Tuesday, June 8, 2010
1901 - 1926
1926
1918.jpg)
1911
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1911
1910
1907 - Penola Dayley, High School Senior
1902 - Backside of Cassia Stake Academy Graduating Class
1902 - Cassia Stake Academy Graduating Class
"LEARNING IS OUR NOBLE AIM"
Patriarchal Blessing of Annie Penola Dayley
Patriarchal Blessing by James Dayley, Patriarch, upon the head of Annie Penola Dayley, daughter of Jacob Dayley and Annie Christina Eliason Dayley. Born September 11, 1890, at Oakley, Idaho:
Dear sister, in the name of Jesus, I lay my hands upon your head to bless you by virtue of the Priesthood vested in me with all the blessings of the New and Everlasting Covenant. I bless you with the blessings of a Father. And I say unto you: be faithful, for the gifts and power of God will be with you. You shall be mighty in the day in which you live and in your sex in doing works for your ancestors.
Thou shalt be filled with an overflow of the Spirit of God. His Spirit will be with you continually. Your work is mighty in the House of the Lord. You shall be blessed with thy brothers and sisters in performing the work in the House of the Lord.
Thy days shall be many upon the Earth. Thy hands shall be stored with a multiplicity of blessings. The Lord will bless you with earthly blessings and your heart shall be as willing to bestow them upon your sex, as the Lord is willing to bless you.
Be faithful in thy young days, for the Lord will fill you with His Spirit and thy hands shall be stored with earthly blessings. Thy desire will be: “Lord, Thy will be done.” You will see the glory and power of Almighty God with the people of the Lord.
I seal all these blessings that are predicted upon your head, by virtue of the Priesthood vested in me and in the name of Jesus. Amen
Dear sister, in the name of Jesus, I lay my hands upon your head to bless you by virtue of the Priesthood vested in me with all the blessings of the New and Everlasting Covenant. I bless you with the blessings of a Father. And I say unto you: be faithful, for the gifts and power of God will be with you. You shall be mighty in the day in which you live and in your sex in doing works for your ancestors.
Thou shalt be filled with an overflow of the Spirit of God. His Spirit will be with you continually. Your work is mighty in the House of the Lord. You shall be blessed with thy brothers and sisters in performing the work in the House of the Lord.
Thy days shall be many upon the Earth. Thy hands shall be stored with a multiplicity of blessings. The Lord will bless you with earthly blessings and your heart shall be as willing to bestow them upon your sex, as the Lord is willing to bless you.
Be faithful in thy young days, for the Lord will fill you with His Spirit and thy hands shall be stored with earthly blessings. Thy desire will be: “Lord, Thy will be done.” You will see the glory and power of Almighty God with the people of the Lord.
I seal all these blessings that are predicted upon your head, by virtue of the Priesthood vested in me and in the name of Jesus. Amen
1972, Testimony of Wallace Aroet Hale
Testimony of Wallace Aroet Hale
May 1972, Murray 10th Ward, Murray West Stake, Mission Farewell of Grandson, Randall Whitney Hale
Eighty-five years is quite a load to carry all this way here, especially for this occasion, but I am thankful to meet with you and partake of the sacrament and in honor to another one of my grandsons. By way of testimony, I would like to relate an experience that came to me when I was a young missionary in the mission field. I think it will help Brother Randy, as well as all of us.
My oldest brother died when he was on the missions. He took typhoid fever in Maryland, and Brother McMurrin, Joseph W. McMurrin, came out to Oakley and preached his sermon, his funeral sermon, and I took a liking to Brother McMurrin, and when I was called, I wanted him to set me apart for my mission. They recorded mission blessings in those days and among one of the things Brother McMurrin told me that in answer to prayer my tongue would be loosed and I would speak fluently the words of life and salvation to the convincing of the honest in heart and the confounding of those who think they are wise.
Way out in the panhandle of Oklahoma, that runs way out to New Mexico and Arizona, there was a bunch of men having an argument over the Mormon Church, and they decided to write to President Joseph F. Smith, our President [Joseph Fielding Smith] now’s father. And they asked a lot of questions, very reasonable, and President Smith sent the letter to President Bennion to Independence, Missouri, and he sent it down into Oklahoma to our conference president. I was laboring with a young Elder about out in the middle of Oklahoma, and he asked us to go out there and answer these questions. So we figured we had about three hundred miles to walk. It was near conference, so we knew we would have to hurry.
