Breaking Blue

by Timothy Egan

  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.”

  5.

  The Night Marshal

  WITH 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.

  Newport Creamery Co.

  A Community Industry.

  Highest Market Price Grade A Butterfat.

  Honest Weight. Correct Tests.

  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.

  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. Bu
t 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.

  ON 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.