Breaking Blue (6 page)

They could keep some of the butter at Mother’s and store the rest of it at Ralstin’s ranch, south of Spokane near Hangman’s Creek—so named as the site where defeated Indian leaders were hung from pine boughs in 1858 after they came to Colonel George Wright seeking terms of surrender. In 1935, some citizens were urging that the original name, Latah Creek, be restored—a proposal that was shot down by Spokane civic leaders, who said it must remain Hangman’s Creek “to remind us of when the Redmen were cowed,” as one local politician put it.

As Burch and Ralstin discussed the rough outline of their plan, Burch noticed that somebody was listening—a woman named Pearl Keogh. A late-night regular at Mother’s Kitchen, Pearl was short and very pretty, with intense blue eyes and dark curly hair, which she usually wore to her shoulders. After midnight, when Pearl got off work from Sacred Heart Hospital, where she was a nurse, she went down the hill to Mother’s. Her sister, Ruth, worked there as a cook and later as night manager. With three children, and a husband sick with tuberculosis at a sanitarium, Ruth needed every nickel she got from Mother’s. Pearl was a bit more footloose. She flirted with cops at Mother’s and told jokes that cracked the boys up. Some nights, she would sit and chat with Ruth, nursing coffee, listening to the radio. Walter Winchell’s weekly round of rapid-fire news, launched from table 50 of New York’s Stork Club, was a favorite (“Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. Let’s go to press …”). Everybody was talking about Huey Long, the Kingfish, former governor of Louisiana, then a senator, who could coax a snake onto an iceberg. “Every man is a king, but no man wears a crown,” the Kingfish would say. His call to take money from the wealthiest people in the country and give it to the poorest, in the form of a five-thousand-dollar homestead fund for each family, was well received in much of the West. But in September, an assassin’s bullet effectively buried his plan.

Before she moved to Spokane, Pearl had a temporary job in Idaho doling out bullets to out-of-work miners and timbermen living in tents along the Saint Maries River. Governor Ross’s idea of relief was to encourage hunting. But some of the broken men couldn’t even afford to buy bullets for their rifles. Pearl was given boxes of cartridges by state officials and assigned to parcel out a ration of bullets to each family she could find along the river. One of eleven white children raised at the Saint Ignatius Catholic Mission on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, Pearl was living a near-subsistence life in Idaho when the Depression hit. But having grown up around Flathead natives who lived in tepees, snagged fish with dip nets, and hunted game by horseback, Pearl Keogh was no stranger to extracting food from the land. She fished and hunted and sassed back men who were twice her weight.

When she moved west to Spokane, she was hired as a nurse at Sacred Heart. Pearl was happy to have the job—except that the hospital couldn’t afford to pay her. Her salary was a weekly allotment of scrip, which she could redeem with merchants for food. She worked a second job in the day as a nurse for a doctor who gave tonsillectomies to schoolchildren, who paid a quarter for the operation.

During the endless hot nights of the final days of summer, Pearl joined the regulars at Mother’s in all sorts of diversions. Some nights, they piled into Virgil Burch’s Hudson and went out for a whirl and a gulp of cool air. But during the second week of September, the usual mix of loose humor, smart talk, and open deal-making seemed to be missing at Mother’s. Pearl felt the tension. When she asked Ruth about it, her sister put her finger to her lips and looked around. Something was up, she told her sister on Friday night, September 13. The boys were planning something.

Burch caught the sisters looking his way; he snapped at Ruth. “You wanna keep this job, you stay out of other people’s business,” he said.

Clyde Ralstin snickered; the idea that some little girl from Montana could hurt them was laughable.

A third man, a goose-necked ex-con from Mississippi named Acie Logan, a regular at Mother’s, was also in on the talk. Tall and muscular, with gray eyes and floppy ears, Logan was covered with tattoos
and scars, sketches on a body at war with the world since he had dropped out of school in the fourth grade. Nude women intertwined with snakes and cows on both forearms. On his chest an American flag was wrapped around a dagger. Logan had once challenged Clyde Ralstin to a fight. After Clyde whipped him, he became an acolyte, looking up to the big detective, impressed by his absolute confidence. King Clyde seemed invulnerable; nobody in the Stone Fortress or at Mother’s Kitchen could touch him.

