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Thursday, July 29, 2004
Infamous Seattle outlaw surfaces again
Some say Harry Tracy was just a good boy, gone bad.
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After all, he was polite to his hostages -- most of them -- and took pains not to bind the women and children too tightly.
His eyes told a different story. Harry Tracy had the eyes of a killer -- brooding, deep-set and stone cold, as befits a desperado.
Much of the truth is lost in legend, but this much is certain: When Tracy overtook Seattle in the terrifying summer of 1902, bullets flew, lawmen fell and the Old West rose from its grave.
More than a century later, it's hard to fathom the grip this wraithlike fugitive had on the public imagination. He was, some say, the last desperado.
Even as he was hijacking farm folk and fishermen from Bothell to Kent, Seattle theaters staged Tracy melodramas and former captives signed autographs at The Bon Marché. Dime novels roared off the presses.
They named a nickel cigar for Tracy and a cocktail, too, and the story of his violent prison break flickered large on the silent screen. Even in death he was a celebrity, plucked nearly naked and bald by trophy hunters.
The saga began on June 9, 1902, when Tracy and sidekick Dave Merrill shot their way out of the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem, leaving three guards dead and triggering a massive, hysterical manhunt as they headed north.
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| Oregon State Archives, Salem/HistoryLink | ||
| Although there were two sides to Harry Tracy, the thieving, killing persona always won out. For a time he was as elusive as the west wind. | ||
Somewhere near Chehalis, Tracy shot his irksome partner in a "duel" and left his body to rot in a blackberry field.
By the time he reached Seattle, it was just Tracy against hundreds of fired-up possemen, baying bloodhounds, five National Guard units from two states, lawmen of all stripes, even gun-slinging reporters. Soon, three more men were to die by his hand.
In the end, it was a teenage boy, one George E. Goldfinch, who proved his undoing. Harry Tracy was a little too trusting of the youngsters.
The Tracy legend has slowly faded, just as Oregon officials intended when they poured quicklime on his body to hasten its destruction and buried him in an unmarked grave.
But every so often, someone revives the tale. Regional historian Stewart Holbrook wrote about him in the 1930s. The TV series "Death Valley Days" dramatized him in 1953.
Thirty years later, Bruce Dern and folk-rock troubadour Gordon Lightfoot starred in a little-known Canadian film, "Harry Tracy, Desperado," which took his name and little else.
Now the story has surfaced again in "Harry Tracy: A Bainbridge Bandit," a comic, musical melodrama being staged by Bainbridge Performing Arts. The show, a fanciful take on Tracy's real-life flight to the island, ends its run on Sunday.
"What was fascinating about (Tracy)," said co-writer John Ellis, "is he got away over and over again. He would be completely surrounded and then he'd disappear."
Amateur sleuths who delve into the historical record -- most of it written by hell-for-leather reporters -- walk away wide-eyed at Tracy's impact on a city that had just emerged from the Yukon gold rush to an age of trolleys and business suits.
"This was the modern age and yet this guy ran wild for two months ...," said Bill Gulick, whose 1999 book "Manhunt: The Pursuit of Harry Tracy," gave a detailed account of the chase. "He was sort of the O.J. Simpson of his day. Everybody had to get their Tracy fix."
Historylink's Alan Stein stumbled onto the story a few years ago, after seeing Tracy's single-action Colt revolver at the White River Valley Museum in Auburn. He was stunned.
"My gosh!" he said. "I just couldn't believe that story was so huge. ... It was the last ember of the Old West. This is a story worth telling again."
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The making of a bandit
In the beginning, Harry was a good boy, the apple of his mother's eye. Jim Dullenty, longtime editor of Old West magazine, studied him extensively. He gives one of the best accounts of the bandit's early life in his 1983 book "Harry Tracy: The Last Desperado."
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| Courtesy of Lincoln County Historical Society | ||
| Finally, possemen had reason to rejoice: Tracy was found east of the Cascades, 10 miles from Creston, after one of his "hostages" turned him in. | ||
Tracy -- real name Harry Severns -- was born in Wisconsin around 1874. His grandfather was a justice of the peace, his father a logger and school district treasurer -- until he ran off with school funds and was killed by a train. Harry's outlaw career got a penny-ante start in 1895, when he funded a night on the town by stealing $2 from a fellow wheat thresher in the Dakotas. He dodged the sheriff, headed west and called himself Tracy. He spent the winter of 1896 in a cabin at Loon Lake, north of Spokane.
