Nothing Daunted

by Wickenden, Dorothy

  Each day the men went to work with their pickaxes and shovels. If there were pools of water, they pumped it out. Miners, two to each room, loaded the loose coal into the cars, then hung a chip on the cars they had filled. The rope rider pulled them to the surface, where the check-weighman measured them and recorded the weight and car numbers. The chips were then returned to the board, and the weighman transported the cars to the tipple. There were some details that Bob left out of his account. The miners always checked their tonnage and counted the number of chips to be sure that all of their cars had been weighed. On the trip to the weighman, the rope rider occasionally “lost” or changed a number. Men were paid by the ton, but if any ordinary rock—called bone—found its way into a car, the miner wasn’t paid for that load. If a man didn’t return at the end of the day or was found dead in the mine, he was identified by his numbered chip.

  At the end of their shift, workers cut out a space underneath the coal. The goal was to avoid “shooting on the solid,” which crushed the coal into slack; they wanted valuable lump and nut coal. Then they drilled holes for the explosives and placed the charges. Only the shot-firer remained, to be sure the charges were tamped in and the fuse was the right length. Mine explosions were caused by a shot “blowing out” or going off at the wrong time. The shot-firer lit the powder and “shot the coal down,” breaking it up into chunks to be loaded into cars the next day.

  As the women walked back to the surface of the earth, Ros was struck by the enormity of the enterprise—a feeling reinforced that afternoon when they gamely accompanied Bob four miles, behind two mules in a steady rain, to Phippsburg, where the roundhouse and other engine and car-repair buildings had just been finished. Sam Perry had spent heavily on the improvements, and it was an impressive sight—no better way, Bob must have felt, to show the woman he loved the role the Perrys were playing in the future of the West. Dorothy, though, was shaken by her experience in the mine. She wrote afterward, “I am glad to have done it, for I never need to go through another. I was scared & didn’t like it.”

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  It poured throughout Saturday—an equinoctial event, Perry told them. The women all slept late both mornings, while their imperturbable host started the fire and made breakfast. His housekeeper was sick, so Charlotte and Portia, who were used to cooking for large groups at camp, took over the other meals. Dorothy and Ros helped with the dishes. The food was magnificent, they said: grouse for breakfast, and for dinner, duck and ice cream.

  Before they left on Sunday, it stopped raining, and Ros took a picture of Bob leaning casually against the back-porch rail with one of his Airedales. The downpour had turned the rough roads into a slurry of mud. Perry put chains on the tires, and they started home—six women squeezed into his little car. Dorothy was glad that for once she and Ros hadn’t overpacked; they had just put a change of clothes into their knitting bags. The chains didn’t make much difference, and after skidding in the mud for several miles, they returned to the Oak Creek depot and took the train. Charlotte and Portia got off at Steamboat Springs, while the others continued on to Hayden. The Harrisons had invited Dot and Anne to stay with them for the rest of their visit.

  Dorothy and Ros were worried about how they would get to school, and everyone got up early on Monday morning. Bob had assured them that he would borrow an automobile, but as it turned out, everyone in Hayden who owned one had gone to a funeral some forty miles away. The storm had blown down the telephone wire, so they couldn’t call the school and let the students know they would be late. While Bob worked on the transportation dilemma, they visited Mrs. Peck and observed a class at the Hayden School.

  At noon, Bob returned in a seven-passenger Marmon—an unusual sight in Hayden, with its whitewall tires, long, gleaming black nose, and two gentlemen in the front seat. The Marmon’s owner, a sheep man from Wyoming, insisted that he was going to Elkhead anyway, and said he gladly would take them. The other man was Ferry’s ranching partner, Jack White, whose bristly hair stood straight up from his head. With his rugged good looks, gruff courtesy, and bone-crushing handshake, he appeared to have stepped out of a dime-store Western. Bob, reassured, took the train back to Oak Creek. “We were all piled into the tonneau,” Ros said, “and had a most wonderful ride out.”

