This is a story told to me by my grandfather, Orla Hicks. He told me this story several times. I first wrote it down when I was eleven. That was a long time ago.
Gramps, little Orly, was born on and grew up on Camas Prairie, near Soldier, Idaho, where his parents, Robert and Anna, homesteaded a 160-acre farm. Orly had several siblings, all much older, but he found a playmate, a boy about his own age, on a farm ten miles away across the prairie, near the foothills on the other side. He told me that this boy was family, a cousin, I think. I have forgotten that boy’s name, so I will call him Johnny.
Those ten miles between their homes meant that Orly and Johnny didn’t see each other very often, but when the boys were about 8 years old, that changed. By an arrangement between their families, the boys would spend several days with one family. Then, riding an old white mare, both would make their way across the prairie to spend several days with the other family. Wherever the boys were at a given time, it wasn’t all play. They did family chores, too. As soon as winter began to close in, the arrangement would end until after snowmelt in the spring.
Both boys were happy with this, and they were especially happy on the days that they spent crossing Camas Prairie when going from one house to another. In spring and summer, Camas Prairie is a 50-mile-long meadow filled with wildflowers, patched with fields of alfalfa and wheat, and dotted here and there with farms and ranches. The hills on both sides of the prairie are still wild.
Orly and Johnny would take their time crossing the prairie. They would fish, look for arrowheads, or simply lie in the willow-shade and watch the clouds sail by.
The boys were told by both sets of parents, however, to be wary. The Iron Bit Outfit (I will call it), an enormous cattle operation, was waging a hit-and-run war against farmers—“squatters,” the Iron Bit boys called them. Squatters were fencing their fields, “ruining the open range.” The rumor on the prairie was that the Iron Bit Outfit had hired gunmen to run out the squatters, at first using cheap buy-out offers, and if those didn’t work, resorting to violence and fire. Several settlers had already been burned out and forced to leave the prairie by the Iron Bit Outfit, or so Orly’s and Johnny’s parents had heard, and they warned the boys to keep a sharp lookout on their journeys across the prairie, and to hide if they saw any strangers.
On this particular early-summer day, Orly and Johnny had started the trek from Johnny’s house to Orly’s, and they had been lazy. They had “dinked around the creek,” as Gramps put it, for quite some time. They had eaten their packed lunches and had fallen asleep. When they woke up, shadows had grown long in the tall grass, and to the west, great thunderheads were piling up over the hills. Soon, there would be a storm.
“We’re not much more than halfway across,” the boys thought. “We’ll never make it to Orly’s before that storm hits.”
Across the meadow to the northwest, there stood a barn. They knew that barn. They had stopped to play inside more than once. Though abandoned, the barn was sturdy, with hay still stacked inside, a loft with a big hay-lift window, and a well-made roof. A small shed had been tacked onto one side, a shady place to tie a horse for an hour or two while exploration was happening. The settler’s home had been burned to the ground several years before and the farm abandoned, but the barn remained. No one would be around. “Let’s spend the night in the barn!” they decided.
In these days of cell phones and phone tracking, it’s not easy to imagine, but, of course, the boys’ parents wouldn’t have known on which day the pair of boys would show up on that old white mare. There was no regular schedule for their back-and-forth movements. How long they would stay in place depended upon chores and the weather, among other things. At one or the other of the homes, the boys would simply show up every few days.
No one would be worrying if they didn’t make it to Orly’s until the following day.
They took the mare to the creek and let her have a long drink.
The barn was less than a mile away. If they hurried, they could get there just before the storm. Light was fading. Behind the clouds, the sun was going down. They climbed onto the mare and made it to the barn before the storm.
They tied the mare to an upright support beam in the side-shed. Then they dug into the stack of hay in the back of the barn until they came to stuff that smelled right, and supplied her with feed for the night.
The boys decided to sleep in the loft. The handmade ladder was still in place. The boys had brought a can of beans in addition to the lunches they had already eaten. They climbed up the ladder, opened the can with a pocketknife, and had dinner while looking out the open haylift window.
The storm came in rapidly. Dark-bottomed clouds rushed across the meadows and fields. The barn creaked and groaned in the fitful winds, and in the early twilight, the first drops of rain came smacking down.
“Look, Orly!” Johnny said suddenly, just as they were finishing the can of beans. He pointed out the window. “Riders!”
Indeed, from the east, two riders came galloping. They were aiming for the barn.
“It’s going to start pouring any minute,” Orly thought. “Just like us, they are heading to the barn to get out of the storm.”
“What if they’re Iron Bit boys?” Johnny said.
“The mare is out of sight,” Orly said. “With all the noise from the storm, maybe they won’t hear her. Maybe they won’t go back into that shed.”
“What if they come up here?” Johnny asked. Orly could tell that he was scared.
Orly ran for the ladder and pulled it up, then buried it under a few inches of loose hay.
The barn doors swung wide and the boys crouched behind the hay, listening. By this time the barn was dark inside. They could hear the hollow steps of horses on the wooden floor, and voices, but they couldn’t make out any words over the sounds of the storm.
