Cattle Detective Tom Horn at work late at night.
Artwork courtesy of
L. D. Edgar,
Western Heritage Studio
Cody, WY

(Wyoming Division of
Cultural Resources)
"Black Billy" Hill
After the robbery the robbers escaped north through Casper, Wyoming. North of town they murdered a pursuing sheriff, Joe Hazen, who was leading one of the posses. The robbers, believed to be four in number, continued north into the Big Horn Mountains where they obtained
horses, it is believed, from Billy Hill, a local homesteader who was friendly with the outlaw element. Tom Horn, when he was investigating the murder, verified that it was Hill's connivance that made it possible for the robbers to reach Brown's Hole in northwest Colorado.

(Museum of Northwest
Colorado, Craig)
Madison "Matt" Rash, whom Tom Horn murdered In July, 1900 in Brown's Hole,
Colorado, three months before he murdered Isam Dart.

(Wyoming Division of
Cultural Resources)
Bosler, Wyoming rancher John Coble, who was one of Tom Horn's principal
employers and a friend. In the Brown's Hole conspiracy it was Coble who recommended to Ora Haley, Charley Ayer and Wiff Wilson that they hire Tom Horn and pay him $500 each to eliminate the rustlers.

About the author

Chip Carlson posing with Tom Horn's Winchester at a local museum.

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"Chip Carlson is the authority on
Tom Horn"
--Gene M. Gressley Ph.D., director emeritus of the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming

Chip Carlson for information on Tom Horn

Chip Carlson is a Cheyenne, Wyoming historian and author who writes on early-day crime in the West. He has written two books on Tom Horn and Joe LeFors, with a third at the publisher.Ê He is a frequent contributor to regional and national periodicals, providing materials on Western history.

Exactly 100 Years Ago&

1900 "More Trouble Ahead"
By Chip Carlson

Editor's Note: Cheyenne author Chip Carlsons new book on Tom Horn is scheduled for release the summer of 2001, coinciding with the 100-year mark of Willie Nickells murder northwest of Cheyenne. The following is an excerpt of one chapter in the book, which will carry the title, "TOM HORN: BLOOD ON THE MOON." It is being released exclusively on ReadTheWest.com this month, the 100^th anniversary of Tom Horns killing of Isam Dart in northwest Colorado.

Yet another man was to be executed in Browns Hole in 1900.

Isam Dart was born in Texas 1855 and had arrived in Colorado in the 1870s or early 1880s. By one account, he first bore the name Ned Huddleston, who may have been the slave owner who owned Huddleston/Darts parents. He supposedly had lost an ear in a knife fight with an Indian with whose wife Dart had become involved.

Dart rode with the Tip Gault gang, according to the same source, while it was attempting to escape with stolen horses belonging to Margaret Andersons outfit south of Saratoga, Wyoming in 1875. In that episode, a previous Carbon County sheriff owned a ranch through which the horse thieves were pushing the herd. An evening shootout occurred, leaving all the thieves except Dart dead around a campfire. Dart spent an uneasy night next to the unburied body of one of the luckless thieves, and then stole money belts and whatever other loot he could gather up before he escaped on foot. He was wounded by a rancher when he attempted to steal a horse, and was found by an accomplice on the prairie.

It is known that he was an accomplished horse breaker and all-around top cowhand, and superb at cutting out and roping cattle.

Dart ran for election as constable in Sweetwater County, Wyoming in 1884. The position was to be in Coyote Creek Precinct, forty-five miles southwest of Rock Springs and a few miles north of Irish Canyon, an eastern access to Browns Hole. Dart won the election, with eight votes.

Dart was not without sin. Three indictments for branding neat cattle in Sweetwater County were brought against him by the Territory of Wyoming in 1889, but were discharged.

Dart was acquainted with one of the robbers of the Union Pacific train at Wilcox that took place north of Rock River, Wyoming on June 2, 1899.Ê [View train robbery images]

Darts involvement was described in a letter from Rock Springs to U. S. Marshal Frank Hadsell dated August 12, 1899. Little did Dart know that Tom Horn would investigate the robbery, and that Horns scrutiny of Browns Hole a year later would lead to his own death.