For months Tracy wandered through Utah and Colorado, often sideways with the law -- but never, as legend later had it, part of Butch Cassidy's Hole-in-the-Wall gang. After an 1897 holdup, probably his most serious crime to date, he landed a one-year term at the Utah State Penitentiary. He and three other convicts broke out after a few months.
Tracy's brief stay yielded these items of record: He had deeply indented blue eyes, stood a quarter-inch shy of 5 feet 9 inches and wore a size 7 1/8 hat and size 7 shoe.
He later wrote 10 stanzas of doggerel about the Utah breakout, signed, "Yours with Kind Love and Best Wishes, Harry Tracy." The opening lines were: "We left the Salt Lake pen, as the sun was setting low and walked along the railroad tracks until (our) legs refused to go."
In 1898, after killing a posseman and busting out of two Colorado jails, Tracy rolled into Seattle. Here he met Dave Merrill, a perennial ne'er-do-well who was to figure in Seattle's "story of the century" a few years later.
They headed to Portland in January 1899 and led a life of swaggering crime as the Black Mackinaw Bandits, robbing streetcar conductors, drugstores and saloons. After tying up one saloonkeeper, they brutally gagged him with a towel they hammered down his throat with their revolvers.
Police caught Merrill the next month, curled up in a dresser drawer at his house. Minutes later, a woman who was either Merrill's mother or landlady bit at the reward, saying Tracy was expected next day. The police caught him after he fled and tried to hijack a passing train.
On March 21, 1899, Tracy was sentenced to 20 years in the Oregon State Penitentiary. Merrill got a 13-year sentence.
The stage was set for their final and most deadly chapter.
Armed and dangerous
June 9, 1902, started routinely with roll call and a march from the chapel to the prison foundry. Heading down an aisle strewn with sheet metal and tools, Merrill and Tracy suddenly stooped and grabbed Winchester rifles and Colt revolvers planted by an unknown accomplice. They came up shooting.
As the unarmed guards fled, Tracy took calculated aim and shot the head guard, then killed a tower guard from a distance of 150 yards. In the end, three guards died and a wounded inmate lost a leg.
The prison break electrified the citizens of Oregon, who launched an all-out manhunt. But Tracy and Merrill were always one move ahead. After doubling back to Salem and posing as possemen, they headed north to the Columbia River, stealing horses along the way.
On June 15, nearly a week after the breakout, they made their way across the river in a rowboat manned by three hostages. Reaching the Washington shore, they released their captives, shook hands and gave them a stolen Elk's badge in thanks -- after stealing $2 from them.
The posses, led by bloodhounds from Walla Walla, were far away when Tracy and Merrill showed up early one morning at the Vancouver-area farmhouse of Henry Tiede.
They helped themselves to Tiede's bacon and bread, stole his clothes and admired their pictures in the paper before leaving the German farmer bound and gagged. "Great was the indignation," a reporter wrote, when the sheriff learned the outlaws had foiled them again.
The trail picked up July 2 when Tracy showed up, alone, at the Capital City Oyster Co. near Olympia. "I'm Tracy," he said. "Fix me some breakfast." After the meal, he forced three men and a youth to take him 65 miles to Seattle in a gas-powered launch tied up nearby.
"All the way down the Sound," captain A.J. Clark later recounted, "he entertained us with dime novel stories of his deeds and by joshing my son about his red hair."
Tracy also made the startling announcement that he had killed his partner because "Dave Merrill was a no-good coward, who's had it comin' for a long time." Tracy said he had proposed a 10-pace duel but -- not trusting Merrill -- turned after eight or nine paces and fired.
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| Oregon State Archives, Salem/HistoryLink | ||
| In 1899, David Merrill joined Tracy on a crime spree. A month later, they were arrested in Portland. | ||
The whys -- even the ifs -- of the duel have puzzled historians. A popular theory holds that Tracy learned of the role that Merrill's "mother" played in his capture in Portland three years earlier and took his revenge. Later, a woman and her 12-year-old son found a body in a blackberry thicket where Tracy had described leaving Merrill dead.
