Walking back to where the man had first been spotted, the guards found a black suitcase. It was so overstuffed that it had been held closed with baling wire. They untwisted the wire and opened it. Inside were 150 sticks of dynamite—enough to destroy the whole plant. A nine-foot-long white fuse snaked out along the ground. Someone noticed it was lit and slowly sizzling toward the charge. The guards quickly snuffed it out.
That night, a cold December storm swept in, and gusting winds beat rain against the town. Police fanned out over the city, looking for the bomber. They searched all night and through the next day. They checked the hospitals and hotels. It looked like the saboteur had gotten away. Then, late that afternoon, two boys walking home from high school found a man passed out in a field. His clothes were soaked with rain, his back was caked in blood. His hand gripped a large revolver. The authorities had their man.
A shotgun blast had hit the man in the back, and pellets had lodged in his lung. He was barely conscious from pneumonia and loss of blood. He was taken first to the jail, then moved to the hospital. Fortunately for him, the Chappel Brothers guards were only packing birdshot, which had left him bloodied but had not pierced too deeply.
The man was small and thin, pale in complexion, with neat dark hair he parted sharply to the right, and light blue eyes that bulged slightly out of his face. Police searched his hotel room and found Industrial Workers of the World literature that encouraged violent action against unfair employers. The police told the local paper they were “convinced he was one of the most dangerous anarchists ever apprehended in the area.”
Late that night, the man recovered enough to speak. With the state’s attorney and a stenographer in the room, he made a bedside confession—one he likely thought would be his last. His name was Francis Litts, but everyone called him Frank. He was polite and well spoken. He was calm and sincere as he spoke. He said he was forty-one years old. He had been born in upstate New York but raised in Montana and Idaho, where his father kept sheep and drove them up into the mountains each summer. He had grown up around horses, and he loved them very much. As an adult, he had wandered the West, working in mines in Alaska and California. He was a kind man who sent money home to New York to buy Christmas presents for his relatives, and sometimes he sent chocolates. But he could also be unpredictable. His brother’s granddaughter told me that family lore held that he once attacked a man for whistling.
A MUGSHOT OF FRANK LITTS.
In the hospital, the prosecutor pressed Litts about his labor activism. A reporter from the Rockford Daily Republic was there to record the conversation. The prosecutor pressed Litts about the pamphlets the police had found. Litts said something that surprised them. He admitted, calmly, that he had tried to blow up the plant. But he was not trying to destroy Chappel Brothers in solidarity with the workers. He was trying to destroy it in solidarity with the mustangs.
“I was in Miles City, Montana, when I first heard about range horses being shipped east to be killed for food purposes. I believe that the killing and corralling of wild horses is wrong,” he said.41
In Montana, he had seen the mustangs being loaded for the Chappel Brothers plant, he said, and decided the only way to stop such an evil factory was to destroy it. He headed east on the same train line. He applied for a job at Chappel Brothers so he could case the factory, he said, but soon left because he couldn’t bear seeing the horror inside.
He told of the first night he tried to burn the place down, pouring gas on the back doors. “After I touched it off, I ran through the fields, reached the business section, and went to sleep in my room at a hotel,” he said, his voice growing raspy with exhaustion. “I didn’t wait to see if the fire was going to damage the building or not, but I guess it did, but not enough.”
A nurse stopped him and made him drink water. She urged him to rest, but he pushed on. He said he kept watching the plant, and the sight of more trainloads of mustangs arriving enraged him. He tried again to set fires with more gasoline. And again. He thought the big fire in November had done the trick, but, after repairs, the plant kept churning out cans of meat.
So, he said, “I went last week and bought 150 sticks of dynamite.” His plan was not to kill anyone. He had about ten minutes’ worth of fuse, he said, which would give him just enough time to warn the workers to get out.
Throughout his interview, he was courteous and clear-headed, but he showed no remorse. “I would rather see my body or my mother’s ground up and used for fertilizer than to have horses killed like they are here,” he said, adding that he was looking forward to standing trial, because he was sure the public would feel the same way.
