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The Silver Chalice
The Most Dangerous Game
In the Constellation of Rooster and Lunatics
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Rocky Mountain Magazine Sept./Oct. 1981
CLAUDE DALLAS ENTERED the high desert of Idaho and Nevada
the way many mountain men had—18 years old and as shy as
he was green, holding close to him myths of the raw West. In 1980
he had reached the age of 30, and he was no longer young. His
beard had grown full, and after one grueling winter alone in the
desert, he kept his brown hair long and tied in a ponytail. He had
become a good horseman and a crack shot, and was learning skills
that would help him survive on his own deep in the wilderness, the
tricks of trapping bobcat and coyote. Later, after it was all
over—the allegations of murder, Dallas's disappearance, and the
futile manhunt—one friend would lament, "Claude was born 150
years too late."
For a while the sheriff's office received word of five or six
Dallas sightings a day, enough to cause one officer to
comment during the hunt, "It's a bad time to be wearing
a beard." But from the outset all there was to go on was
George Nielsen's testimony that Dallas had actually
begun his escape at Sand Pass Road in the Bloody Run Hills.
Wherever he had been dropped off, Dallas had gained nearly 30 hours
head start on his pursuers in territory he knew intimately.
"I've got to believe it when they say this guy could travel 30 or 40
miles a night," Nettleton declared. "He was tough." When it became
obvious within a week that Dallas was probably not in the area, the
manhunt was suspended. Posters offering a $20,000 reward were later
sent to law agencies across the country; reports of Dallas sightings began
to pour in from almost every state. None have yet produced the suspect.
Once the manhunt was played out, the search for Bill Pogue's body became paramount.
Sonar and ultrasonic devices, scuba divers, tracking dogs, psychics, grappling hooks,
bulldozers, helicopters, planes, land vehicles, and nearly 200 people figured
in the month-long search. Still the winter desert and mountains yielded nothing.
IN 1972 THE NATIONAL Geographic Society published a book titled The American Cowboy. The volume included two photographs of a peach-fuzzed cowhand on the Little
Humboldt Ranch in Nevada; it was Claude Dallas. The author, Bart McDowell,
observed in the text, "not every buckaroo can be identified here [on the Owyhee Desert];
some give spurious Social Security numbers to protect the privacy of their past."
Although he was barely out of his teens, Claude seems already to have been one such
mysterious character. As it turned out, he had his reasons for anonymity.
Few people knew, and no one seems to have cared, that the reclusive boy had
come from the East. Born in Virginia in 1950, he was reportedly raised in New
York State with four brothers, one sister, and two half-sisters. After graduating
from high school in 1968 Dallas headed west, possibly thinking he had
left all authority behind.
It is said that one day he just showed up on the Alvord Ranch in southeastern Oregon, carrying his bedroll and a commemorative-edition rifle. There Claude got his first taste of cowboy life. With the money he earned in Oregon, the teen-ager purchased two horses and set off somewhat quixotically to explore the withered frontier. Eventually his wanderings led to the
Paradise Valley region in northern Nevada, where he led a cowboy's life, worked harvest on potato farms, dug wells, and generally paid dues. During his first year with the Quarter Circle A outfit in Nevada, Dallas hand-filed a pair of spurs and made his own chaps.
"Anybody can go down and be a cowboy," explained Sheriff Nettleton. "Thirty days with this outfit, 30 days with that outfit. Normally you put five outfits under the belt and you've done something. This guy apparently worked for upwards of 20 or 30 of them. He earned a
reputation for being a hard-working loner type. . .clean, neat, and polite."
In 1973 Claude's idyll was shattered. The FBI tracked him down and arrested him for
failure to appear for military induction, Dallas blamed the photographs published in The American Cowboy for his arrest, although one FBI agent denied the book led the bureau to
him. He was extradited to Columbus, Ohio, where his draft board was located. Later
he told friends he had spent a month in custody in Columbus and was fined before
being released.
