Breaking Blue (7 page)

This inland empire was the last big section of mainland America to be seen by whites. On their return in 1805, Lewis and Clark had followed the Columbia east to its juncture with the Snake River near the present Oregon border, but they had not come near the high country to the north. A trading post, Spokane House, was established in 1811 by David Thompson, a trapper of great charm and endurance. He claimed the land for England. After Spokane House folded, a victim of its isolation, the Hudson’s Bay Company became the regional European presence with its operation at Fort Colville, northwest of the Spokane House location. Food was never a problem. “The natives have an abundance of the finest salmon in the world,” wrote one Hudson’s Bay Company official. “All within a hundred yards of their door, and plenty of potatoes and grain if they like it.” A young native, his Salishan name changed to Spokane Garry, befriended the traders and was sent to England to study Christianity and the new language of commerce. He was the eldest son of Illim-Spokaneé, chief of the
Sin-ho-mas-naish, or salmon-trout people, who became known as the Spokanes.

When Garry returned from overseas, he could read and write, speak English and French, and he knew which fork to use for salad and how to defer to a lady. He was given two wives by his tribe, the middle band of Spokane Indians living near the river. As sketched by artists in the 1850s, Spokane Garry had sharp, wide-set eyes, a regal nose, and a full head of thick hair, which he wore past his shoulders. He set up a missionary school to preach the new gospels of agriculture and Christianity. The Spokanes took to neither.

Garry, trusting men in uniform and those who said they represented God, thought the three thousand people who lived near the river would be left alone. But then gold was discovered near Colville, and a steady stream of hard-rock miners followed. When a white man was killed by an Indian in 1858, a cavalry brigade of 164 troops came north from Fort Walla Walla and was ambushed. It was never clear how many Spokanes took part in the skirmish; but that made no difference to Colonel George Wright, who led a punitive force north to avenge the loss. Wright became to the natives of the inland Northwest what Sherman had been to Georgians in the Civil War. Armed with new, long-range, rapid-fire rifles, Wright’s six-hundred-man army crushed the tribes as he drove north to the Spokane River and east into the Coeur d’Alenes. When the natives scattered in defeat, he sought them out, intending to burn their food supplies and kill their leaders. Chief Owhi and his son Qualchan came forth to discuss terms of surrender; Wright had them summarily hanged. East of Spokane Falls, in late September, Wright rounded up eight hundred of the natives’ horses and had them shot, one after another. All night, the shrieks of bleeding animals filled the valley as they were mowed down by round after round of gunfire. Some of Wright’s officers later wrote that it was the most sickening spectacle they had ever seen. But Wright wasn’t finished. He had fifteen other natives hanged. Moving east, he burned storage sheds full of grain and winter food, and he shot cattle.

When Wright at last withdrew, he left a starving and defeated band
of people in the rich empire. Spokane Garry, who had signed the terms of surrender after Wright forced him to grovel in tears, was given a homestead and the promise of a small pension every month from the federal government.

During the latter half of Garry’s life, the town of Spokane took shape around a flour mill by the falls. Silver was discovered in the east, gold in the north, and wheat farms blossomed in the rolling Palouse country to the south. The railroads fed the new town thousands of immigrants every year. Garry still tried to live a dual life: as a property owner on his homestead and as a traditional gatherer of food near the river. One day, while he was fishing, a white family simply appropriated his farmland, claiming he belonged on a reservation. Garry retreated to a tepee near the site where other Spokanes had been executed by Wright. Schoolchildren taunted Garry, a curious, shrunken old man with a half-blind wife. His pension stopped not long after his homestead was stolen from him. In his last years, he made occasional trips on his white horse to the fast-growing town. He survived off charity and the earnings of his daughter Nelly, who made a living washing clothes. When he died in 1892, his entire estate consisted of ten horses, all of which were later stolen from his widow.

The Conniffs worked with Indians—the Kalispels and the Spokanes—but did not share the gloom the natives had inherited from their fathers and mothers. The Spokanes were left with a small reservation far downriver from the falls, and the Kalispels were placed on forty-five hundred acres hugging the east bank of the Pend Oreille River—the smallest Indian reservation in America.