It was 6 p.m. when Clark's vessel reached the waters off Seattle, but Tracy told him to wait until dusk before pulling in at Meadow Point, a brush-covered, thinly populated area two miles north of Ballard. He made crewman Frank Scott bind the others; the captain's teenage son was tied at the elbows to spare his sore wrist. Then he took Scott hostage.
"I'll send you a lot of money to make up for kidnapping you and the launch," Tracy told the captain, "for I'll have a lot of dough pretty soon now. And I won't forget you other fellows. You acted pretty decent by me."
Tracy's descent on the unsuspecting citizens of Seattle had begun.
"It was without precedent in outlaw history," Dullenty was to write. "It was as if Jesse James had walked single-handedly into Kansas City."
Over the next week, Tracy crisscrossed the region, turning up on doorsteps even as untrained possemen and armed reporters beat the bushes -- sometimes shooting at each other.
After two spectacularly fatal shootouts with Tracy in one day -- a "trail of blood" that left three dead -- newspapers printed day-by-day summaries of the fugitive's movements.
Following the trail
JULY 3, 1902: It was raining hard as four deputies and two reporters walked the railroad tracks, headed south from Woodinville. Then reporter Louis B. Sefrit spotted a muddy footprint near a cabin.
Suddenly, Tracy popped up from a stump 30 feet away and started blasting with his Winchester. Reporter Karl Anderson fell, grazed, into a cold puddle. Snohomish County Deputy Sheriff Charles Raymond fell on top of him, dead. In the confused gunfire, King County deputy Jack Williams was gravely wounded.
Tracy fled through the woods.
Posing as a deputy, he hijacked a nearby wagon and ordered the farmer, a Mr. Johnson, to drive him to Seattle with all haste.
In late afternoon, he showed up at the Woodland Park home of Mrs. R.H. Van Horn -- a house that still exists -- and demanded a meal.
There was a moment's panic when the grocery boy showed up on his daily rounds, but Mrs. Van Horn played it cool, silently mouthing "Tracy" as the boy concluded his business. The boy jumped on his horse-drawn wagon and high-tailed it to Fremont, where he reported the incident to King County Sheriff Edward Cudihee.
Cudihee staked out the Van Horn house with a nervous posse: patrolman E.E. Breese, coal miner Neil Rawley and an insurance man named J.I. Knight. Tracy emerged after dark, walking between two hostages.
Suddenly Breese yelled, "Drop that gun, Tracy!"
Tracy fired twice and Breese fell dead. Rawley, wounded, died the following day.
Tracy disappeared again.
JULY 4, 1902: The fugitive's whereabouts were a mystery -- except to Ravenna farmer August Fisher and family, who got an unwelcome visit from Tracy that morning. Mrs. Fisher, who spoke little English, made him breakfast and packed some food, while Tracy searched Mr. Fisher's wardrobe for clothes to steal.
"I would prefer that black hat you have there," Tracy reportedly said, "but I guess it is a Sunday article, and as you appear to be a poor man, I will leave it."
Upon leaving, Tracy said he would have to tie up the Fishers and their four children.
"Just then," says one account, "Mrs. Fisher's baby girl, aged 18 months, ... tried to crawl up in her mother's lap. Tracy surveyed the little one silently for a minute, as if in deep thought, then remarked: "No, I will not tie you people up, because somebody will have to attend to that baby, and if I left its mother loose ... she could release the others."
The family promised to keep mum for 48 hours in exchange for remaining free. Fearful of reprisals, they huddled at home until a passing friend called the sheriff.
Meanwhile, Tracy sneaked back to Meadow Point, where he hijacked a Japanese fishing boat and headed to Bainbridge Island.
JULY 5: Emerging from the woods, Tracy next visited the Johnsons, an immigrant farm family with two children and a hired hand named John Anderson. Tracy said he had planned to kill them all, "but after seeing your pretty little girl, I will kill no one if you will mind me."
He stayed at their Port Madison home all day, eating meals with his rifle on his knees. But he was chatty and, after reading Mrs. Van Horn's interview in the newspaper, said he admired her pluck.
That evening Tracy forced Anderson to bind and gag the family, but told him to take it easy on Mrs. Johnson and the little girl.
Tracy then tied Anderson's hands to the oars of a boat and made him row to West Seattle, where they camped before heading south.
