Deadman's Bar

August of nineteen twenty-eight. A few men sat down beside a homesteader's deathbed and asked him what happened on the Snake River. I'll give you what he gave them. Then we'll come to what he wouldn't. The spring of eighteen eighty-six brought four men to the Snake for its gold. Their camp was on the river, not far ahead of you. Henry Welter, a brewer. August Kellenberger, a little fellow short two fingers on his right hand. Tiggerman, a giant out of the King's Guard in Germany. And John Tonnar, hired on for grub and a split of the cleanup. They pitched their tents on the bar. Over the pass in Teton Basin lived Emile Wolff, the man on that deathbed. Henry Welter turned out to be an old schoolmate of his, from back home in Luxembourg. Late that summer, at haying time, Wolff saw a man coming on foot. Tonnar, alone, wanting work. Wolff asked after the others. They were planning a raft, Tonnar said, to go for meat. So Wolff hired him. For a month they slept side by side, and Tonnar's gun was never out of his reach. One day Tonnar sent him to a hiding place in the cabin and asked him to mind what he found there. A silver watch, and a purse. Meanwhile a boating party down from Yellowstone stopped at an empty camp. Below it, under a gravel bluff, three bodies lay at the water's edge, weighted down with stones. A posse came to Wolff's door in late August and told him. "My God," he said. "Grab him while you can." They took Tonnar on a haystack before he could get to his gun. Wolff went to the bar with a surgeon from Evanston. They knew the giant by his size and little Kellenberger by that right hand. And they kept two skulls as evidence. One was Henry Welter's. The boy he'd gone to school with. It came to nothing. There was no witness but the man on trial, his lawyers called it self-defense, and the jury let him go, which surprised the judge as much as it surprised Wolff. Tonnar was gone on the first freight train. His own lawyer said he never got a cent. A hand-lettered sign, the story goes, turned up near the diggings. "Payin' gold will never be found here, no matter how many men tries. There's some enough to beguile one, like Tanglefoot paper does flies." So, back to that deathbed. All those years he'd carried it. They asked him the rest. Some of it, he said, he wished he could forget, and some he "had never told anyone and never would." A month of nights in that cabin. The gun in reach, a watch in the hiding place he'd later swear was stolen from the dead, and Wolff lying there not knowing yet who he was listening to breathe. Up ahead, Deadman's Bar Road goes off on your right, down to the water. I've been down it plenty in the daylight. I've yet to stay till dark.