Vigilantes were a shadow government in frontier Prineville

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. But, 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, as 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.