Logan, who’d served time in five different jails since leaving Mississippi in the early 1920s, was afraid of returning to prison. He used to talk about his last address in a Washington State institution, the damp stockade at Monroe in the forests of Snohomish County, northeast of Seattle: he swore he went nearly thirty days one winter without seeing the sun. Logan had been in on at least two other butter heists, but the plan to knock off the Newport Creamery seemed to bother him. The dairymen were up in arms, angry and trigger-happy, talking about organizing posses and hanging the sons of bitches who were stealing their food and their source of winter money. The job might not be as easy as Burch and Ralstin made it out to be, Logan said.

The radio squawked of war talk between the Italians and the Ethiopians. Sipping her coffee, Pearl Keogh tuned out the news and listened to an exchange between Logan and the two friends who ran Mother’s Kitchen. Burch’s parrot was starting to chew on the wooden bar.

“What if somebody’s there?” Logan asked in his muddy drawl. “What if we get caught—what do we do then? I won’t go back to the joint. I won’t, goddamn it!”

“It ain’t gonna be a problem, Acie,” Burch answered.

“What the hell do you know that I don’t know?”

“I know we got experience.”

“Yeah?”

“We got Clyde here,” he said, slapping Ralstin on the back. “And he’s no virgin.”

W
ITH ITS
wood-planked sidewalks and saloons thick with sawdust, the town of Newport, population 1,400, made no effort to paint a promotional gloss over the haggard look it acquired during the Depression. Some days, when smoke poured from the chimneys of rawboned frame houses and a single car driving down the main street was enough to raise a cloud of dust, the town looked like it might well slide down the bank into the swift hold of the Pend Oreille River, and the valley would be better off without it. The river, one of the few in North America to flow northward, drains the timber and mine country of western Montana, northern Idaho, and eastern Washington. Like the towns of Ione and Usk and Metaline Falls and Priest River and Bonners Ferry, Newport existed because the nearby mountains were full of silver, lead, and gold, and the forests were thick with cedar, Douglas fir, and white pine. In 1935, Newport had not a single restaurant, no gas station, two banks, one small hotel, a grocery store, and a few bars, including one where patrons could wrestle with a live bear. On the Idaho side of the river, the Diamond Match Company maintained a sawmill, though it sputtered during hard times. Perhaps the most valuable enterprise in Newport was its commercial creamery, on the edge of town.

The job of Marshal George Conniff, Sr., was to protect the creamery and the handful of other businesses in Newport. He was fifty-three years old, stumbling through the worst losing streak in a life of fine adventure. The marshal had sandy hair, blond on the way to gray, and a cleft chin. He was not happy walking a night beat for the town of Newport; after four years as police chief in the town of Sandpoint, just across the Pend Oreille River in Idaho, he’d sworn off this line of trench-level law enforcement. At Sandpoint, he’d been shot at, kicked, punched, cursed, chased—and underpaid for all of it. He fought Indians and Finns drawn to liquor and the Pend Oreille fish runs, and tangled with tanked-up lumberjacks and tough-guy bootleggers. With his three children grown, George Conniff figured that it was time to get back to the land, as he’d long planned. This job in Newport, protecting merchants with a pistol and a badge, was supposed to be a one-year affair. His plan was to make just enough to finish the cabin he was building on acreage in a meadow facing the mountains, and then settle in for a better life. By September, he had only one month left, and then he would quit—done with law enforcement forever.

In the broad valleys and flat meadows of the Pend Oreille country, winter lingered too late and the first frost came too early for growing fruit or seed crops. But geologic tumult had endowed this land with good soil for alfalfa, one of the basic foods of dairy cows. When an ice and earthen dam in western Montana burst more than twelve thousand years ago, it unleashed the greatest flood ever known, a force of more than five hundred cubic miles of water pushing through the mountains and scraping coulees out of the basalt and forested high country of eastern Washington. Gradually, as the water retreated to the bigger channels, including the Pend Oreille and Spokane rivers, it left behind thick sediment, thirty feet deep in parts. Most years, a farmer could get several cuttings from a small hay field, which provided enough to feed a herd of milk producers. In those days before hay was baled and stored under tin-roofed barns, it was harvested by horse-drawn mowers and piled into hooded mounds exposed to the weather. During the mid-1930s drought, cinders from
nearby forest fires torched many a haystack, further depleting the supply.

Farmers whose cows were not starving brought their milk into the cooperative in Newport, where cream was separated and processed into cheese or churned into butter, and the remainder was kept in large urns and sold to retailers. Every week, the creamery ran an ad in the Newport
Miner
.