When we located this man, he was a – talk about a hippie! He was sitting outside a little old cabin, a retired old lawyer. He had tobacco juice running down his beard and you just can’t hardly think how he looked. We told him we had walked six hundred miles and three hundred miles out there to answer his questions and he thought it was one of the biggest jokes he ever heard. He just fell back and laughed and laughed at us. He didn’t even take us in his house.
We left then and walked back across the northeast corner of Texas back into Oklahoma for our conference. I know there was a family of Saints living out in the western part of Oklahoma and we looked them up in a city one late afternoon. The sister, when we reached their place, fixed us something to eat, then showed us in their big front room, stirred up the old fire, the old back log, and that was the last time we saw anybody till night.
In the night we noticed there was quite a lot of confusion out in the kitchen. We didn’t know just what was going on and pretty quick they started to carrying in chairs, made benches or planks across benches and chairs making room for quite a crowd. Now, I thought, “Well, that’s nice of them. That’s why they haven’t come to visit with us at all – they’ve been out advertising a meeting. We’re going to have a cottage meeting.”
Pretty quick the people started filing in. They nearly filled the house and I felt that I was nearly ready to take over, when in walked the – oh! – the brightest looking man that I ever saw – a fine big man. He walked behind the table they had set for the speaker. He laid down his books and I happened to look across and saw, oh!, The Mountain Meadow Massacre, Brigham Young’s Nineteen Wives, Adam, God, and . . . and those other books. They just about scared me to death. I know my young companion hadn’t talked or know little about the gospel and I knew I didn’t know too much. I didn’t know if I’d ever met or talked with one of the Reorganized people in my life. He got behind the pulpit and he started to tell them what all he had accomplished. He even said, “I want to tell you folks I’ve had the angels turn the passages of scriptures for me while I preach!” And it just scared me to death! There I was – I didn’t have a book or no preparation at all but he hadn’t talked five minutes till it seems as though I was just lifted up and I walked right around and stood beside him.
Pretty quick I challenged some of his statements. He started talking and I wanted to bear testimony that my tongue was loosed. And I did speak things as I – way beyond my power or knowledge at that time. And before I had talked to him five minutes, he started to trembling just like a man that was having the chills and fever. Every part of his body was shaking. When he started to talk his chin would just rattle! And all at once he reached down and grabbed his books and beat it across the room to the door. When he got to the door, he stopped and said, “I want to tell you folks that the brains to the Church went to Utah.” He slammed the door and we never seen anymore of him, but he left a nice little congregation there for two young boys in the twentieth year to preach the Gospel as it had been restored and with the same authority that had been restored to the Prophet Joseph Smith.
I know the Lord will help Randy in the mission field if he puts his trust in the Father in Heaven. I know that He lives and that He will bless us all. I often think of the works of Solomon when he had been blessed with more wisdom than anybody in his day, had gained all the riches that he needed above all the men at that time, and in closing his writing the Book of Ecclesiastes, he says: “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter; Fear God and keep His commandments, for it is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every work into judgment with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil.”
May the Lord bless and help us to do right and further His work in the Earth, I pray in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
May 1972, Murray 10th Ward, Murray West Stake, Mission Farewell of Grandson, Randall Whitney Hale
Eighty-five years is quite a load to carry all this way here, especially for this occasion, but I am thankful to meet with you and partake of the sacrament and in honor to another one of my grandsons. By way of testimony, I would like to relate an experience that came to me when I was a young missionary in the mission field. I think it will help Brother Randy, as well as all of us.
My oldest brother died when he was on the missions. He took typhoid fever in Maryland, and Brother McMurrin, Joseph W. McMurrin, came out to Oakley and preached his sermon, his funeral sermon, and I took a liking to Brother McMurrin, and when I was called, I wanted him to set me apart for my mission. They recorded mission blessings in those days and among one of the things Brother McMurrin told me that in answer to prayer my tongue would be loosed and I would speak fluently the words of life and salvation to the convincing of the honest in heart and the confounding of those who think they are wise.
Way out in the panhandle of Oklahoma, that runs way out to New Mexico and Arizona, there was a bunch of men having an argument over the Mormon Church, and they decided to write to President Joseph F. Smith, our President [Joseph Fielding Smith] now’s father. And they asked a lot of questions, very reasonable, and President Smith sent the letter to President Bennion to Independence, Missouri, and he sent it down into Oklahoma to our conference president. I was laboring with a young Elder about out in the middle of Oklahoma, and he asked us to go out there and answer these questions. So we figured we had about three hundred miles to walk. It was near conference, so we knew we would have to hurry.