"Claude had bad feelings toward the FBI," said Irene Fischer, who
first met Dallas in 1970 when she was a cook with the Quarter Circle A
outfit and he was a green, shy cowhand. "Claude's father said that
the FBI had harassed that family for years," Irene remembered. "They
wouldn't let it rest. They hunted him until they caught him. And
when the man put him on the bus back to Nevada he told him, 'Claude, I'll
get you, even if it's for income tax evasion.' " Whether the FBI did or did
not harass the Dallas family, Claude clearly felt harassed.
Back in Nevada, Dallas resumed the hard, plain life from which
he'd been yanked. Although he was capable of discoursing on the
evils of the Vietnam War and a wide range of other topics, it was the
West that most interested him. Fading arts such as braiding rawhide,
bottle collecting, and reloading old cartridges appealed to him, and
he was fond of the paintings of Charles M. Russell, particularly a
lighthearted work entitled A Bronc to Breakfast.
Sometime around 1975 Dallas started teaching himself how to
trap. In recent years, when pelts began to fetch prices in the hundreds
of dollars, numerous ranchers and farmers have taken up trapping,
though few have done better than break even. But for Dallas trapping was not just a hobby. He considered it a basic necessity for the
life he wanted to live. According to older professionals like Santy
Mendieta and Frank Aramburu, Basques who have been trapping for
40 and 60 years, respectively, Dallas was only an amateur trapper. Just
the same, they say, he brought in respectable pelts.
MANY LAW OFFICERS between Boise and Winnemucca have
expressed concern that Dallas might be lionized by the
media. Some angrily deny it, but others allow that Claude
Dallas cut quite a figure—at least on the face of things. The man was
devoted to a life style celebrated in fiction and film, part cowboy and
pan trapper. He lived clean and simple. As Sheriff Nettleton observed,
"Outside of this one small quirk, he's the kind of guy you could respect."
Because of that "one small quirk," what is alleged to have been his role
in the murders, Dallas is one of the most wanted men in America.
In March 1976 Dallas was cited and fined for a trapping violation
near Eureka, Nevada. It is said that after that incident he added game
wardens to his list of aggravations headed by the FBI. He seemed to
be more and more in the habit of quietly spurning the law. The traps
he set around Bull Camp last January are one example of his civil
disobedience. According to the wardens who pulled them, his traps
were neither tagged for identification nor gapped for eagle protection,
and they were baited. In addition, although Dallas had pur-
chased a nonresident trapping license for the state of Idaho, he was at
least four days premature in setting out his line.
"I hunt a lot," said Dr. James Calder, a Winnemucca dentist who
regularly checked Dallas's teeth. "I've come across Claude out in the
desert lots of times. He has camps all over this country. As well as I
know him, I always got the cold shoulder when I met him in the
desert. Probably why he didn't like you coming around was he always
had a deer or something he had shot out of season in his camp.
There's no secret about that. He either didn't want you to see what he
had shot or he didn't want you to be implicated if he got in trouble
for it. I don't know which. I do know Claude believed he had a right
to kill animals out of season without regard for game laws."
In the winter of 1978-79, Nevada Department of Wildlife warden
Gene Weller confiscated two guns from Dallas as well as traps he
believed belonged to the trapper. The peculiar circumstances of that
encounter underscore the cat-and-mouse game some hunters and
trappers play with game wardens and vice versa. The scenario also
places Dallas's alleged statements two years later at Bull Camp in
illuminating context.
Late one afternoon, during a routine check of trap lines in a canyon
of the Bloody Run Hills, Weller came across a number of baited— and
therefore illegal—sets. Because of the location of the traps and the
lateness of the hour, Weller decided against waiting for the owner of
the traps; he instead confiscated them. The warden left his business
card and a note stating why the traps had been seized and who to contact. Early the next morning, as Weller was returning to the canyon,
he saw a red jeep moving toward the canyon mouth. He parked his
truck in an arroyo and waited until the driver had departed on foot
up the canyon, then drove closer and prepared for a rare event—an
arrest of a violator caught red-handed.
"I waited all day," Weller said. "I waited and waited. It was in the
winter and the canyon was slipperier than all get-out, and I thought,
finally. This guy has slipped and broken his leg. By then it was dark. I
called for a sheriffs backup and got a couple of deputies.