The authorities, still flummoxed, were awaiting fresh bloodhounds from Walla Walla.
JULY 6-8: Anderson was forced to row and then hike for hours to Renton, where Tracy met briefly with four accomplices. Leaving Anderson tied up out back, Tracy took over the nearby Gerrells home, where he spent four hours entertaining the neighbor ladies, including a flirtatious young belle named May Baker.
The next day's P-I said Baker found Tracy "a gallant, tender-hearted man, with a prodigious love for little children, ... a man with a decided respect for womanhood, but above all, a man with iron nerve."
Miss Baker proved pretty nervy herself. Tracy had sent the Gerrells boy to town to buy a pair of revolvers, but the boy went straight to the sheriff, and a posse headed out. One pursuer, a Renton butcher, entered the house, but Miss Baker, a gun at her back, shooed him away.
As twilight fell, Tracy scoped out his exit and slipped off through the woods. Bloodhounds gave chase, but then stopped abruptly, sniffing and rolling in the grass.
Tracy had sprinkled his track with cayenne pepper.
JULY 9: Early that morning, Tracy showed up at the home of another Swedish immigrant, E.M. Johnson of Kent (the third Johnson in this tale). He stayed all day, seeking food.
"I told him I hated to build a fire on such a warm day," Mrs. Johnson told a reporter. "He told me not to bother about it, saying that a cold lunch was good enough."
Tracy ordered Johnson, on pain of his family's death, to borrow money in town and catch the 7 a.m. train to Tacoma to buy him two .45-caliber revolvers. Awaiting the man's return, Tracy spoke fondly of his mother, with tears in his eyes. Less tenderly, he threatened to kill Johnson if he brought deputies.
When the man returned with a single gun, Tracy added it to his arsenal and took his leave.
The P-I sent famed photographer Asahel Curtis, brother of photographer Edward S., to capture Johnson's story in words and pictures.
The bloody climax
Tracy's trail grew cold then, until late July, when he showed up east of the Cascades.
Keith Schick, 91, who lives near Silverdale, told the P-I Tracy showed up at his uncle's ranch 15 miles east of Waterville. Schick's teenage cousin Minnie, who was home alone, was ordered to make Tracy a meal.
"He was very polite and he paid her 50 cents," Schick said.
Tracy's downfall began in early August when he overtook a young rider named George E. Goldfinch. Tracy announced his identity and asked the location of the nearest ranch. Goldfinch led him to the spread owned by Lucius and Eugene Eddy, 10 miles from Creston and 50-plus miles west of Spokane.
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| Courtesy of Lincoln County Historical Society | ||
| Finishing what lawmen couldn't, a wounded Tracy killed himself during a gun battle. The Lincoln County Museum owns his plaster death mask. | ||
That evening, Tracy let the Goldfinch boy go, with the usual warning to keep quiet. Instead, young Goldfinch contacted the sheriff, who assembled a five-man posse: a constable, an attorney, a railroad foreman, a doctor and a hardware store owner.
The posse hurriedly closed in. Tracy had just emerged from the barn to help Lou Eddy unhitch his horse-drawn hay mower. Approaching, the constable yelled, "Hold up your hands!"
Shooting, Tracy ran down a hill behind the barn. Before he could vanish into the wheat field, two bullets struck his right leg, severing an artery. He crawled 75 feet to a large outcropping, later called "Tracy Rock," and made his last stand.
Soon another three dozen possemen arrived. For Tracy, trapped and dying, there was only one way out. That night a final shot rang out from his revolver.
At daylight on Aug. 6, the lawmen found his body, a bullet hole above his right eye. Tracy's long flight was over, and he took the Old West with him to the grave.
Even in death, Tracy remained a celebrity.
Crowds rushed the train all the way down to Salem as officials carried the desperado's remains back to the Oregon penitentiary. At one point, they cut chips from his coffin.
"Railroad avenue was jammed with a black mass of humanity from Marion Street to Yesler Way," the Seattle press reported. "As the train rolled into the station, there was a rush forward, the crowd surging out on the track, directly in front of the engine ...."
On Aug. 9, 1902, Tracy reached his final destination and was buried -- ironically -- next to Merrill.
Seattle had survived its brush with the last of the old-time desperados.
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