When we located this man, he was a – talk about a hippie! He was sitting outside a little old cabin, a retired old lawyer. He had tobacco juice running down his beard and you just can’t hardly think how he looked. We told him we had walked six hundred miles and three hundred miles out there to answer his questions and he thought it was one of the biggest jokes he ever heard. He just fell back and laughed and laughed at us. He didn’t even take us in his house.
We left then and walked back across the northeast corner of Texas back into Oklahoma for our conference. I know there was a family of Saints living out in the western part of Oklahoma and we looked them up in a city one late afternoon. The sister, when we reached their place, fixed us something to eat, then showed us in their big front room, stirred up the old fire, the old back log, and that was the last time we saw anybody till night.
In the night we noticed there was quite a lot of confusion out in the kitchen. We didn’t know just what was going on and pretty quick they started to carrying in chairs, made benches or planks across benches and chairs making room for quite a crowd. Now, I thought, “Well, that’s nice of them. That’s why they haven’t come to visit with us at all – they’ve been out advertising a meeting. We’re going to have a cottage meeting.”
Pretty quick the people started filing in. They nearly filled the house and I felt that I was nearly ready to take over, when in walked the – oh! – the brightest looking man that I ever saw – a fine big man. He walked behind the table they had set for the speaker. He laid down his books and I happened to look across and saw, oh!, The Mountain Meadow Massacre, Brigham Young’s Nineteen Wives, Adam, God, and . . . and those other books. They just about scared me to death. I know my young companion hadn’t talked or know little about the gospel and I knew I didn’t know too much. I didn’t know if I’d ever met or talked with one of the Reorganized people in my life. He got behind the pulpit and he started to tell them what all he had accomplished. He even said, “I want to tell you folks I’ve had the angels turn the passages of scriptures for me while I preach!” And it just scared me to death! There I was – I didn’t have a book or no preparation at all but he hadn’t talked five minutes till it seems as though I was just lifted up and I walked right around and stood beside him.
Pretty quick I challenged some of his statements. He started talking and I wanted to bear testimony that my tongue was loosed. And I did speak things as I – way beyond my power or knowledge at that time. And before I had talked to him five minutes, he started to trembling just like a man that was having the chills and fever. Every part of his body was shaking. When he started to talk his chin would just rattle! And all at once he reached down and grabbed his books and beat it across the room to the door. When he got to the door, he stopped and said, “I want to tell you folks that the brains to the Church went to Utah.” He slammed the door and we never seen anymore of him, but he left a nice little congregation there for two young boys in the twentieth year to preach the Gospel as it had been restored and with the same authority that had been restored to the Prophet Joseph Smith.
I know the Lord will help Randy in the mission field if he puts his trust in the Father in Heaven. I know that He lives and that He will bless us all. I often think of the works of Solomon when he had been blessed with more wisdom than anybody in his day, had gained all the riches that he needed above all the men at that time, and in closing his writing the Book of Ecclesiastes, he says: “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter; Fear God and keep His commandments, for it is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every work into judgment with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil.”
May the Lord bless and help us to do right and further His work in the Earth, I pray in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
A Brief Autobiography of Wallace Aroet Hale
A Brief Autobiography of Wallace Aroet Hale
[i]
Great Grandmother and Great Grandfather Hale were born and raised in Grantsville, Utah. They were married on June 17, 1880. They moved to Gentile Valley shortly after they were married and remained there for four or five years, then they moved to Oakley, Idaho and bought land one mile north of the Oakley Dam on the east side of the Goose Creek. They built a little two room house and Wallace A. Hale was born October 11, 1886, being the third child.
As a boy I had to help around the farm and herd cows, driving them to pasture. When Wallace A. Hale came out of the water after being baptized on October 11, 1893, my Mother and Father gave me my first pair of overalls and suspender. My brother, Rosel, was just younger and he cried and didn’t think it was right unless either the overalls or the suspenders were given to him.
Whenever Wallace’s Grandfather Hale would come to see them he always made a great big kite. For days the excitement ran high while they rambled all over the ranch to find material to use. If there was a party, after the big folks had had their fun, he got down on his hands and knees and made fun for the little folks.
