C. E. Pierce, a White male deputy sheriff, met his end in Basin, Wyoming, on the night of July 19, 1903, when the little county-seat town was overtaken by a burst of vigilante violence. Pierce was inside the Big Horn County jail, helping guard two condemned prisoners, Jim Gorman and J. F. Walters, as they waited on appeals from their murder convictions. Then, out of the dark, a masked mob rode in, armed and determined to do in minutes what the courts had not yet finished.
The riders fired into the jail before forcing their way toward the cells, and one of the first shots struck Pierce in the chest, killing him almost at once. In the chaos that followed, the mob battered the doors, reached the prisoners, and shot them down as well, turning the jail into a scene of sudden, furious bloodshed.
The killing did not happen in a vacuum. The men the mob came for were already notorious in the region. Jim Gorman had been convicted of murdering his brother, Tom Gorman, whose body was discovered in a shallow grave after suspicions grew and the sheriff investigated; accounts said Gorman's sister-in-law, Maggie, later testified against him. Walters had been convicted in the killing of Agnes Hoover, a wealthy widow he had pursued and then fatally shot after she rejected him. Their cases had stirred the county for months, and contemporary and later reporting says Sheriff Fenton had even received word that a mob might be coming from the Hyattville and Ten Sleep country. He reportedly tried to protect the prisoners by moving them for a time, but Gorman escaped and was recaptured, and once the men were back in the Basin jail, the danger returned with deadly force. Pierce became the man standing between the mob and its quarry, and he died before the law could hold the line.
As for suspects and arrests, the trail did not end cleanly, but it did leave names behind. Reporting from the aftermath says no immediate arrests were made after the raid, even though anger ran high over the deputy's killing. Later, a grand jury charged seven Big Horn County ranchers in connection with the jail attack. Among the men named in later summaries of the prosecutions were Dan Lee Morse, Colin Mackenzie, George H. Saban, James G. Tatlock, L. Taylor, Ralph Mercer, and a man identified as Hardee. The case against several of them began to fall apart for lack of evidence, and the prosecution eventually concentrated on men it considered leaders. Morse was specifically tried on the killing of Pierce, but he was acquitted after the prosecution could not secure the testimony it needed. Contemporary follow-up reporting described witnesses unwilling to testify and even alleged that money had been spent to get witnesses out of the country or silence them. In the end, although indictments were returned and named suspects were hauled into the machinery of the courts, no one was convicted for the killing of C. E. Pierce, and the deputy's death passed into Wyoming history as one more frontier crime swallowed by fear, loyalty, and the code of the mob.