"The three of us went up. One of the deputies checked the jeep
and found a rifle. He told me it was loaded, with an unexpended
[therefore illegal] round in the chamber. We went up the canyon.
"Well, I tracked him in the frozen snow, tracked him to the first
trap site, and my business card, which I'd hung on a bait wire, was
gone. At this point I circled around with a flashlight. There was
another set of tracks coming down, but not on the trail. So 1 tracked
these; finally the tracks went up a side hill and I lost the track. . . .1
later found out that he was in fact sitting on the mountain watching
me watch for him. He was probably, chuckling the whole time. In
retrospect, he could have blown me away at any time that day."
The three officers retreated to their vehicles, confiscated the rifle
and a pistol from the jeep, and left. After a few days Dallas appeared
at the county courthouse to claim the confiscated guns. He denied
that the traps had been his or that the rifle had been loaded. Weller
had no evidence that connected Dallas with the traps, and when the
deputy who'd opened the rifle was questioned about it, he declined
to swear under oath that the round had been a live one. Weller could
do nothing but sign the guns over to Dallas. It may have been this
incident that Dallas had in mind on January 5, when he allegedly informed Bill Pogue that he would deny the charges if taken to court.
There was another significant postscript to Weller's encounter
with Dallas. He remembers, "[Claude] told me, 'You are welcome in
my camp.' His camp was very important to him, I found out later.
'But,' he said, 'leave your badge outside.' And 1 told him, 'Claude, 1
can't leave my badge outside.' And he said, 'Well, don't come into
my camp, then.'"
This sentiment may illustrate Dallas's distaste for authority, but it
explains nothing about the greatest mystery of all: if Jim Stevens's
eyewitness account is accurate, why did Dallas drive 70 miles out of
the wilderness to dispose of Pogue's body? He had failed to haul the
corpse of Conley Elms up to the rim and must have known that the
body would not disappear in the waist-deep, slow-moving waters of
the Owyhee. With his plan for hiding both bodies ruined, why would
he then have driven back to civilization to bury Pogue?
Irene Fischer may have come close to explaining the mystery.
"There's still this horrible feeling of why, what was Claude's idea to
bring Pogue's body in here," she said. "He was so angry at
Pogue that he was just going to make sure that man was never found."
WE'RE CALLED CONSERVATION officers," says Michael Elms. A
stocky, bearded man, Elms knew both murder victims well—one was
his "little brother" and the other "a very, very close friend." Had he
not been ill the day before the shootings, Michael Elms would have
been at Bull Camp instead of his brother. Jazz plays softly on his
living room radio as he talks about his job. The books on
his shelves include a copy of The Whole Earth Catalog and a
multi-volume set of The Classics of Philosophy.
"We check hunters and fishermen, trespassers, rustlers. We do
quite a bit of public speaking. We're on call for helping with different law enforcement agencies and whatever biological work the
department wants us to do. Almost all of us have got at least bachelor
of science degrees, quite a number have master's, and there's several
Ph.D.'s walking around." Idaho conservation officers earn roughly
(1600 per month, and each senior officer is responsible for some 1200
square miles of state, federal, and private land. Their mission is to
manage a walking, eating, renewable resource—the stare's wildlife.
Because of the nature of their responsibilities, conservation officers
must deal with outdoorsmen, most of whom carry guns and a few of
whom have no desire to see the law nosing around their campsites.
"We go out and find even fishermen carrying guns and
big knives," Elms says. "It's sort of a Wild West syndrome.
For example, we have an air force base down the road here
[Mountain Home Air Force Base]. As soon as they hit the
base some of the men go out and buy a gun, a big knife,
and a couple of bandoleers and head out into the hills."
One ten-year study conducted by the Wyoming Game and
Fish Department showed that a game warden has roughly
seven times the chance or being shot at or threatened with
a gun as a regular peace officer and almost nine times as
great a chance of dying if assaulted.