Though the decision of Litts to dynamite a dog-food factory is extreme, his deep respect for horses is hardly rare. It’s often said that one of the reasons horses became such successful domestic companions is that they are innately social animals. Horses have lived in family bands for millions of years, and they are all wired to be attuned to the moods and signals of other members. People successfully domesticated horses because we were able to tap into that capacity for trust and dependence. What gets less attention is that this domestication is a two-way street. We, too, are also wired to be social animals. The urge to reach out and connect with animals is something so basic in our fabric that it is universal across cultures and arises shortly after birth. Horses have also tapped into our capacity for trust and dependence. We forge relationships with them that are in ways very human. We talk to them. We give them names. We connect. And when we do, we implicitly extend to them the social contract of humanity: fairness, kindness, honesty, trust. The word humane, which is how we are supposed to treat horses, comes from the word human. It is perhaps because of this social contract Americans have extended to the horse that we do not eat them, and since the time of Chappel Brothers, we have done away with horse slaughterhouses in this country entirely.
Litts, like most people of his era, grew up with horses. He respected them. To him, they were not meat or marauders but companions. To him, slaughter was akin to murder. What choice did he have but to try to stop it?
The principle of animal rights was beyond a fringe idea in 1925. Vegetarianism was essentially nonexistent. In terms of radical activists, Litts was at least fifty years ahead of his time. People living on farms slaughtered animals themselves, and the practical economics of farm life didn’t allow much room for the rights of other creatures. But horses did have a special place in many people’s minds. Families often kept workhorses long after they could work—they were “put out to pasture.” A century ago, these horses even had a name: Old Dobbin. Most people of the time grew up knowing at least one Old Dobbin they would visit in the back pasture. Perhaps because of this widespread support of horses, the story of the mad cowboy trying to save mustangs from the cannery went out on the wires and ran in newspapers all over the country. Many in the public were sympathetic. Telegrams of support addressed to “the cowboy” began to flood the jail from all over the country.
The authorities in Rockford tried to head off the idea of Litts as a dime-novel folk hero by portraying him as a hopeless nutcase. Ernest Chappel, P. M.’s brother, questioned whether Litts really was a Montana cowboy and suggested he was, in fact, really a miner—a job that at the time was synonymous with violent anarchists. If Litts were a real cowboy, he said, he would support what Chappel Brothers was doing. “The people of Montana are eager to get rid of these wild horses as they take the feed the cattle need,” he told reporters.
The Horse Association of America also got in on the public relations campaign, saying the animals being slaughtered at the plant were not really horses, but “worthless Cayuses, descended from the mustang, but inferior, having deteriorated from inbreeding and lack of food.” A spokesman told the Associated Press that “it was more humane to slaughter them than to let them starve to death on the range in old age.”
The press took up the drumbeat, calling Litts “the eccentric Montana cowboy” and “the little man with a cow
pony complex.” They wondered whether he was truly crazy or just “a tool of an organization trying to destroy the horsemeat industry.” But many in the public sided with Litts, and some even joined in his cause. A week after he had been arrested, police again surrounded the Chappel Brothers plant after Chappel saw what he thought were suspicious figures casing his plant, and he got a call from a man who said, “We’ll get you, look out.”
In jail, Litts spent his days reading books on his cot and writing letters to senators, city councilmen, and anyone else he thought would listen. He wrote a letter to Grace Coolidge, wife of President Calvin Coolidge. A noted animal lover, she had once spared a raccoon sent to the president for Thanksgiving dinner, then let it live in the White House. In his letter, Litts described the sadness of the horses as they learned their fate, and the tears that rolled out of their eyes.
We don’t know what books Litts read in his cell, but we do know many of the best sellers in the years leading up to the bombing attempt were romantic portrayals of the West, including Zane Grey’s The Vanishing American—a tale about a greedy capitalist who tries to round up wild horses for profit.