  Along the way, the sheep man kept turning around and firing compliments at the women, as they prayed he would make the difficult turns. When they spotted a coyote, the man jammed on the brakes and pulled out a rifle. White took his six-shooter from his hip pocket. Both fired and missed. Dorothy, falling into her prescribed role, wrote: “Imagine being in a beautiful machine & having two men shooting from the running board!” The men soon stirred up a flock of sage grouse, also known as cocks of the plains, “& we were fairly trembling with excitement as they loaded up. Mr. White killed two beauties & then showed us the gory process of cleaning them. They gallantly presented them to us and we made a triumphant entrance, much to Mrs. Harrison’s excitement.” By then it was midafternoon. The teachers swore to each other that they wouldn’t miss another day of school all year, a vow they kept.

  14

  “UNARMED AND DEFENSELESS”

  Bob Perry and Mascot at his cabin in Oak Hills, 1916

  Ros was turning thirty on October 8, and Bob and Ferry had promised to take them to a scenic place south of Hayden called Williams Fork. They were looking forward to a busy weekend, starting with a teachers’ conference in Hayden on Saturday and ending with the excursion on Sunday with their friends. On Friday, though, Ferry telephoned them at the schoolhouse to say that he had heard from Dr. Cole, the aptly named company doctor at Oak Hills, that Bob wasn’t well. The birthday outing would have to be postponed. Claiming that he knew nothing more about it, he said he guessed there wasn’t much the matter.

  When the two women woke up the next morning to another deluge, they changed their minds about riding to Hayden, although they knew that Mrs. Peck would be disappointed not to see them at the conference. Ros wrote a get-well note to Bob.

  Dear Mr. Perry:

  We surely were sorry to hear via Mr. Carpenter and Dr. Cole that you’re not feeling up to the work. I hope it’s nothing serious. . . .

  This is just to convey to you our sympathy and the hope that whatever is the matter—it won’t last long.

  The Auburns

  Dorothy scrawled a hearty P.S. at the bottom of the page:

  Cheer up! We’ll have that birthday party yet—all the merrier for being postponed. What’s in a date?

  In the afternoon, they rode to a neighboring ranch to make a phone call for Mrs. Harrison. They were told that Carpenter had left suddenly for Oak Creek, and they suspected there was some trouble at the mine, but they weren’t overly concerned. On Monday evening, however, as they were riding home from school, Everette Adair hailed them, and as he rode up, he asked breathlessly if they had heard the news about Bob Perry.

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  The previous Wednesday, October 4, as Bob was getting ready for bed, he had stepped outside his cabin in his undershirt and trousers. Two men suddenly appeared from around the corner, their faces masked with blue handkerchiefs. One pressed a rifle against his stomach; the other put a revolver to his head. Speaking in heavy accents, they said, “Don’t scare, don’t scare, we want money,” and told him they were going to take him into the mountains. Bob protested that he wasn’t dressed to go anywhere on such a cold night and told them the money was in the house.

  They forced him inside, allowing him to get dressed. The taller man took Bob’s wallet from the table; it contained two five-dollar bills and some change. The man’s companion—broad-shouldered and barrel-chested with light brown eyes—demanded tobacco and helped himself to a Colt .32 and a holster in the cabinet. He also picked up a watch, but when Bob ordered him to put it back, the tall man grabbed it and threw it on the table. They stepped into the kitchen and packed some food to take with them.

  The kidnappers bound hi
s arms to his sides and led him outside at gunpoint, warning him not to holler. Soon the men were arguing with each other in a foreign language. Bob surmised that they were disagreeing about which route to take from the cabin. They led him away, making slow progress through the back country above the mines, avoiding the trails in the creek bottoms where they might be seen and were more likely to leave tracks. After an hour or two they paused to rest in an aspen grove, where a crude shelter had been built out of boughs, and the remains of a campfire were evident.

  The short, stocky man handed his rifle to his companion and took down another rifle they had tied to a tree. He then stepped to one side and made some hand signals, apparently to another confederate higher up in the brush. The tall man, who was dressed in brown overalls, a brown coat, and a gray mackinaw, tied Bob’s arms behind him and held the rest of the length of rope. They resumed their circuitous journey, stopping for the night at the top of a ridge outside Oak Creek. They built a fire, bound his feet, and tied the long end of the rope to a high tree branch. Bob attempted to loosen his bonds and was warned that if he tried again, they would kill him. The kidnappers alternated keeping watch.