After felling the trees on his sixty-acre homestead, George Conniff blasted the stumps away with dynamite—a curious form of cultivation to the Kalispel and Spokane, but common in the early years of the twentieth century, when settlers like Conniff were called stump farmers. He planted potatoes and wheat and killed an occasional deer. The hope of Conniff and his wife, Alma, was that the garden, plentiful venison, and bartering would provide them with enough to get by. They raised three children in a drafty wood-frame house without
indoor plumbing. Some winter mornings, it was so cold that frost formed on the inside of their home. But the stump farm was not enough, so Conniff took the job as lawman in Sandpoint. It was difficult work—seven-day weeks, wrestling with woodsmen and itinerants. He quit the job after four years and made plans to become a full-time farmer, perhaps branching out with dairy cows. After traipsing around the world carrying loads of grain, ice, or logs for meager wages, and then keeping the law in the timber town of Sandpoint, he was ready to go to work for himself.

Conniff’s dream collapsed in a fire that burned the family home to the ground. When he went to collect the insurance money, he was told he had nothing coming to him. How could this be? He had paid the premiums, faithfully, for years. Yes, but he now found out that those premiums had not been turned in to the company. George Conniff was left without a dime to compensate for the house that had been destroyed by fire.

Broke, their house in ashes, George and Alma took up residence in an apartment in Newport, and he accepted the night marshal’s job—for one year only. At the same time, he worked furiously to build a new home, a log cabin, to replace the one gutted by fire. In the hours before his shift as night marshal, Conniff and his son cut logs and notched them together, the foundation of the place in which he hoped to live out his remaining, and better, years.

On Saturday night, as George Conniff walked to inspect the Newport Creamery, the cabin was half-built, and the marshal had given notice that he would be off the job within two weeks. It seemed as if his luck was starting to change. A few days earlier, he had received some wonderful news: the Washington State Supreme Court had ruled against the insurance company for failing to compensate Conniff for his fire loss. It ordered the company to pay the family $1,000.

O
N THEIR WAY NORTH
in Detective Clyde Ralstin’s REO Flying Cloud, the boys from Mother’s Kitchen talked about their own dreams. Women, of course. Clyde had his eye on one of the waitresses
at Mother’s—a real looker, he said. Her name was Dorothy. Hunting was another favorite subject. Ralstin and Burch were plotting their next trip to the cabin they shared on the Montana border. They knew the creamery heists could not go on for long—for one thing, they were running out of places to rob. Their ambition was to get out of the petty stuff and move on to something big. The pay of a Spokane police detective, Ralstin said, was pitiful. He’d been on the force seven years, had risen from patrolman to motorcycle cop to sergeant to detective, and still he made only forty-two dollars a week—an insult. “I don’t know why I even put up with it,” he would say.

It was bad enough that he wasn’t being paid what he thought he was worth; now Ralstin had to deal with hostile politicians and prosecutors. The year had begun with a city council investigation of police graft. They didn’t find anything on Clyde; he was too well insulated by his personal stockpile of other men’s secrets, the politicians and lawyers and police captains whose liquor came from the bootleggers who counted Detective Ralstin as a close friend. But the constant corruption probes were a headache. Clyde was tired of it all; he wanted a windfall.

Logan, the veteran con, had his own sketch of the big time. Everybody in the joint had a plan; mostly it was just talk, word stuffings to fill a day. But finally, in 1935, somebody had pulled it off: a con’s dream had come true. Big time was the Weyerhaeuser kidnapping, a crime that was hatched in Spokane. A pair of low-level cons, William “Swede” Dainard and Harmon Waley, and Harmon’s bride, Margaret, were killing time in a Spokane apartment when Margaret read something in the newspaper about the Weyerhaeusers. The family, one of the wealthiest in the nation, had millions of acres of private timberland in the Northwest and enough money to fill bathtubs with twenty-dollar bills. The cons drove to Tacoma, where the family lived in regal splendor among the small circle of timber barons. In the light of mid-afternoon, Harmon and the Swede kidnapped nine-year-old George Weyerhaeuser while he was on his way home from school. They took the boy to logged-over stump lands east of Seattle, blindfolded him, and dumped him into a deep pit, three feet wide and six
feet long, covered with tin. A ransom note was mailed to Philip Weyerhaeuser, the father. Though he tried to keep it secret, word of the kidnapping leaked out; after flashing around the country, it became one of the biggest stories of the year. George spent several days in the pit; then he was removed, locked in the trunk of the kidnappers’ Ford coupe, and driven 280 miles east to Spokane. There he was chained inside a closet in an apartment. After the $200,000 ransom was delivered, George was driven back across the state and released. Waley and his wife went to Salt Lake City, where they were arrested after Margaret tried to buy a pair of stockings with a bill whose number had been recorded. The Swede got away. He was traced to Butte, Montana, but slipped through a police dragnet. As of September, he and his $100,000 share of the kidnapping loot were still missing.

