Vigilante Days and Ways: The pioneers of the Rockies; the makers and making of Montana and IdahoLangford, Nathaniel Pitt
History
Vigilante Days and Ways: The pioneers of the Rockies; the makers and making of Montana and Idaho
Langford, Nathaniel Pitt
Frontier and pioneer life -- Northwestern States; Northwestern States -- History; Vigilance committees; West (U.S.) -- History
two weeks after his trial, he left Idaho City for Walla Walla.
One day the following Spring, Patterson entered a barber’s shop for the
purpose of getting shaved. Removing his coat, he seated himself in the
barber’s chair. A man by the name of Donahue arose from a chair
opposite, and, advancing towards him, said:
“Ferd, you and I can’t both live in this community. You have threatened
me.” As Patterson sprung to his feet, Donahue shot him. Staggering to
the street, he started towards the saloon where he had left his pistol,
and was followed by Donahue, who continued to fire at him, and he fell
dead across the threshold of the saloon, thus verifying in his own case
the fatalistic belief of his class, “He died with his boots on.”
The only incident of Patterson’s trial worthy of note was the following:
One of the attorneys who had been employed for a purpose disconnected
with the management of the trial, insisted upon making an argument to
the jury. This annoyed his colleagues, and disgusted Patterson’s
friends, but professional etiquette upon the part of the lawyers, and a
certain indefinable delicacy from which even the worst of men are not
wholly estranged, prevented all interference, and the advocate launched
out into a speech of great length, filled with indiscreet assertions,
slipshod arguments, and ridiculous appeals, at each of which, as they
came up, one of the shrewder counsel for the defendant, seated beside
his client, filled almost to bursting with indignation, would whisper in
his ear the ominous words,
“There goes another nail into your coffin, Ferd.”
Wincing under these repeated admonitions, Patterson’s eyes assumed their
blood-drinking expression, and at last the mental strain becoming too
great for longer composure, he exclaimed with a profane curse,
“I wish it had been he, in the place of Old Pinkham.”
Upon the trial of Donahue the jury failed to agree. He was remanded to
prison, from which he afterwards escaped, fled to California, where he
was rearrested, and released upon a writ of habeas corpus, by the
strange decision that the provision of the Constitution of the United
States requiring one State to deliver up a fugitive from justice to
another claiming him, did not apply to Territories.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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