After the Wilcox heist, D. G. Thomas, the county and prosecuting attorney for Wyomings Sweetwater County, wrote Hadsell that Angust McDougal had arrived in town from roundups south of Rock Springs and Powder Springs. He said that McDougal met a man "faged [sic] and worn out by hard riding, having six horses well shod, and one of the [sic them] packed." Thomas continued that Isam Dart was accompanying McDougal and had known the man for many years. McDougal, too, knew the man.

The man, however, apparently Dart knew better than he did McDougal and therefore felt he could confide in him. He asked Dart what he knew about "the condition" of the country. Dart replied that everyone knew the area was in an uproar over the recent robbery of the Union Pacific. The man told Dart that at the time of the robbery he was in British Columbia.

Dart persisted in talking about the robbery. The man, inquiring about McDougal, and on being told who he was, said, "dont tell, for Gods sake dont tell any one you saw me." As Dart pursued the matter of the holdup the man "virtually admitted that he was one of the parties, as he remarked, I had a hell of a time keeping away from the hounds& Dart, you must not give me away.

"This mans name was Joe Curry, Joe Southerner, alias Tom McCarty, who used to work with Joe Hazen on the range."

D. G. Thomas continued in his letter that McDougal would be interested in apprehending the man as long as he was in the company of a deputy sheriff and was paid for his work. He added that Hadsell could actually meet the man in Thomas office or should send a "discreet" man to do so, and that Hadsell should keep the matter a "professional secret."

He concluded by saying that Tom ODay (of the botched 1897 Belle Fourche, South Dakota bank robbery) along with Charles Stevens (a.k.a. White River Charley) and John Jinks (alias John Ray) "are in this neck of the woods."

It is not known but apparently Hadsell did not follow up on this golden opportunity, or the man may have disappeared. He may well have been George Curry, whom a number of authorities believe was one of the robbers and whom the Union Pacific wanted to apprehend. Curry ended up being killed in a shootout with a posse in Utah.

A fateful development for Isam Dart occurred two months after Matt Rashs murder at the hands of Tom Horn. Boldly dropping his alias, on September 26, 1900, Horn signed his own name to a complaint naming Dart as a horse thief.

Dart suspected that trouble was ahead for him after Matt Rashs murder. He holed up in a cabin with six other individuals, including Sam and George Bassett, Louis Brown, Billy Rash, Larry Curtin and Elijah B. "Longhorn" Thompson, on his ranch on remote Cold Spring Mountain in Browns Hole. The whole bunch had been friendly with Matt Rash, and figured their names were on the list of those to be exterminated. Some may have been right.

On the morning of October 4, 1900, Dart died of a single gunshot wound as he and the others filed out from the cabin toward a corral. In the cold and windy dawn, none sighted the killer. They bolted for the cabin where they barricaded themselves until nightfall. The next day they found two thirty-thirty caliber shells at the base of the tree that had hidden the assassin. Horn was known to pack a thirty-thirty Winchester.

Several contemporary publications from the Browns Park area add color and other perspectives to the events.

The October 17, 1900 Steamboat Pilot reported the murder of Dart and stated that "a regular reign of terror prevails in Browns Park since the murder of Matt Rash and Isam Dart." It also carried a brief article:

Warned to Leave

A special from Rock Springs says: There is more trouble ahead in Browns Park, where Matt Rash, a cattleman, and Isham [sic] Dart, a colored cowman, were murdered by the lawless element which makes the park their headquarter. Yesterday a letter was found near the cabin of Dart containing a notification of speedy death for the Bassetts and Joe Davenport if they do not leave the county within sixty days. The men threatened are cattlemen who have refused to become friendly with the gang of cattle rustlers.

The November 14, 1900 Pilot reported on Rashs fathers arrival to disinter Matts remains and prepare them for shipment to Texas. It continued that people were beginning to speculate that Rashs and Darts killer was one and the same person, and that he was not from the area, "saying there are so few men here it is an easy matter for each man to show where he was when Dart was shot." It also commented on A. G. Wallihans having seen a "lone horseman" riding east after Rashs death.

On December 5, 1900 the Pilot reported yet another shooting. It said that young George Banks of Lay, Colorado had been shot at but not injured. The paper commented in an editorial of the same date on a more serious matter, the complicity of the governors of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah. It included the possibility of a second gunman.

"&to employ a detective to enter that section.

What his instructions were none may know.