Much of the job's danger stems from the marginal communications between
officers and the distances that often separate wardens from
one another. And yet the inherent danger does not appear
to have caused any paranoia among Idaho's game
wardens—even after the Bull Camp shootings. Dale Baird,
chief of law enforcement in the Idaho Department of Fish
and Game, explains, "Privately and around campfircs over
the years, we've all said that sometime it's going to happen
to one of us—just hope it isn't going to be me. So while
[the double murder] was a shock, it wasn't a total surprise.
You worry about these things, but you can't worry too
much or you wouldn't go."
Conley Elms had Struggled for years to obtain his job
with Idaho Fish and Game, working at odd jobs and as a
part-time biological aide with the department until he was
hired as a conservation officer in 1977. He and Michael had
grown up on a small ranch near Beaver Marsh, Oregon
(population 20 or less), and for four years before his
murder Conley and his brother had shared the same occupation with
great satisfaction. From all accounts Conley was a man at peace
with himself. His main passion was a quiet one—fly fishing. At the
time of his death at age 33, he and his wife, Sheryl, were in the
final stage of adopting a baby from India.
Comments from various Idaho Fish and Game officers give the impression
that Conley Elms was less likely to have been a party to a conflict with
Dallas than Bill Pogue. This is not to say that Pogue was responsible for the alleged confrontation, but Elms was probably less threatening to Dallas.
"Bill Pogue was difficult to get to know," says Jerry Thiessen, big-game manager with Idaho Fish and Game and one of Pogue's closest
friends. "It rook me six or eight years.... Bill and I would go down to
Owyhee County and do what buddies do—look for arrowheads, cook
a steak. We built a relationship and a rapport with Owyhee County.
He was gentle, he was kind.
"But he had an air about himself that represented authority, even
without his uniform on. He had little time for idle chitchat with
people he didn't know well. I wouldn't say he was brusque, but he
was sometimes short with people. Bill believed you shouldn't
dillydally around. If you're not going to enforce the law, don't have
the law."
Pogue was a lawman, and most people seern to remember him as
such. Thiessen says, "When Bill walked up to you, there was no question
in your mind that he represented the law." Pogue's stare, especially intense
as the result of an accident to his right eye, made his presence keenly felt.
"People remembered that he'd looked at them," says Thiessen.
"There wasn't any way you were going to forget the man."
Dr. Calder agrees. "Bill was a tough law officer," he says, "but
you've got to be tough around here. He was stern with poachers,
people ripping off the wild game." But beneath Pogue's icy demeanor
was a warm humor. Having spent part of his life in
bunkhouses with cowboys and years as a student of the early mountain
men, Pogue admired much the same western period and life
Style that Dallas did. In 1964, when he first arrived in Garden Valley,
Idaho, to take a job with Idaho Fish and Game, Pogue moved his
family into a log cabin. His love of nature and regard for history surfaced
most articulately in his artwork. He was a photographer who
favored river otters and hummingbirds as subjects. But it was his
sketches and paintings that most vividly revealed the inner man.
Pogue's personal favorite was entitled Mountain Man. In this drawing
a bright-eyed, bearded character softly touches a single strand of
barbed wire, gazing with innocent resignation at the near side of
civilization. Inasmuch as Pogue himself accepted civilization and its
restricting barbed wire, Mountain Man may have been a self-portrait
of sons. It expresses a deeply felt sympathy for the trappers and frontier
recluses who fell before the changing times. Except for the
resignation in the mountain man's eyes, the drawing could also have
been a portrait of Claude Dallas.
In the menagerie of characters Pogue drew, one figure resembles
his alleged murderer more closely still. The Trapper depicts a fierce,
bearded hunter straddling a dead wolf. Trap in one hand, walking
stick in the other, the man in this drawing is clearly defiant, not
resigned to the viewer's trespass. Drawn a year before the shootings,
the work seems to have presaged the persona Pogue and Elms last
encountered.
TO SOME IT WOULD seem that Claude Dallas is a man of almost
legendary proportions. The stage is certainly set in his favor: his
story brings elements of the western myth—wilderness,
solitude, and violence—together. There have even been reports that
some people applauded the murders. But Santy Mendieta summarizes
a more general feeling among locals when he observes, "It's a
sad thing. You can't make a hero out of either of them. What
brought it about was that the one was going to drag the other into
Boise, or wherever, handcuffed and hogtied. And the other man just
wasn't going to go—and he didn't. From what I hear and from what I
knew of them, they being the two men they were, [they] would have
had the same trouble right out here on the street."