The creamery had more than enough business in the Pend Oreille country without having to sell in Spokane. A few years earlier, many of these same dairymen had been forced to dump their milk because prices were so low that they lost money on every gallon sold in a glutted market. As Americans moved to the cities in the 1920s, farmers for the first time became an object of contemporary caricature; they were laughed at, called hicks and hayseeds. Now, milk, butter, and cream were gold; the Newport Creamery was a regional Fort Knox, and the derision was more discreet. As hay became scarce and dairy supplies dwindled, the farmers who took their milk to the Newport Creamery felt the paws of a hungry land. There was a national shortage as well, with milk selling at ten cents a quart, but demand for at least thirteen million more quarts than farmers were producing. At Washington State University, in Pullman, students bartered for tuition with crates of canned peaches; a dozen jars could buy a student one semester of college. Wheat silos were being robbed. In 1935, the first year America ever had to import wheat, the price rose to its highest level in a decade. At the same time, Mussolini’s moves into Ethiopia with the Italian army helped to drive up the price. The notion that a European dictator’s thrust into Africa could provide enough incentive for thieves to break into wheat silos in the inland Pacific Northwest was an indication to some farmers that the world had become too small, too fast.

Just after seven-thirty Saturday night, the fourteenth of September, the sun ducked behind the western edge of the Selkirks, where the valley floor of the Pend Oreille rose in forested waves of green. A few of the aspen and larch trees at higher elevations were in the early stages of the slow turn to gold. The saloons were roaring as usual—piano music blended with laughter—and full of timber beasts and part-time miners and firefighters and government road-builders and prospectors. Darkness quickly drained the air of heat, but it didn’t lessen the aroma of forest fire smoke. Marshal Conniff kept away from the wild life in the beer halls and made his rounds in the alleys and back streets of Newport. Small-town America in this part of the rural West was no more idyllic than Al Capone’s Chicago. A month earlier, the town marshal of Rosalia, just south of Spokane, had been killed by gunfire from a trio of bank robbers. A year before that, Conniff’s predecessor as Newport marshal had nearly died of head wounds from a beating he suffered at the hands of food thieves. He had been kicked, pistol-whipped across the head, and left for dead.

For women, suffering with husbands who saw their pride dwindle away with the drought and Depression, the times were particularly harsh. In a town of shuttered gossip and diminishing hope, Saturday night would bring Marshal Conniff into the homes of women bleeding from the fists of their spouses. The marshal made occasional arrests, but the courts were not much help. As one judge in Spokane said in dismissing the divorce suit of a wife, “There is probably no greater cruelty which may be inflicted upon a man than that which is inflicted by a contentious, unreasonable, and nagging woman.”

An hour after sunset, the sky turned dark, the moon and stars disappearing under a sudden cloud cover. Winds pushed the warm air south; the rustle of pine boughs was a precursor to a storm. Conniff had checked the two banks in town and was on his way to the creamery. The forest fire smoke, which had hung in the air for most of summer, was a reminder of Conniff’s misfortune, the fire that had gutted his house.

One of fourteen kids raised in Montana, Conniff left home at age thirteen, joined the merchant marine, and saw the world. But his overseas adventures were cut short by a freak accident: a load of
ballast was dumped atop his head, breaking his back. Though he never regained full strength, he worked some of the most demanding of muscle-powered jobs—cutting ice blocks from mountain lakes for shipment to California, hauling timber from distant sites.

Later in life, Conniff found a forest-and-meadowed slice of valley twelve miles south of Newport and proceeded to set up a homestead. Conniff’s son, George junior, made friends with a native elder who one summer took him into a tepee where a ceremony was held. The Kalispels, whose name means “eater of camas,” had always lived on salmon and bulbs of the blue flower for which they were named. Although whites had built roads and set up villages and plowed many of the camas fields into hay farms, there were still hundreds of Indians whose lives were tied to the migrations of fish and elk in the rivers and woods north of Spokane. Well into the twentieth century, the natives set up traditional seasonal camps along the shore of the Pend Oreille or the Spokane, dip-netting fish and drying them for winter storage. Every July, the natives would hold a powwow, out of habit more than need; most trading was done with white merchants. If the name Spokane came up, it was often as a cautionary tale, the story of the utter betrayal of man and his homeland.