Black-market butter would not make Logan, Burch, and Ralstin rich on the scale that the Swede had pulled off, but it brought in plenty of money—enough, at least, to fuel the next dream.

Just after 9:30 p.m., the car backed into an alley entrance to the Newport Creamery. It was dark, and nobody was there. Piece of cake, just like Burch had predicted. The lock popped, the door opened, and there it was—hundreds of pounds of fresh butter, cartons of cottage cheese, and containers of cream. They stacked enough to load up the trunk and part of the floor in the back. Spokane was an hour south, giving them enough time to get the dairy products into storage before they would spoil.

Just as the door was closing, the squeak of hinges and the sound of footsteps on gravel attracted Marshal Conniff. He moved closer to the creamery, a single-story, cinder-block building, and shined his flashlight. “Who’s there?”

The burglars were in the dark; the marshal was under a light.

As Conniff edged forward, he saw the car, the stacks of butter, cream, and cottage cheese. When he reached for his pistol, a gun was pulled on him. The night air, full of smoke and heat, now had gunfire—at least four shots from the butter thieves.

One bullet passed through the marshal’s left wrist.

Another shot hit his right arm and lodged against a bone in the shoulder.

A third bullet ripped through his groin and shattered his hip, knocking him down.

As he lay bleeding on the gravel floor of the alley, a final shot pierced his heart, tearing open an inch-and-a-half-long gash, then penetrated his right lung.

The gunmen entered the car and sped away. Across the street, two boys who heard the shooting ran toward the creamery. The mayor of Newport, who lived nearby, also rushed to the crime scene. One bullet had entered his house. They found the marshal in shock, still clutching his flashlight, gagging on blood, his gun beside him. There was no blood near the creamery door. The butter thieves had escaped unscathed.

G
EORGE
C
ONNIFF
lived for another ten hours, awake for most of it, conscious that his life was draining away. He never got a good look at the people who shot him—just two men with guns, he said. One of them was a big guy, well over six feet tall. The other man was smaller. Never saw a face. As his wife and three children gathered around him, he told his boy, George junior, to look after his mother.

Throughout the night and into the dawn of Sunday morning he lay on a bed in Newport, pain overwhelming his body. Just after sunrise, when the whistle of the Diamond Match sawmill summoned the morning shift to work across the Pend Oreille, Conniff was loaded into an ambulance to be taken to a bigger hospital in Spokane. He cried out as they carried him into the car; his body was on fire, the wounds open flames. The ride to Spokane was torture, a jangling, jarring route, Conniff’s body leaking pus and blood; the fever pushed ever higher. Alma stayed with him, but he couldn’t force any words out to his wife. By the time the car arrived at Saint Luke’s Hospital in Spokane, George Conniff was dead.

The creamery had lost several hundred pounds of grade-A butter, and the slender book of local history, a record of the white man’s
brief attachment to the Pend Oreille country, was given a new chapter. During the second week of the driest September in memory, a little boy named Harold Chase drowned in the river, the Indian dipnet fishermen at Kettle Falls said the salmon run was the worst they had ever seen, and the Newport night marshal was killed by butter thieves. On Monday morning it rained.

W
ITHIN AN HOUR
of the shooting, the roads leading into Spokane, south of Newport, were barricaded. There were only two real escape points for the butter thieves: they could race down the paved road toward Spokane, then blend into the city, or they could try their luck in the woods of Idaho, east across the Pend Oreille River in the other direction, perhaps sit it out and wait for things to cool down. Only a few, familiar faces passed through the Idaho border. At the other blockade, the entrance to Spokane, a steady stream of cars came into the city; each was stopped and inspected by two officers.