  The mine whistles awoke them at seven A.M. The tall man, who was younger and had a better command of English, told him that they had been hired by someone in Oak Creek to kill him, but what they really wanted was money. They ordered him to write to his father in Denver and demand that he bring them $15,000 (the equivalent a century later of about $300,000); then they would release him. If he refused, they would shoot him.

  After haggling with his captors about whether his father must deliver the money alone and whether the horse should be white or red or red and white, they agreed that Perry Sr. could ride a white horse and that he could be accompanied by Bob’s milk man, Ed Griffin, who would ride the red horse the captors had seen him on before. Evidently, they were familiar with Oak Creek. They gave Bob a pencil and paper, and he wrote two copies of the ransom note, one addressed to his father’s Denver office and the other to his parents’ house on Grant Street. As they ordered, he wrote that the police were not to be notified, and that if a posse appeared, they would kill him before the rescuers got anywhere near him. Figuring the men could not read English, Bob added a few details of his own:

  Thursday, 7:00 a.m.

  Dear Pop,

  . . . [T]hey are very definite as to what will happen to me if they do not get the money. They speak a foreign language which I cannot understand. It seems to me that they are “touched.” Anything you will do is O.K. to me. If anything should happen to me, give my love to them all. For I have done all that I can . . . They say if you send the money you can come on a white horse, and that you may bring another man with you—Ed Griffin on Lazarus. You are to walk the hills straight west regardless of the roads, or, as they say, “as the sun hideth,” and they will stop you some time during the day. They tell me we are to start walking tomorrow. BOB

  When he had finished, he was given a grubby little book of one-cent stamps. Bob put two on each letter, wrote “Special Delivery” on the envelopes, and informed the men that the letters would cost more—ten cents each. They asked whether they would have to sign anything for the postmaster, and Bob told them just to buy the extra stamps and drop the letters into the box. The tall man went off to Oak Creek with the letters but soon came back with another demand. Bob duly added: “P.S. They just return to say that it must be gold.”

  The man reappeared about four hours later in different clothes: a brown suit, a dark flannel shirt, an overcoat, and new shoes. He changed his shirt again and pulled on his overalls over the trousers, then his mackinaw. He also brought back a sack containing several loaves of bread, a pound of butter, twelve cans of Tuxedo tobacco, a ham, and four pears. He took three cans of tobacco for himself and gave nine cans to the stocky man—a chain-smoker in a black slouch hat who puffed on his pipe through his handkerchief. The kerchief slipped down while he slept, and Bob took note of his features: a broad, flat nose and a heavy mustache, with hair that seemed to grow across his face rather than down. His hands were large and red with stubby fingers, and his right thumbnail was bruised. Bob had little appetite, but he managed to eat some bread and butter. He asked one of them to fetch him some water from Little Trout Creek, near where they were camped. When he complained of being cold, the tall man loaned him his overcoat.

  On Thursday evening, after dark, Bob and his captors set out again, and the stocky man became furious when he saw that the ropes binding Bob’s arms had become loose. The captors spoke urgently to each other, and the tall one again threatened him, telling him that if they found the rope loosened again, they would kill him. Besides, he said, “There are about thirty of us around here, and you could never make a getaway.” Bob doubted their talk about a group of co-conspirators but not their willingness to shoot him.

  At daybreak on Friday, after walking through a light drizzle, they stopped in a deep gulch called Little Middle Creek, where the men told him they would stay until the ransom was delivered. Cold and damp, Bob asked them to build a fire. They hesitated, thinking the smoke might be seen, but finally consented and made breakfast, frying some of the ham and tearing off pieces of bread. Bob lay down by the fire to rest, but the long end of the rope had been fastened so high on a tree branch that it tugged uncomfortably. The stocky man untied it, which provoked further words with his companion.