In Idaho capital punishment is now administered by lethal injection,
and several law officers have expressed angry hope that Claude
Dallas will be the first guinea pig for the new technique. The murders
have torn holes in the lives of the victims' families and friends; they
wait for the day of justice. But the questions raised by the tragedy
have also caused deep anguish for Dallas's closest friends.
"These law boys had a chance to use what I call appropriate common
sense," explains Cortland Nielsen, brother of George Nielsen.
"They didn't have to push Claude. They could have told him in a
right way that someone had reported him. People talk bad about
him, but Claude wasn't the sort to waste deer meat."
Nielsen remembers Dallas back when he was a teen-ager beginning
the horseback circuit of Nevada that led him. 11 years later, to Bull
Camp on the Owyhee. He searches for some negative quality in the
boy he watched grow into a man, something that might demonstrate
that, even at his worst, Dallas was better than most.
"The only thing wrong with him," he says, pausing, "he let his hair
grow. But in this book here, the Bible, it says that long hair is a
woman's beauty and it's filth on a man. I told him so, too." Nielsen
drops into silence and gropes for a different thought. Almost wish-
fully he suddenly booms, "I'm confident Claude is traveling around
the world and getting along fine." He falters. "Bur then he's got a
conscience, too. So finally it'll hit him too much someday. Then he'll
figure a way to get lost and that'll be the end. No one will ever see
him again." Nielsen stops, disturbed by the idea he has just ex-
pressed. Outside his window enormous winds rip at the topsoil of the
solitary ranches perched up and down the valley.
"The only way that he could ever get back, that people will ever see
him again, would be if the people [the law] let it be known
that. ..that. . .but, see... you can't excuse, you can't. . .it's so
tough." At last he concludes, "I just don't know how to call it. I wrote
a letter to Norman Vincent Peale to find out right from wrong, what
should be done if I ever see Claude, say in Portland or Calcutta next
Sunday, other than tell him to pray or turn himself in. I don't know.
It's really tough."
Not far down the road from Nielsen lives Dallas's old friend, Irene
Fischer. The winter she and Claude worked the Circle A together,
Irene and her husband, Walt, gave the lone boy presents and a
Christmas meal when all the other hands had departed for the holiday.
Now she mourns Claude, almost as if he were a dead younger
brother. Her scrapbook contains some of the few photographs in
which Dallas ever appeared, and pictures taken for The American
Cowboy hang in her home.
During the past few months Fischer has sketched an exquisite fantasy
of the moment of the alleged murders. Behind Dallas is a hazy
rendition of a western saloon. Buildings and skyscrapers, the urban
landscape Dallas repudiated, loom even deeper in the background,
tucked in some narrow alley of the trapper's psyche. The romanticized
periphery is balanced by the event taking place in the work and
the realism of the desert floor in the foreground. In the sketch Dallas
is shooting a lawman. Such is the nightmare within the dream.
"I'm very sorry for what he done," Fischer says, "sorry because we'll
never see him again. I hope he never gets caught for the simple reason
I don't think Claude will ever be taken alive. I wouldn't want him to
kill anyone else, and I wouldn't want them to kill him. And I
wouldn't want him to end up killing himself. He did make a remark
to a friend that if he was caught he'd shoot it out, and that if it got
down to his last shell he'd shoot himself before he'd be taken."
That sentiment is less painful to her than another, more personal
one, though. Despite her anger at the law for its determined pursuit
of Claude Dallas, Fischer has had to compose her own answer to a
question that haunts her: what would she have done if this friend of years had arrived at her house with the blood of two dead
men on him?
"I've laid awake at night and thought about it," she sighs. "Claude
was a dear friend, and I've really had to look inside myself. And
I honestly believe that I would have been in my right mind. . .I'm
so dead set against. . ." She halts and would rather not say it.
"I couldn't have helped Claude. . . .His destiny is in the hands of
God now."
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