Then there was a brightness, centering in one corner below. Orly knew that brightness. His older brother, Marion, always carried a little miner’s lantern in his saddlebags. Carefully, Orly pushed aside some hay for a look.
There below were Marion and one of Johnny’s brothers, young men who worked on the family farms but also hired out as ranch hands now and then.
“Let’s keep low,” Johnny whispered into Orly’s ear. “In the middle of the night, we can make spook noises and scare our brothers to death!”
Orly thought that was a great idea. The boys stayed hidden in the loft as the two below rolled out their bedrolls on the floor and laid out food from their saddlebags. Then the storm came in proper, pounding the roof with waves of hard rain.
Something else came in as well.
The barn doors burst open, and in the dim light of the miner’s lamp, Orly saw two men, rain-slicked, standing in the open doorway. The men nodded to each other and came in, leading their horses.
Orly looked at Johnny. Johnny looked at Orly. “Iron Bit,” Johnny whispered. “Iron Bit brand on one of the horses.” The men tied their horses to an upright and walked over to the two young men.
As the boys watched from the hayloft, one of the men pulled out a gun and shot both young men.
“Squatters,” the murderer said. He laughed. The Iron Bit men dragged the bodies to the back wall and proceeded to unsaddle their own horses.
“We were afraid to move,” Gramps told me all those years later. “We were terrified that they would hear our mare in that little shed.”
The boys lay motionless in the hay as the storm raged outside. Orly and Johnny watched as the two men made themselves comfortable on the bedrolls already rolled out and ate the food that the two young men had carried in their saddlebags.
Orly paid particular attention to their faces.
Eventually, one of the men blew out the lamp and the two men went to sleep.
The boys didn’t sleep that night, but lay in the hay as if paralyzed, watching.
By dawn, the storm had blown itself out. The two men saddled up their own horses and, leading the horses of the two dead men, rode away. Orly and Johnny watched them from the haylift window. They didn’t venture down until the men were out of sight.
The boys ran to the bodies, but it was much too late. Both young men were cold, long dead.
The rising sun sent splinters of light through cracks between boards, light splinters all across the floor of the barn, across the bloody floor, the miner’s lantern, and the white faces of two young men who would never ride again.
“We’re going to swear. We’re going to swear on their bodies. We’re going to swear a blood oath,” one of the boys said. I don’t know which one.
A pocketknife came out and two swift cuts were made across the palms of two small hands, hands that were then clasped in oath, just as knights of old had done hundreds of years in the past and thousands of miles from Camas Prairie, Idaho.
“We swear,” said the boys together, “that if we ever see those two men again, we will kill them.”
Part 2
Years came and passed, and Orly was on his own now, eighteen years old, a man.
He had been hired to ferry a wagonload of bar furniture from Boise to the first bar to open in the small mining town of Jarbidge, just across the border into Nevada. And he had been warned.
“The guy who hired me told me to watch myself,” Gramps said, settling back into his armchair. “He said that a lone bandit had been holding up people going in and out of Jarbidge. He told me that on a narrow part of the track, a place with a steep drop-off on one side, this outlaw would fell a tree across the road and sit back in the shadows with a rifle until someone showed up. Then he’d rob them and take their horses. So the guy who hired me asked if I had a gun and I showed him mine, and he said, ‘OK, the job is yours. The money is waiting for you at the bar in Jarbidge. They’ll feed you and put you up for the night, too.’ So we loaded up the bar stools and such,” Gramps said, “and I headed southeast out of town with my wagon and team.”
Orly was four nights on the road before he got to the Jarbidge country of steep hillsides, narrow canyons, and rocky streams. Today in a modern vehicle, that trip takes four hours. Orly had been to Jarbidge before; he knew how to pace his team and where he would find water.
When he was close to the steepest part of the trip, not far from the narrow canyon of his destination, Orly tied his team to a tree. He took his pistol and climbed the slope away from the road, up into the pines.
Below, he could see the thread of dirt road bending through the rocks, a sharp drop-off on the downhill side. Across the road lay a fallen tree. And uphill from the road in the shade, with his back against a pine, sat a man with a rifle across his knees.
Orly watched the man. The man watched the road. Orly couldn’t see his face.
After some time, the man turned his head. Ten years had aged that face since the night Orly had seen it in the dim light of a miner’s lamp in an abandoned barn on Camas Prairie.
Taking careful aim, he shot the man. Only one shot was needed.
Orly found the outlaw’s horse tied to a tree in a draw back from the road. He led the horse back to his wagon and tied it to the back.
He drove his team to the fallen tree, sent it crashing down the mountainside, and took the bar furniture on into Jarbidge.
Dana Quinney grew up in Ketchum, Idaho. She is an Idaho outdoor biologist, having spent most of her career monitoring vegetation, re-seeding after wildfire, and studying small mammals. As a girl, she began writing down the stories her parents and grandparents told, and Death on Camas Prairie is one of them.