  Sometime before eleven A.M., Bob dozed off. When he woke up, both kidnappers were asleep. Under the taller man’s jacket, he could see the edge of the holster holding his own automatic; his rifle was on the ground at the foot of a tree about six feet away. Although his upper arms were bound, he managed to work free his feet and his forearms. Bob leaned over and tried to grab the gun, but it was just beyond reach. Instead, he jumped over the tall man and seized the rifle from his companion.

  The kidnapper woke up and grabbed the rifle back with both hands, but Bob shoved it against his chest and then awkwardly wrested it from him. Bob backed up to the tree where the second rifle was lying. He angled the stocky man’s rifle at them both, telling them to run or he would kill them. As the tall man reached for the automatic and started toward him, the stocky man came at him from the other side. Bob repeated his command, but the tall man ignored him, and Bob fired, hitting him in the chest. The man reeled and fell but got up again, standing unsteadily.

  Bob took both rifles and ran in the opposite direction. He stopped briefly about three-quarters of a mile from the gulch and managed to work his arms free. He soon reached the Ben Male ranch, where he called Oak Creek and reached his father, who had just arrived.

  Sam Perry had been about to set out with Ed Griffin to deliver the money to the kidnappers. In the hours since he had received the ransom note late Thursday night, he had called Ferry Carpenter to convey the terrible news, obtained the gold with the help of a Denver banker he knew, and chartered a train to Oak Creek. Now, vastly relieved, Sam set out to meet Bob at the ranch, accompanied by Marjorie, four detectives from the Denver police force, and Dr. Cole, a family friend. Ferry, too, had headed for Oak Creek to join one of the posses being organized to capture the renegades.

  Sam doted on Marjorie, his firstborn, treating her like a son. Every year she accompanied him on a weeks-long hunting expedition. As one newspaper account described her, “Wearing a heavy flannel shirt and chaps, like a cowboy of the plains, she has ridden through the wildest regions of the state, shooting deer and bear and even an occasional mountain lion.” One year she returned with a bear cub she named Perrywinkle and kept in her parents’ backyard in Denver. (As an older woman, when her two favorite dogs died, she skinned them and used their pelts as rugs.)

  The Denver Post, always alert to the exploits of the Perry family, reported that Marjorie, the “Denver society girl and experienced bear hunter, is leading one of the posses that is hunting thru the mountains of Routt county for the surviving one of the two Greeks who kidnapped her brother. . . . [S]he knows the ground to b
e traversed as well as any of the men and better than most of them. The young woman is heavily armed.” Bob Perry told the Post in an interview on October 8, “I think they were amateurs in the brigand business, but they were thoroly in earnest about what they were doing, and I guess I was lucky to get away with a whole skin.”

  Once Bob had time to eat and rest, he led his group through the hills to the spot where he had shot the kidnapper. The newspapers didn’t hold back. “Oak Creek,” the Rocky Mountain News reported, was “a scene of the wildest excitement, the streets teeming with aroused Americans.” At around eight P.M. on Friday, they found the tall man lying on his side in Little Middle Creek Gulch. The moon was shining under a light cloud, and they could see a revolver on the ground next to his hand. His clothing was in disarray, and there were two bullet holes, one through the chest and another through his right temple.

  On Sunday morning, the coroner of Routt County impaneled a jury of six and held an inquest at Oak Creek. The dead man was identified as George Katsegahnis, a Greek miner who had worked briefly for Perry in the mine. Ferry served as Bob’s lawyer, and after various witnesses had been called, it was determined that the bullet through the temple was the one that had killed Katsegahnis, and that his partner was Jim Karagounis, who worked with him in the mine. The matter of who fired the fatal shot was not resolved, but “County authorities,” the Oak Creek Times reported on October 9, “have accepted the explanation that George Katsegohnis [sic] the younger and brainier of the two kidnappers, who was injured by young Perry when the latter was forced to shoot in making his escape, killed himself.” The owner of the Oak Creek Cemetery refused to allow him to be buried there, arguing, as an item in the Oak Creek Times put it, “We, as a people, do not want this class of citizens, dead or alive, in our midst.”