Frank Litts seemed to be looking forward to his trial as a public platform. “I’m going to tell the world about the conditions down there at the packing plant,” he told a local reporter. “I’m not sore at anyone around here, but I just want a chance to tell what I know.” Prosecutors seemed intent on not letting that happen. They decided to test Litts’s sanity, so they hired a local “alienist” named Dr. Sidney Winglus to evaluate him. In an interview with Litts, the alienist discovered that Litts had previously been in two insane asylums.
Eleven years before his arrest, Litts was locked in the Morningside Hospital for the insane in Portland, Oregon. There, too, he advocated against what he thought was injustice, sending a letter to his state senator complaining about poor conditions where inmates ate bowls of watery gruel with no spoons and were packed by the dozen into rooms with no chairs. Shortly before traveling to Illinois, Litts had been put in Morningside again after what he said was an argument with his father over a girl Litts wanted to marry. Litts escaped from that asylum in Oregon and went to Montana, where he heard about Chappel Brothers and headed east.
The alienist asked Litts why he tried to blow up the Chappel Brothers plant. Because horse slaughter was morally wrong, Litts said. He listed a number of reasons, including the Bible’s ban on eating meat from animals that don’t have a cloven hoof. The alienist asked Litts whether he felt specially called upon to destroy the plant. Litts said yes. “Religious paranoia” was the alienist’s diagnosis. Cautioning that it would gradually grow worse, he suggested locking Litts in an institution for the criminally insane as soon as possible.
Other people who came in contact with the well-spoken little cowboy thought he seemed fine, and fully aware of what he was doing. “I don’t claim to be an alienist,” the physician treating him for the gunshot wounds told the local paper. “But in my opinion, Litts appears sane.”
If Litts’a state of mind was debatable, his aim was clear. He wanted to destroy the factory, and he wasn’t going to stop just because he had been jailed. During his arraignment, a week after his arrest, he found himself sitting on a bench near the front of a busy courtroom as a crowd of attorneys sorted out the day’s docket. Seeing a chance, he suddenly sprang up, sprinted down the aisle, and disappeared out the door. The deputy in charge chased after him. All eyes remained fixed on the doorway. Eventually the breathless deputy appeared with his quarry after tackling Litts near the elevators.
The deputy put Litts back on the bench and stood behind him, ready for any move. Litts sat quietly as he waited to enter his plea. Suddenly, he dove forward again, crashing through a crowd of lawyers toward a door to the jury room. The deputy caught him by the knees. For the rest of the morning, he sat handcuffed. “Why’d you do that?” asked the deputy later. “You knew you only had a one in a million chance.” “I had a chance didn’t I?” Litts said. “And why not take the chance?”
The bombing attempt barely caused a hiccup in production at Chappel Brothers. A few weeks after Litts was arrested, the local newspaper reported that “one thousand Montana mustangs have been slaughtered the last week by Chappel Brothers.” The meat would go to Europe for Christmas feasts, the article said: “Whole carcasses are barreled for exportation, but corn beef, soup, mince meat and other products are also made.” The reporter noted, “No horse meat is sold for human consumption in this country, but occasional visitors to the plant are given the opportunity to sample the steaks, and greatly to the surprise of most of them, find the meats real delicacies—tender and of excellent flavor.”42
Charged with arson, Litts pleaded not guilty. When his trial started, in February of 1926, he entered court with dozens of pages of handwritten notes held in a tight roll. This, he had told his jailers, was his defense.
The first day of trial, Litts’s court-appointed defense attorney called Dr. Winglus, the alienist, to testify that Litts was insane. Litts sprang to his feet. He was willing to be found guilty, but there was no way he wanted to be dismissed as crazy. He shouted that he did not want the doctor to speak. “I’m being tried for arson, not for sanity,” he told the judge. His lawyer stood and began to make the case to the jury that they could not convict Litts because of his mental state. “Now you cut that out!” Litts shouted. He made his attorney sit down, then gave what the newspapers called “an eloquent speech” to the jury about how the horse was man’s best friend.
