Charles Benjamin Holden, a 34-year-old White man and deputy sheriff from Evanston, Wyoming, died on June 19, 1901, after being shot while trying to bring in a fugitive in the upper Green River country. The trail began with a forgery case: the man Holden was pursuing, Adam “A.J.” Eckert, was wanted for altering a check. Holden went out with Fred Reardon, the storekeeper tied to the complaint, and together they tracked Eckert to a cabin on Horse Creek.
What should have been an arrest turned violent. Eckert opened fire with a revolver, and Holden was mortally wounded. Reardon was also shot. Holden lingered for a short time after the attack, and memorial records place his death in Evanston on June 19, 1901.
The reports that survive give the case the feel of a frontier manhunt. After the shooting, Eckert fled into rough country, but the escape did not last. Accounts preserved in later memorial and historical summaries say he was captured not long afterward, with armed men taking him into custody while authorities worried enough about possible violence that he was brought back toward Evanston by a route meant to avoid trouble. The arrest ended the chase, but not the case. Holden, who had served about two years with the Uinta County Sheriff’s Office and left behind a wife and child, became one of those early Wyoming officers whose death was folded almost immediately into local legend and law-and-order memory.
As for the suspect, the available online sources consistently identify Eckert as the gunman and state that he was arrested, prosecuted, and convicted in Holden’s killing. The surviving summaries say he was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. The story did not end there: years later, while serving that sentence in the Wyoming State Penitentiary, Eckert was involved in a violent escape attempt in which he killed prison guard Ed Samuelson before taking his own life. No other suspects appear in the online record I found. Everything in those sources points to a single assailant, a swift arrest after the shooting, and a conviction that tied Holden’s death directly to Eckert for the rest of the man’s life.