Once I went with my brother, Ed, to hunt a horse. We rode all day long but we were unsuccessful so we started home. Then Ed decided to pray. After we prayed we turned and went back, straight up the mountain, just as we reached the top of Warm Spring Mountain we met the horse coming directly toward us up the other side. We broke that horse and Grandfather made a bargain with Ed to harness it every time he went to see his girl. He eventually earned the horse for his own by doing so.
One time when I had been sick and was just getting well, Father [took] me down to Uncle Edward Hunter’s who gave me a pet lamb. I put it in the herd with father’s sheep and when I had sixteen sheep to call my own I traded them for a good cow. My cow herd increased until I was a young man. Then I was called on a mission and my cows were sold as needed to keep me in the mission field.
I started to school in a log school house up by my home. I remember my folks putting on my new shoes and buttoning them with a button hook the first day of school. I went as afar as the second year of high school, then was call on a mission, from which I returned December 10, 1910.
Vocation
Farmer (own 148 acres). Two years Asst. Forest Ranger. Clerk of Oakley Highway District. Meat Inspector for State of Idaho. Village Clerk. 19 years a member of the Oakley School Board.
Positions Held in the Church
Secretary of the Deacons Quorum in Oakley Ward, Cassia Stake. Served mission to Central States September 31, 1906 to December 8, 1908 where I labored as counselor to Conference President and group leader in charge of Sunday Schools in Oklahoma conference. Called to Stake Board of Religion class. Served in Sunday School Secretary of three Sunday Schools. President of Cassia Stake Elder’s Quorum. Called from Forest Service work to second counselor to Bishop John A. Elison of the Oakley Second Ward. First counselor to Bishop Elison and then First Counselor to Bishop George H. Severe. Served as Bishop of the Oakley Second Ward from January 15, 1927 to June 17, 1937. Then was Ward Clerk to three different Bishops making 45 years I sat around Bishopric Council Table. I also served 16 years as a Stake High Counciler [sic]. Two years as Stake Superintendent of YMMIA. Stake Chairman of Aaronic Priesthood and a ward teacher.
Apostle Marion G. Romney used to call me the man with many position in the Church. He asked me once when I found time for making a livlihood [sic].
Appointments
January 15, 1927 (4 pm) Wallace A. Hale was ordained a Bishop and set apart to preside in the Oakley Second Ward of the Cassia Stake by Elder John A. Widsoe [sic]. (Rosel H. Hale as Counselor and on January 16th Charles J. Smith was set apart Counselor to Bishop Hale.)
On May 23, 1937 Wallace A. Hale Bishop
Clarence L. Nelson, First Counselor
Charles J. Smith, Second Counselor
June 27, 1937 Wallace A. Hale was appointed Ward Clerk in the Oakley Second Ward and a Stake High Councilman in the Cassia Stake.
Family
Wallace Aroet Hale, son of Solomon E. Hale and Helen Louisa Hunter Hale, was born October 11, 1886 at Oakley, Idaho. He married Annie Penola Dayley February 2, 1910 in the L.D.S. Temple at Logan, Utah.
The following children were born to his union:
Relia Rachel Hale who married Melvin Oscar Paskett
Ronald Aroet Hale who married Beth Dorine Reynolds
Verla Hale who married David Ruland Martindale
Eliphet Lund Hale who married Margaret Anne Parke
Whitney Dayley Hale who married Melda Catherine Morgan
Yvonne Hale who married Renoldo J. Egbert
Anna Lou Hale who married Eldred Earl Bair
Ruby Clair Hale who married William Lunsden Spence
Hilda Rae Hale who married Q. Gail Anderson
Wallace Fielding Hale who married Betty Bean
At the present, 1965, we have 40 grandchildren and 5 great grandchildren. Three of our children have filled foreign missions and three of the boys have served in Bishopric’s, and one in the Stake High Council.
[i] Written in 1965. Source: Wallace Aroet Hale Book of Remembrance
[i]
Great Grandmother and Great Grandfather Hale were born and raised in Grantsville, Utah. They were married on June 17, 1880. They moved to Gentile Valley shortly after they were married and remained there for four or five years, then they moved to Oakley, Idaho and bought land one mile north of the Oakley Dam on the east side of the Goose Creek. They built a little two room house and Wallace A. Hale was born October 11, 1886, being the third child.
