Vigilantes were a shadow government in frontier Prineville

In the months that followed the murders of A.H. Crooks and Stephen Jory, as detailed last week in Part One of this two-part series, the members of the mob that lynched their killer formed themselves into a secret shadow government.

They became known as simply “the Vigilantes,” and although they undertook their operations wearing masks and under cover of darkness, everybody pretty much knew who they were.

And that was a problem because who they were was the cream of Prineville’s social elite — men like Mayor Elisha Barnes, attorney George Barnes (Elisha’s son), and rancher Charley Long — and, of course, Central Oregon supervillain William “Bud” Thompson.

The Vigilantes were the secret militia arm of the Ochoco Livestock Association, the cattlemen’s committee that formed a few days after the Crooks and Jory murders.

And at first, letting the Vigilantes run things seemed to be working great. Most of the time, to get compliance from a rancher or homesteader who was breaking the law or violating range custom, they didn’t even have to saddle up. A terse letter, signed with a crimson skull and crossbones, almost always sufficed.

There were signs of trouble early on; in fact, there were a couple of murders, which we’ll get into shortly. But for the most part, the average Prineville resident liked having some effective law enforcement for once.

But, those murders. The first Vigilante-connected murder came in June of 1882, just a couple of months after the group formed. A cattleman from the Antelope area, Michael Mogan, came into Prineville to do some gambling.

Mogan got into a card game with James Morris “Mossy” Barnes, a younger son of Mayor Elisha Barnes. At some point, Mogan and Mossy Barnes started arguing — there are half a dozen conflicting accounts of what caused the fight, but most of them involve a disagreement over gambling winnings.

In any case, Mossy Barnes left the saloon, went home, and returned with a revolver, which he used to let some fresh air into Michael Mogan’s chest. Mogan died a day or two later.

Barnes was charged with the murder, but by the time his trial came up Crook County had been created out of southern Wasco County, so the trial was held in Prineville rather than The Dalles, and the court was stacked with fellow Vigilantes. They scheduled the trial at the same time as the state fair, knowing all the prosecution’s witnesses would be unavailable at that time. Mossy was duly acquitted.

It was toward the end of 1882 that the Vigilantes started getting bold. They were the law in Prineville, and now everybody knew it. It had become dangerous even to publicly criticize them or their methods; even a mild expression of disapproval could provoke one of those dreaded letters — or worse.

It got worse for a rancher named Al Schwartz, close to Christmastime. Schwartz was a longtime resident and cattleman who had publicly opposed the Vigilantes from the start, but still socialized with them from time to time. One cold December night, he was drinking and gambling in Harry Burmeister’s saloon with several Vigilante members when someone outside shot him in the head through a window.

Meanwhile, back on Schwartz’s ranch, other Vigilantes had invited his hired hands, Sid Huston and Charles Luster, to a neighbor’s house, probably for dinner. The neighbor was another of the Barnes boys, W.C. Barnes; and a group of Vigilantes rushed the house, seized both boys, dragged them to a nearby juniper tree, and lynched them both.

It turned out Luster was the main target of the whole night’s operations. He was a horse-racing jockey, and on his last race, he’d ignored some very pointed advice from well-connected Vigilantes that it would be much healthier for him to lose the race than to win it. Luster ignored the threat, refused to “flop” and ran his best race.

He won, and as a result, several highly placed Vigilantes lost big money.

After the lynching, the Vigilantes claimed Luster had been a horse thief who had been planning a big score, and they’d gotten him before he could do the job. But the result of his last horse race, and who won and lost money on it, was common public knowledge in Prineville, and the average Prineville resident had to wonder at how convenient it was that Luster was just suddenly being denounced as a horse thief less than a week after causing Vigilantes to lose their bets.

A few days later, a Vigilante named Charley Long picked a fight with Hank Vaughan, of all people. Vaughan, who was probably the most gifted non-Indian horseman in 1800s Oregon and knew a winner when he saw one, had bet heavy on Luster’s horse and won a whole lot of money from Vigilantes.

Long may not have been familiar with Vaughan’s reputation — he was probably old Oregon’s best gunfighter — or maybe he just thought he was good enough to outplay him. In any case, the two of them acted out some Wild West pistol pageantry in the middle of Till Glaze’s saloon, and both ended up recovering from serious gunshot wounds (two apiece) in the same hospital room.

