by WSU Press; “When the Juniper Trees Bore Fruit,” an article by Herbert Lundy published in the March 12, 1939, issue of the Portland Morning Oregonian; Reminiscences of a Pioneer, a book by William Thompson published in 1912 by the Alturas Plaindealer)

Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State University and writes about odd tidbits of Oregon history. His most recent book, Bad Ideas and Horrible People of Old Oregon, was published by Ouragan House early this year. To contact him or suggest a topic: [email protected] or 541-357-2222.