HANGMAN CLAIMED ONE HAZEN AREA PIONEER
~By Maynard Stephens
By the time each of the five sons of Joe and Belle Stephens was 12, he knew every rock, tree, beaver dam, skunk den, and homestead cellar hole on the old sheep ranch of almost 5,000 acres straddling the Knife River.
We knew every place most likely to yield arrowheads, every gravel bar on the river where agates might be found, the best spots to kick out a bunny rabbit, the places where prairie chickens drummed their spring dance. We missed very little.
We were especially curious about the deserted cellar holes which contained only a few foundation stones and possible the broken, rusted remains of an old stove.
There was one such hole across the river from the ranch on a little bench just above the high water line. Mother said when she was about 7, a man and his woman lived there, but the man, a horse trader, was seldom home. She had seen him some times at McGrath’s store in old Stanton and she was afraid of him. She was told he was a bad man, and he looked the part. He was rough looking, wore buckskin, and always carried a gun. In his boot top, he carried a big knife.
She told us about him many times, and she always mentioned the knife in his boot top, which she seemed to find especially threatening. After his prolonged absences, he would show up with new horses. Finally he disappeared, never to return. The woman stayed for a time, and then she vanished. A story circulated around Stanton that the man had been hanged by some Montana cowboys for horse rustling.
After I came to Montana, I wondered if the hanging story could be verified, but I couldn’t recall the man’s name. My sister, Winnie, then 92 and living in Missoula, said, “Of course, I remember. His name was Burr.”
Sure enough. The name Dixie Burr cropped up in an account of the “Stuart’s Stranglers” raid on a camp near the mouth of the Musselshell River, July 8, 1884. There a group of nine vigilantes came across a gang of suspected rustlers, among whom was one Dixie Burr.
The year 1884 corresponded with the time Mother’s folks, the Dave Wood’s, were trading at the McGrath Bros. store in old Stanton. The Wood family at the time lived where the Stephens ranch headquarters later was situated.
As related in “Before Barbed Wire,” by Mark H. Brown and W. R. Felton, vigilantes arrived at the rustler camp before daylight. Of the nine, three guarded the tent containing Burr and five others. Five surrounded the cabin occupied by the other members of the gang. One vigilante guarded the horses.
Old man James, apparently the leader of the rustler gang, was first to emerge from the cabin and was ordered to turn out some 165 horses in the rustler corral. He did, but returned to the cabin and fired on the vigilantes who then set fire to the cabin, destroying it, its occupants and a hay stack.
One rustler, Stringer Jack, crawled out of the tent into some willows and was shot there. Dixie Burr had his arm shattered by a rifle slug and managed to crawl into an old dry well where he stayed until after dark to make his escape to the river. Next day, he and three other survivors made a raft and floated down the Missouri to the vicinity of Fort Peck. There they were intercepted by some soldiers and Indian scouts who arrested them and threw them in the guard house.
A U. S. Marshal came to pick them up and take them to White Sulphur Springs, but was met by a posse of cowboys who took the four prisoners and hanged them from a pole placed across two small cabins which were then burned.
A steamboat stopped at Bates Point the following day and crew and passengers were treated to the grisly site of four still figures hanging from the cottonwood trees among the smoking ruins of the cabins and corrals.
Word of the hanging no doubt arrived in Stanton and other river towns as boats came down the Missouri.
Besides the 165 horses recovered near Bates Point, another 119 were found in other places.
But vigilante law was coming to an end. A total of 63 men were shot or hanged in Montana and western North Dakota in 1884. Not one in 1885.