As a boy I had to help around the farm and herd cows, driving them to pasture. When Wallace A. Hale came out of the water after being baptized on October 11, 1893, my Mother and Father gave me my first pair of overalls and suspender. My brother, Rosel, was just younger and he cried and didn’t think it was right unless either the overalls or the suspenders were given to him.
Whenever Wallace’s Grandfather Hale would come to see them he always made a great big kite. For days the excitement ran high while they rambled all over the ranch to find material to use. If there was a party, after the big folks had had their fun, he got down on his hands and knees and made fun for the little folks.
Once I went with my brother, Ed, to hunt a horse. We rode all day long but we were unsuccessful so we started home. Then Ed decided to pray. After we prayed we turned and went back, straight up the mountain, just as we reached the top of Warm Spring Mountain we met the horse coming directly toward us up the other side. We broke that horse and Grandfather made a bargain with Ed to harness it every time he went to see his girl. He eventually earned the horse for his own by doing so.
One time when I had been sick and was just getting well, Father [took] me down to Uncle Edward Hunter’s who gave me a pet lamb. I put it in the herd with father’s sheep and when I had sixteen sheep to call my own I traded them for a good cow. My cow herd increased until I was a young man. Then I was called on a mission and my cows were sold as needed to keep me in the mission field.
I started to school in a log school house up by my home. I remember my folks putting on my new shoes and buttoning them with a button hook the first day of school. I went as afar as the second year of high school, then was call on a mission, from which I returned December 10, 1910.
Vocation
Farmer (own 148 acres). Two years Asst. Forest Ranger. Clerk of Oakley Highway District. Meat Inspector for State of Idaho. Village Clerk. 19 years a member of the Oakley School Board.
Positions Held in the Church
Secretary of the Deacons Quorum in Oakley Ward, Cassia Stake. Served mission to Central States September 31, 1906 to December 8, 1908 where I labored as counselor to Conference President and group leader in charge of Sunday Schools in Oklahoma conference. Called to Stake Board of Religion class. Served in Sunday School Secretary of three Sunday Schools. President of Cassia Stake Elder’s Quorum. Called from Forest Service work to second counselor to Bishop John A. Elison of the Oakley Second Ward. First counselor to Bishop Elison and then First Counselor to Bishop George H. Severe. Served as Bishop of the Oakley Second Ward from January 15, 1927 to June 17, 1937. Then was Ward Clerk to three different Bishops making 45 years I sat around Bishopric Council Table. I also served 16 years as a Stake High Counciler [sic]. Two years as Stake Superintendent of YMMIA. Stake Chairman of Aaronic Priesthood and a ward teacher.
Apostle Marion G. Romney used to call me the man with many position in the Church. He asked me once when I found time for making a livlihood [sic].
Appointments
January 15, 1927 (4 pm) Wallace A. Hale was ordained a Bishop and set apart to preside in the Oakley Second Ward of the Cassia Stake by Elder John A. Widsoe [sic]. (Rosel H. Hale as Counselor and on January 16th Charles J. Smith was set apart Counselor to Bishop Hale.)
On May 23, 1937 Wallace A. Hale Bishop
Clarence L. Nelson, First Counselor
Charles J. Smith, Second Counselor
June 27, 1937 Wallace A. Hale was appointed Ward Clerk in the Oakley Second Ward and a Stake High Councilman in the Cassia Stake.
Family
Wallace Aroet Hale, son of Solomon E. Hale and Helen Louisa Hunter Hale, was born October 11, 1886 at Oakley, Idaho. He married Annie Penola Dayley February 2, 1910 in the L.D.S. Temple at Logan, Utah.
The following children were born to his union:
Relia Rachel Hale who married Melvin Oscar Paskett
Ronald Aroet Hale who married Beth Dorine Reynolds
Verla Hale who married David Ruland Martindale
Eliphet Lund Hale who married Margaret Anne Parke
Whitney Dayley Hale who married Melda Catherine Morgan
Yvonne Hale who married Renoldo J. Egbert
Anna Lou Hale who married Eldred Earl Bair
Ruby Clair Hale who married William Lunsden Spence
Hilda Rae Hale who married Q. Gail Anderson
Wallace Fielding Hale who married Betty Bean
At the present, 1965, we have 40 grandchildren and 5 great grandchildren. Three of our children have filled foreign missions and three of the boys have served in Bishopric’s, and one in the Stake High Council.
