James Capen, a White male federal prohibition agent, died on May 11, 1928, after a raid in the Cumberland area of Wyoming turned in an instant from law enforcement routine into a fatal gun battle. Capen and another officer, Percy Epperson, had gone to a ranch near Little Muddy Creek, where they found and destroyed an illegal still. The man connected to the property was placed under arrest, and for a brief moment it may have seemed the hard part was over.
But as the arrested rancher was allowed to pick up his coat and hat, he instead seized a rifle and opened fire, striking Capen in the abdomen. Epperson shot back, wounding the gunman multiple times, and then rushed both men toward medical help. Capen did not survive the trip into the hospital, and the suspect also died from his wounds, leaving the case closed by death rather than by courtroom judgment.
The surviving record points to one clear suspect, but not every source preserves his name the same way. The official ATF account identifies the ranch owner and arrested man as Mike Soytik, while period newspaper coverage described the dead rancher as Michael Bishopick and said the shooting followed the seizure of a still on his ranch near Kemmerer. What does not appear to change from source to source is the shape of the event itself: there was no lingering mystery about who fired the shots, no long list of persons of interest, and no later arrest sweep. The suspect was already in custody at the scene before he turned violent, and because he died the same day, there was no trial, conviction, or sentence to follow. What remained instead was the stark outline of a Prohibition-era killing on a remote Wyoming ranch, where an arrest over illicit liquor ended with both the officer and the gunman dead before the day was done.
