Jim Kershner’s This day in history
From our archives, 100 years ago
The hunt for a desperado heated up in the mountains around Emida, Idaho, south of St. Maries.
The man, known to authorities only as “the freckle-faced man,” had killed a man in a Colfax saloon a month earlier. Then he fled into the mountains of Idaho.
Since then, he had terrorized ranch families, homesteaders and fire crews when he appeared suddenly, held them up for groceries and ammunition and disappeared again. He told one man in a backwoods camp that the posse had come so close to him several times that he could have “killed them easily.”
He didn’t, only because they did not see him. Yet he now vowed to kill “the next officer” he saw.
He recently held up Bessie Warren, 12, while she was riding along a trail near her home. He told her to say nothing or she would be killed. Otherwise, he did her no harm.
Yet the noose was now drawing tight. Two bloodhounds had found his trail, and they were leading a half-dozen deputies toward his mountain lair.
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(From the Associated Press)