[i] Written in 1965. Source: Wallace Aroet Hale Book of Remembrance
Lest We Forget
Lest We Forget
“Diamondfield” Jack Davis, Hired Gunman of the Cattlemen of South Central Idaho
by Wallace A. Hale[i]
[I am the son] of Solomon E. Hale, one of the early sheepmen of Cassia County and sheep scab inspector for the State of Idaho and half owner in the Warm Springs dipping and shearing Corrello. Where sheep by the tens of thousands were sheared and made to swim through a hundred foot vat filled with a mixture of hot lime and sulpher [sic] before leaving for summer range. Little is known of the trouble in the Birch Creek Canyon. My Father rode to Vipont Mine with me one day and he pointed out the line at Walters Creek where the cattlemen had set a line for sheep not to cross going into Junction Valley. He told me one Fall he and his brother-in-law, Hyrum L. Hunter crossed this line and were herding their sheep well down in Junction Valley, when five men rode up to Father and ask him if he wanted to die or go back. Father told them he guessed he’d sooner go back. They rode to Hyrum L. Hunter and gave him the same choice. It seemed they didn’t move fast enough to suit them for the next day while Uncle was out with his sheep he seen men ride up to his camp with a team of mules which they hitched to his camp and went as hard as mules could run back down to Fish Creek. Father said [“Y]ou should have seen the camp with nothing put away for moving, dishes, pans, lamp and grub all over the floor – sure a mess.[”] Well some filing on homestead land and a two mile limit law passed, pretty well put an end to trouble on Birch Creek, but it soon shifted to West Hills, the head of Goose Creek and Shoshone Basin. The sheep gradually pushing the cattlemen back and tromping out the grass, the stocky shade brush gradually taking place of the lush grass. Until the cattlemen established a line known as dead man ridge south of head of Goose Creek and hired a man by the name of Jack Davis, who later became known as Diamondfield Jack, to ride that ridge and see that no sheep crossed. As soon as the sheepmen crossed that line fireworks started. There was quite a bit of excitement at our house when we heard he had Sol Hale and Bill Tolman as marked men he was to kill. In an argument he watched his chance and shot Tolman. He helped him to a place and hollered to other sheepmen to come and get him. He finely [sic] got well, but he soon had a night battle with Loren Wilson and Brother Joseph and several other sheep herders were threatened and turned back.
On February 4, 1896, my Uncle Davis Hunter called at the camp of John Wilson and Dan Cummings on his way to Oakley. After a short visit he left and about 12 days later Ted Severe noticed the sheep of Wilson and Cummings scattered around, and on going to their camp found they had been murdered. Noel Carlson brought the word to Oakley and then it was relayed to Albion to Harvey Perkins, Sheriff of Cassia County. So he and Dr. Story went to the camp and Dr. Story performed an autopsy on the badly decomposed bodies. Then they were brought to the old rock school house in Oakley where they were prepared for burial.
And how I remember as a boy the knolling of the old school bell. When they arrived in the middle of the night the school house was only ½ block from our house. I was a lover of dogs and how I pitied the two dogs tied to the wagon for 12 days without food or water. How they must have looked for a sour dough biscuit to be thrown to them, or why they weren’t asked to round up the sheep. And then Uncle Davis telling of them nearly eating up 2 sets of harnesses, and how when they were untied, they could hardly stand up.
Well papers were soon got out for the arrest of Diamondfield Jack. Through luck he was located in a prison in Arizona. Sheriff O. P. Anderson and E. R. Dayley left to bring him back to Albion, where on April 8, 1897 one of the bitterest legal dramas in the history of Idaho, if not the whole west, was started. Judge C.O. Stockslager presiding; John G. Rogers, Wm. E. Borah, and O. W. Powers for the prosecution; and James H. Hawley and J. Perky and Wm. Puckett for the defense. Well it struck again at our home when Father was drawn on the Jury, but he was soon dismissed. After the trial had gone for 7 days the Jury returned a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree, and on the 4th of June 1897 the judge passed sentence that Diamondfield Jack was to be hanged by the neck until dead.
Davis from his prison cell watched a gallows being built where he was to be hung. It never happened, but the legal battle lasted some 6 years. On December 18, 1905, Davis walked out a free man. While I sit here in the Oakley Village Office I am within ten feet of the Old Jail Cell that held Diamondfield Jack so long.