But his deadly work speaks for itself&"

&And now for the tale that is whispered where death lurks so mysteriously: A little over a year ago the governors of three states [Utah, Wyoming and Colorado] met to devise plans to clean out the Hole-in-the-Wall gang which has infested the country lying so conveniently near the corner of the three states. It is asserted that men who had the ear of the governors told them that certain settlers were the aiders, abettors and protectors of the outlaws. That they were themselves cattle rustlers and should be cleaned out. What the officials themselves did is not known, but they at least encouraged powerful interests which are antagonistic to the rustlers, if such they be, to employ a detective to enter that section. What his instructions were none may know. But his deadly work speaks for itself. In this remarkable story the assassins name is even mentioned. According to the story he sat with Rash at his table and partook of his hospitality. He then murdered him like a dog. He was seen going from the place where Dart met his sudden fate a few weeks later.

This man was spotted and a new one took his place. The first man openly boasted in Cheyenne, and his interview was published in the Denver papers that the "rustlers" would soon be cleaned out of Browns Park and it would be a safe place in which to live. The second man is in the country now. He is evidently not as good a shot as the other. Twice he has tried and failed. There are said to be seven names on the death list carried by these men.

The second man, if there was one, might have been Bob Meldrum, Tom Horns fellow Pinkerton operative. Meldrum was working in nearby Carbon County, Wyoming at the time.

In February 1901 George Banks said that he had seen the party who had shot at him and chased him four miles. Then, in March a bullet hit his saddle below the horn. The horse started to run, and Banks, frightened, let him have his head in order to escape. A. G. Wallihan added to the account, saying of Tom Horn,

Lots of the men he was after used to stop here at my roadhouse. Longhorn Thompson had a ranch on Snake River joining the Two Bar outfit. He ate Thanksgiving dinner here with us at Lay and went home. He met Tom Horn in the willows on his own ranch, and jumped off into Snake River before Horn had time to shoot. Thompson moved to Craig after that and one night his wife heard a scraping at the window and she opened the curtain, and there stood Tom Horn. [The] Thompsons moved to Vernal, Utah, after that.... George Banks had a ranch right here at Lay. He was in Craig once putting up his horse in the barn and he heard some men talking outside in the corral, back of the barn. They were talking about killing Matt Rash. Then they stepped into the barn and saw that he had heard them. It was Hi Bernard... and Horn and another man. Banks let on he had not heard them, but a few days later when he went over a ridge there to look for his Jersey cow a bullet cut his shirt front and tore his vest. They wanted to get rid of him for fear he had heard them. Haley was an awful small man in lots of ways.

Two years later, the Craig Courier issue of Saturday, January 18, 1902 reported on Tom Horns arrest for the murder of Willie Nickell. It commented,

&The boy was murdered last July in cold blood, being shot from ambush in the same manner that Isam Dart of Browns park was killed&.

&The Cheyenne correspondents of the Denver papers state that Horn is suspected of being the murderer of Matt Rash and Isam Dart.

Horn is well known to a number of Routt County stockmen and his name as been associated with Browns park assassinations ever since the crimes were committed. He was Rashs employee for a short time and made several visits to Craig. While in this section he was known as Tom Hicks.

Tom Horn himself summarized his activities in Browns Park in 1900, in the incriminating letters he wrote to Joe LeFors early in 1902. As shown later the nefarious plotting that preceded his so-called confession, his correspondence led directly to his arrest and conviction.

Ironically and with perhaps a bit of humor, Tom also wrote a letter on Sheriff Ed Smalleys stationery to Bob Meldrum while in jail on April 18, 1903.

Bob Meldrum, Esq.
Telluride, Colo.

Dear Bob, Recd yours of the 10th today. It is the only word I have had of you since you were here. Snow slides are sure to be raising cain all over the San Juan. I will drop you another line in a few days. Yes, I am sure to get a new trial. I will come free then sure. I have not seen any one for a couple of months. We had a bad winter sure. All our fellows were in town a few days ago but I did not get to see any of them. Browns Park was always a nice quiet place & I cant see what makes them cut up now. Harry Tracy gave the place a bad name. I guess one of the Hays was the first man Tracy every killed. Farnum had ought [to be] prominent now as he had the pleasure of arresting Tracy once in a snow-bank. I dont see any one and consequently have no news to write. I will see my lawyers in two or three weeks and will then write you through them.

I am well and fat. Write whenever you can.
Yours truly,
Tom Horn

Copyright © 2000 Chip Carlson. No unauthorized reproduction or transmission by any means whatsoever permitted under federal criminal law.

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