A few other mysterious murders and disappearances happened around this time as well — all of them happening to ranchers and homesteaders who had publicly criticized the Vigilantes. Historian David Braly writes that there is a house on Deer Street in Prineville that still has scars on it today from a dynamite bomb the Vigilantes placed there back in 1883 to target one critic.

That whole year was a sketchy one for Prineville residents, and most of them kept their heads down and tried not to come to the Vigilantes’ attention. Several residents, when they received a warning letter with the skull and crossbones, packed up and left town rather than risk facing a group that had demonstrated itself to be arbitrary, ruthless and bloodthirsty.

Along about Christmastime in 1883, though, some new things happened that finally pushed the situation too far.

The first thing was that Bud Thompson — who until this point had managed to avoid any direct involvement with the Vigilantes, although everyone knew he was the mastermind behind the scenes — murdered Michael Mogan’s brother, Frank.

Michael Mogan, you’ll recall, was the fellow Mossy Barnes got in a beef with and gunned down in a saloon the previous year. That trial had just concluded with a verdict of “not guilty” from a thoroughly intimidated Prineville jury, and Frank Mogan was probably still pretty upset about it. Also, James Blakely told Oregonian reporter Herbert Lundy, years later, that the gun Mossy used to murder Michael Mogan was borrowed from Bud Thompson.

In any case, Frank Mogan considered that Thompson had had something to do with it. So the two of them got into what appears to have been a screaming row just after midnight, in Till Glaze’s saloon.

The argument culminated in Bud Thompson pulling his six-gun and emptying the whole thing into Frank Mogan — and remember, this would have been a single-action pistol, so he had to manually recock it for every shot.

Bud Thompson now got to personally reap the benefit of the packed court system and cowed jury pool that had helped his young friend Mossy beat the rap. And it worked out in more or less the same way, except that now the public was starting to get wise and to wonder if this kangaroo-court stuff was going to be a new normal for Prineville.

The Vigilantes got one more solid murder in, extirpating rancher Steve Staats for the crime of saying mean things about them before the music stopped for good.

And the way that worked was, they marked out rancher James Blakely for their next hit, and Blakely turned out to be rather more than they could handle.

Like Hank Vaughan, Jim Blakely was a Brownsville kid, born there in 1851. So he was two years younger than Vaughan, and probably knew him growing up.

Also like Vaughan, Blakely was tough as a steel fencepost. Unlike Vaughan, though, he had the respect of pretty much everyone in town. He worked hard, minded his own business, and was very transparent in his views. The Vigilantes knew he disapproved of them, they’d known it since the lynching. Blakely had taken the lynching very seriously, because he’d been the one to convince Langdon to give himself up after the Crooks and Jory murders, and Langdon had been under his protection when the Vigilantes seized and murdered him.

The respect of the community kept Blakely safe for quite a while. But by late 1883, the Vigilantes were starting to feel confident enough to take him on. At their meeting, in a Prineville saloon, a Vigilante member named Gus Winckler — who, by the way, had been appointed Crook County Treasurer on Bud Thompson’s recommendation — said it was about time for the Vigilantes to punch Blakely’s ticket.

The thing was, by late 1883, the Vigilantes’ popularity had collapsed, and they didn’t know it. Basically, by this time, everyone who wasn’t one of them was an opponent — but, of course, nobody dared say so.

But several of the other folks in the saloon that night were happy to trot on over to Blakely’s place and tell him what Winckler had said about him, and Blakely was furious. He and several friends charged down to the saloon, but by the time they got there the Vigilantes had gone home.

The next day, though, Blakely strapped on his .41-caliber Colt revolver and went looking for Winckler. He found him in front of a hotel. When their eyes met Winckler hastily retreated into the hotel with Blakely in hot pursuit, and tried to hide out in the outhouse in back. Blakely ordered him out, marched him at gunpoint into the middle of the street, and told him to take the next stagecoach out of town. “You won’t get out of here if you don’t,” he growled.

Winckler left as ordered, leaving Crook County without a treasurer.

Meanwhile, David Stewart and Charles Pert, the owners of the Prineville Flour Mill, thought it was time to finally do something about the Vigilantes, so they reached out to Blakely and some others. They wanted to set up what amounted to a temporary political party — a sort of counter-vigilance committee.

Their focus was on beating the Vigilantes at the ballot box when they stood for reelection in June. However, they felt there would be some physical force needed for the protection of their candidates, who otherwise might mysteriously disappear or be lynched by Vigilantes pretending to think they were horse thieves. Hence, Stewart and Pert had reached out to all the roughest, toughest, rootin-tootinest non-Vigilantes in town to see if they’d be interested — starting with Blakely and a couple of others.

