Thomas R. Majors, a 48-year-old White male from Casper, Wyoming, stepped into the darkness before dawn on November 2, 1919, as Natrona County officers closed in on a cache of bootleg whiskey hidden near Washington Street just north of Second Street in central Casper. Wyoming had only recently gone dry, and the raid unfolded in the tense, lawless atmosphere that Prohibition had already stirred up.
Sheriff Pat Royce and other officers moved on a stash reported to contain roughly 200 cases of liquor. Majors took position outside with other members of the raiding party while two armed men, Hugh Armstrong and R. E. Martin, came out into the dark. According to later accounts drawn from contemporary reporting, sharp words were exchanged only seconds before gunfire erupted. Majors was hit first in the hand and then in the jaw, the blast killing him almost instantly. Deputy George McKenzie was also wounded, Martin was shot several times in the return fire, and the raid that had begun as an attempt to seize whiskey collapsed into chaos and bloodshed.
In the immediate aftermath, Hugh Armstrong was captured after running back into the nearby house, where he was beaten and arrested, while Martin, wounded, fled for help and was also taken into custody. Cowboy State Daily's reconstruction of the case, based on period newspapers, says Armstrong, Moore, and taxi driver H. J. Evans were arrested, and other participants were rounded up on murder-related accusations after the shooting. A preliminary hearing followed on November 16, and three men were held for district court without bond on a first-degree murder charge. Public feeling in Casper appears to have run hot; the death of Majors was treated not as an isolated quarrel but as a violent symbol of how quickly bootlegging, informants, armed guards, and shaky law enforcement tactics had turned the new dry era into a dangerous contest for control of liquor and the streets around it.
But the case did not end with the arrest. A change of venue sent the murder trial out of Natrona County to Douglas, where Hugh Armstrong faced a Converse County jury in April 1920. His defense rested heavily on the claim that he and Martin did not know they were confronting officers in the dark and believed they were facing hostile intruders. Newspaper-derived accounts say jurors heard conflicting testimony about whether Majors had clearly identified himself and the others as lawmen before the shooting started. Armstrong was acquitted after the jury found him not guilty, and once that verdict came down, the charges against Moore and Martin were dismissed as well. Armstrong was rearrested on liquor-possession charges, but those, too, were dropped soon afterward. Later summaries, including a 2026 Wyoming legislative resolution, would still refer to Majors as having been murdered and to his alleged killers as men who were acquitted at trial. In the end, the gunfire that killed Thomas R. Majors was followed by arrests, a murder prosecution, a moved trial, and an acquittal that left the case legally unresolved and, in the eyes of many in Casper, never truly avenged.