Litts’s lawyer interrupted and asked about previous stints in asylums. Litts shot back that he was being tried for arson, not his past. He asked for the county humane inspector to testify, but the judge refused to call him. His attorney again tried to make the case that his client was incompetent. “I am sane, I can control my acts,” Litts insisted. Litts turned to the judge and said, “He’s throwing me down, trying to make me out that I’m crazy when I’m not!”
The jury deliberated for eleven hours, with two men holding out because they didn’t believe Litts was crazy. Eventually, though, they came back and told the judge that the fires and attempted dynamiting were “the acts of a lunatic.”
Litts immediately stood up and asked for a new trial. “How can a jury deciding if I’m guilty of arson find me insane?” he asked. The judge banged his gavel, calling for order, and sentenced Litts indefinitely to the Illinois Asylum for the Criminally Insane.
It must have been a hard moment for Litts. He had hoped that he could reason with the jury and show them that what he had done was justified by the horror inside the factory. If they found him guilty, he could go to prison with a clean conscience, knowing that even if society was wrong, he had done right. But by finding him insane, the jury denied him any morality. It wasn’t just that they denied he had made the right judgment, they denied he was even capable of making a judgment, and they stripped him of the very thing that was most central to him—his sense of right and wrong.
It was a long drive down to the insane asylum in the southern part of the state, in the town of Chester. Litts sat calmly in the back seat as the sheriff of Rockford drove. According to the local papers, Litts told the sheriff unapologetically that he would one day return to Rockford, and the next time he tried to destroy the Chappel Brothers plant, he would “do it right.”
The asylum had castlelike stone walls. Litts walked down the long corridor of cells that echoed with the shrieking and mumbling madmen. He wouldn’t stay long. Seven days after he arrived, he went out in the circular exercise yard with the rest of the inmates, and, under the watch of armed guards, he disappeared. The guards only noticed him missing after an hour, when they counted the inmates before dinner. Some later theorized the tiny man had slipped out through a small opening in a gate while exercising. Others thought he had hidden under some mats in the yard, then escaped in the chaos as guards rushed out to search for him. Either way, he was loose.
The next day, a bold headline in the
Rockford Daily Republic blared what Chappel likely immediately thought when hearing the news: DYNAMITER FLEES CHESTER, FEAR LITTS MAY RETURN TO ROCKFORD.
When he slipped out of the asylum gates in March 1926, teams of guards with dogs swept the farms around the grounds and combed the banks of the nearby Mississippi River, but they couldn’t find him. People around the Chappel Brothers plant in Rockford worried he would come back for another try at the plant. Locals flooded the police station with calls saying they had spotted him. He was driving by the plant, one said. He had been spied walking down an alley, another said. The Chappel Brothers firm beefed up its squad of armed guards and erected floodlights around the plant. The cops doubted the runaway cowboy would return right away—first he would need to earn money and devise a new plan—but they had no doubt he would be back.
Over the next several months, Litts became the town’s version of Boo Radley—a half-real, half-myth dynamite cowboy bogeyman who lurked in every shadow. Any report of a suspicious figure or odd occurrence was immediately ascribed to Litts. A local train was robbed and authorities suspected Litts. A drunk wandered over to the fence of the Chappel corrals where colts were kept. He was rushed by armed guards and was hauled to jail until he could prove he wasn’t Litts. A religious fanatic shot a man at a rural dance, miles outside of town. It was immediately assumed to be Litts. A small, thin drifter stabbed a rodeo cowboy in Oregon; Rockford newspapers blamed Litts. Rumors gradually cooled after all these reports turned out to be false. Maybe he wasn’t coming back. Maybe he had drowned trying to swim the Mississippi, or gone back to the wilds of Alaska. Maybe he was riding the range in Montana. This was certain: He wasn’t in Rockford.
Wild Horse Country Page 12