All of them were very interested. They formed a group, the Citizens Protective Union, on the spot, and elected Blakely as their leader.

When the Vigilantes found out about the CPU, they mockingly called them The Moonshiners, because they had met quietly late at night to form their gang. (The modern meaning of “moonshine” wouldn’t become a thing for several decades after all this happened, of course.)

The CPU members liked the name and adopted it, kind of like the American colonists did with “Yankee Doodle,” and from then on it was Vigilantes vs. Moonshiners.

As the jocular nickname implies, the Vigilantes didn’t take the Moonshiners seriously at first, which gave Blakely and his boys some much-needed under-the-radar time during which they hurried around from house to house talking to people they thought might be interested in joining forces with them.

They were probably surprised at how receptive folks were — certainly, the Vigilantes would be, later on.

“We worked hard, trying to brace up the backs of folks who had been terrorized for two years,” Blakely recalled many years later, “and it was not long before we had 75 or 80 good citizens in and around Prineville in the Moonshiners.”

That was a lot more than there were Vigilantes.

As the election drew near, the Vigilantes started to be annoyed by the campaigning the Moonshiners were doing against their candidates. They decided it was time to break the rival gang up once and for all, and they marked out a sort of “night of the long knives”-type plan to do it, targeting the Moonshiner leaders.

Unfortunately for the Vigilantes, one of their top boys — George Barnes, the mayor’s son — had a big mouth, or maybe he just didn’t realize that most of the town was backing the Moonshiners now. He bragged about the plan to a friend in a saloon, and somebody down by the end of the bar set down his beer and casually wandered out through the swinging doors, and five minutes later Blakely knew all about it.

The Moonshiners decided the best way to settle things would be with a show of force. So they put the word out to all members: All hands on deck. On the night the Vigilantes had picked for their move, the Moonshiners would assemble a few blocks away and present themselves en masse, like an attack-into-preparation move in a fencing match.

And so it was that, on the night the Vigilantes were meeting at Till Glaze’s saloon for what you might call their “mission briefing,” one of them looked up through the window and saw their evening’s targets strolling toward them up the middle of the street, fully armed and with faces cold and grim, with a huge crowd behind them. A century earlier that crowd would have been packing torches and pitchforks; but, since this was Prineville in 1884, it was bristling with rifle and shotgun barrels instead.

The crowd arrayed itself around the saloon, filling the street, a sea of grim faces glaring through a forest of long-gun barrels into the windows of the saloon.

“If you think you can stop us, come on out and try!” Blakely shouted into the silence, as the Vigilantes peered nervously out at what must have looked worrisomely like a lynch mob to them.

The seconds ticked by as thumbs toyed with the hammers of Colts and Winchesters outside the saloon, and the overwhelmingly outnumbered Vigilantes tried to figure out what to do.

In the end, they did nothing, and the Moonshiners, having made their point, went back to their families. They’d broken the power of the Vigilantes without firing a single shot.

The Vigilantes never rode again. And on election day, the incumbent Vigilantes were turned out, in most cases, by overwhelming majorities. One exception was Bud Thompson’s brother, S.G. Thompson, who won a narrow race for Crook County’s state senate seat; but he and Bud fled the state before the session started, so his opponent, Charles Cartwright, ended up taking the seat. Jim Blakely was elected sheriff.

A rumor, albeit a fairly solid one, claims the Thompson brothers slept in the barn with guns ready until their land was sold and they were ready to leave town. They needn’t have bothered. The Moonshiners never were interested in “taking over the other gang’s rackets,” they just wanted their county back. After they got it, the Moonshiners dissolved their organization and got back to their day jobs.

But maybe Thompson was hiding out from process servers. Martha Mogan, Frank Mogan’s widow, was suing him for murdering her husband. Eventually, the jury awarded her $3,600, which he avoided paying by slinking across the border into California, where he established himself in Alturas as a newspaper publisher and got involved with another round of lynchings and vigilante action there. When he died in 1935, he was revered as a heroic, colorful pioneer and a strong man of character.

He never paid his debt to Martha Mogan, though.

(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; “Pioneer Blakely Brought End to Vigilante Era,” an article by Steve Lent published in the Central Oregonian on March 23, 2019.)

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.

Continued Next Week