Talk:Sage Brush Vengeance

OUNG Jere Cuttles in “Sage Brush Vengeance,” Robert Welles Ritchie's novelette in this issue didn't set out to get any fictional villain when he rode across the overland trail. Bill Hazard was a real man and owned a real gang of cut-throats. Here's his story as gleaned by Mr. Ritchie from the newspapers of the time.

“Lucky Bill Hazard, the big laughing villain—if villain he was—of my story, once lived much as I have tried to picture him doing. And he died as so many of his tribe did in the hell-roarin' Fifties: of too much hemp.

“I first ran across the trail of the late Lucky Bill last summer while prowling about the old ghost towns of the Argonauts in the Sierras—forgotten scenes of what was unquestionably one of the world's epic episodes. In the little county seat of Downieville, snuggled away down in the gorge of North Yuba, I ran across the county surveyor who had in his office dusty bound files of Downieville papers of 1858. In the course of two days' gorgeous burrowing I found this single item under a July date line of that year:

“'Lucky Bill, as the papers have it, was hanged by a mob in Carson Valley on the 19th. He was accused of having murdered a Frenchman. More 'luck' next time, Bill.”

A handsome satiric epitaph!

Just those few lines, and yet they stuck by me. A man called Lucky hanged by a mob

Months afterward I was prowling through the very remarkable Bancroft Library, at the University of California on the quest of an obscure story, a hint of which I had gleaned from an old graybeard of the deserted town Port Wine. Reading through the files of the Sacramento Union of the year Fifty-eight, my eye hit the name “Lucky Bill” in the heading of a column of type; and there was the report of a correspondent—one J. A. Thompson—of the trial, by vigilantes, of that identical outlaw, which occurred in a barn on Clear Creek in Carson Valley. The eye-witness account said that a second man named Edwards was tried with Lucky Bill for the murder of the Frenchman Gordier in the Honey Lake Valley of what is now Lassen County, California.

And—gorgeous touch!—when the twain were captured by the vigilantes they were yoked together by a leg-iron made by a blacksmith from a discarded frying pan.

The Alta California of San Francisco, in a briefer account of the trial and execution come upon by a prompting to cross-reference, gave this grim picture of Lucky Bill's last moment:

“He made no confession but took things coolly, putting the rope around his own neck. His last words were, 'If you want to hang me, I am no hog.'”

Alas for the deceptive glitter of romance! It seems Lucky Bill was married at the time he came to the end of his tether. Legend of the Old Timers in the ghost camps has it that his widow went insane and that his only son became a gambler in Sacramento.

And there you have the bones of my story.

Perhaps I might add that my Judge Stupe, who, too, had his prototype in the flesh, headed a convention in the town I have called Bitter Springs, the object of which was to create the “Territory of Sierra Nevada” out of the far-flung Utah Territory and to include therein all of California lying east of Sierra crest. But that is another story—and a whale of a story, at that. 2em Carmel, California.