[i] Source: Wallace A. Hale’s Book of Remembrance
“Diamondfield” Jack Davis, Hired Gunman of the Cattlemen of South Central Idaho
by Wallace A. Hale[i]
[I am the son] of Solomon E. Hale, one of the early sheepmen of Cassia County and sheep scab inspector for the State of Idaho and half owner in the Warm Springs dipping and shearing Corrello. Where sheep by the tens of thousands were sheared and made to swim through a hundred foot vat filled with a mixture of hot lime and sulpher [sic] before leaving for summer range. Little is known of the trouble in the Birch Creek Canyon. My Father rode to Vipont Mine with me one day and he pointed out the line at Walters Creek where the cattlemen had set a line for sheep not to cross going into Junction Valley. He told me one Fall he and his brother-in-law, Hyrum L. Hunter crossed this line and were herding their sheep well down in Junction Valley, when five men rode up to Father and ask him if he wanted to die or go back. Father told them he guessed he’d sooner go back. They rode to Hyrum L. Hunter and gave him the same choice. It seemed they didn’t move fast enough to suit them for the next day while Uncle was out with his sheep he seen men ride up to his camp with a team of mules which they hitched to his camp and went as hard as mules could run back down to Fish Creek. Father said [“Y]ou should have seen the camp with nothing put away for moving, dishes, pans, lamp and grub all over the floor – sure a mess.[”] Well some filing on homestead land and a two mile limit law passed, pretty well put an end to trouble on Birch Creek, but it soon shifted to West Hills, the head of Goose Creek and Shoshone Basin. The sheep gradually pushing the cattlemen back and tromping out the grass, the stocky shade brush gradually taking place of the lush grass. Until the cattlemen established a line known as dead man ridge south of head of Goose Creek and hired a man by the name of Jack Davis, who later became known as Diamondfield Jack, to ride that ridge and see that no sheep crossed. As soon as the sheepmen crossed that line fireworks started. There was quite a bit of excitement at our house when we heard he had Sol Hale and Bill Tolman as marked men he was to kill. In an argument he watched his chance and shot Tolman. He helped him to a place and hollered to other sheepmen to come and get him. He finely [sic] got well, but he soon had a night battle with Loren Wilson and Brother Joseph and several other sheep herders were threatened and turned back.
On February 4, 1896, my Uncle Davis Hunter called at the camp of John Wilson and Dan Cummings on his way to Oakley. After a short visit he left and about 12 days later Ted Severe noticed the sheep of Wilson and Cummings scattered around, and on going to their camp found they had been murdered. Noel Carlson brought the word to Oakley and then it was relayed to Albion to Harvey Perkins, Sheriff of Cassia County. So he and Dr. Story went to the camp and Dr. Story performed an autopsy on the badly decomposed bodies. Then they were brought to the old rock school house in Oakley where they were prepared for burial.
And how I remember as a boy the knolling of the old school bell. When they arrived in the middle of the night the school house was only ½ block from our house. I was a lover of dogs and how I pitied the two dogs tied to the wagon for 12 days without food or water. How they must have looked for a sour dough biscuit to be thrown to them, or why they weren’t asked to round up the sheep. And then Uncle Davis telling of them nearly eating up 2 sets of harnesses, and how when they were untied, they could hardly stand up.
Well papers were soon got out for the arrest of Diamondfield Jack. Through luck he was located in a prison in Arizona. Sheriff O. P. Anderson and E. R. Dayley left to bring him back to Albion, where on April 8, 1897 one of the bitterest legal dramas in the history of Idaho, if not the whole west, was started. Judge C.O. Stockslager presiding; John G. Rogers, Wm. E. Borah, and O. W. Powers for the prosecution; and James H. Hawley and J. Perky and Wm. Puckett for the defense. Well it struck again at our home when Father was drawn on the Jury, but he was soon dismissed. After the trial had gone for 7 days the Jury returned a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree, and on the 4th of June 1897 the judge passed sentence that Diamondfield Jack was to be hanged by the neck until dead.
Davis from his prison cell watched a gallows being built where he was to be hung. It never happened, but the legal battle lasted some 6 years. On December 18, 1905, Davis walked out a free man. While I sit here in the Oakley Village Office I am within ten feet of the Old Jail Cell that held Diamondfield Jack so long.
[i] Source: Wallace A. Hale’s Book of Remembrance
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