By Phil Roberts, 1/15/22
Notorious hired gun Tom Horn has drawn as much interest from writers and researchers as anyone in Laramie county history. Indeed, the question is: what draws them to the stock detective/hired gun who died on the Julian gallows inside the Laramie County Jail in the capital city of Wyoming on Nov. 20, 1903, after he was convicted of the sniper killing of 14-year-old Willie Nickel along a secluded road in a remote part of the county—remote even today in the 21st century? Some may concur with one of his former defense counsel, T. Blake Kennedy, who years later, as Wyoming’s only federal district judge, told friends that while “Horn was innocent of shooting young Nickell from ambush” in the Iron Mountain country of northwest Laramie County, “he deserved hanging because of all the other murders” he was suspected of committing.
We had the chance to view the scene of the Willie Nickel ambush in the summer of 1979 when a film company’s public relations firm offered to help the State Historical Department if we would accompany their team to the site—with a retinue of experts we’d gather, of course. The firm, Rogers and Cowan. represented actor Steve McQueen who was considering making (yet another) movie on Horn. “But this one will be different,” the firm’s representative assured us by phone. “We promise that if you’ll help us, we’ll film there on location AND we’ll see that your name is ‘prominently displayed’ in the movie’s closing credits.” He added, “Of course. The real story is so compelling that we’ll make it entirely as it happened.”
From their repeated letters and phone calls, the opportunity sounded too good to turn down. After all, as a regularly neglected state agency at appropriations time, we could use the good publicity and credit for drawing a film company to a Wyoming location.
We were aware of McQueen’s earlier ties to the area. He and actress Ali McGraw had married in Cheyenne in 1973, the vows made in the shadow of “Big Boy” in Holladay Park, Justice of the Peace Art Garfield conducting the informal ceremony. (It was said that McQueen first learned of Horn, the ambush, and the hanging, at the time). They had divorced the year before the film company contacted us, but there must have been some draw to the area—and the Horn saga—to bring McQueen, the highest box office earner at the time, to our area to make a feature film.
We set about assembling the “experts.” First, the landowner. Rancher Mick Miller was the son of one of the two Miller brothers originally implicated in the Horn case and, of course, nephew of the other (the one who some still suspected of being the “trigger man” in the Nickell killing, his elementary school rival). Some of us had worked with Mick previously and he graciously offered to guide us to the key spots, several on his ranch. His wife volunteered to make dinner for all of the party, even when we told her the number might be about ten. “No problem,” she said, adding that she cooked often for that many (and more) family, neighbors, and hired men during brandings.
Mick told us he “probably wouldn’t ask” his mother (widow of Gus Miller) to attend, claiming she would become too “upset.” (Mick told me several months later in an interview in the offices of the State Historical Department, that he’d tell me more about the Miller brothers’ role in the Horn case, “But not as long as my mother is alive.” Ironically, he died the next year in Arizona and she lived on to be nearly 100 years old, outliving her son by decades).
Someone suggested getting a Nickel family representative. We found one–Viola Bixler of Boulder, a Nickel niece, who agreed to come. It would be the first meeting between members of the Miller and Nickel families since the time of the trial in 1902. A Horn family member, also in Colorado, at first agreed to come, but later sent regrets because of a time conflict.
Next, with the help of the many authors of pieces about Horn, we compiled a plausible list of people who might be able to contribute to the McQueen company’s narrative. Even though he had no direct knowledge of the case, Chief Justice Rod Guthrie of the Wyoming Supreme Court, had read about the case and studied the procedural aspects of the trial. Veteran Cheyenne attorney George Guy heard about the plan and asked to join. He told us he was “very young” and living in Cheyenne when Horn was hanged. “I grew up hearing about every aspect of the case,” he told us. (Early in his career, he helped prosecute some Japanese officials of war crimes). We added Wyoming State Historical Society Secretary Ellen Mueller and her husband, Fred, a former Iron Mountain resident who grew up hearing about the case, too.
We added a “historic firearms expert,” at the suggestion of the Rogers and Cowan rep. The expert was Andy Anderson, State Museum firearms curator, who would bring vintage rifles of the size and calibre of those noted in the trial, and either fire or estimate the range of each. Having won expert rifle badges in the Marine Corps, I’d be firing the shots from locations at the top of the nearby ridge and from the clump of trees close to the gate where the boy was found, likely spots where the shots were fired, as Horn’s trial transcript surmised. Andy later gained enduring fame from a couple of dozen fourth-graders—and infamy from a couple of their teachers—when he set up a big teepee, not noticing the flat cover of a sprinkler head underneath it. As he was starting his presentation in the teepee on some historical aspect of the fur trade, a groundskeeper, without thinking, turned on the underground sprinkler system. I’ve heard “drowned rats” as one expression used to describe those sitting in the tent when the sprinkler head popped up and went into “drench” setting. (The kids were laughing and seemingly enjoying the novel experience. Not so their teachers!)
Coming, too, was Burton Thompson, a former AP newsman and PR man (who invented the phrase “Butterball Turkey” when he was working for a large Chicago agency). Thompson’s father, John Charles Thompson, was a reporter for the State Tribune who was granted the chance to be the only newsman to be eyewitness to Horn’s execution. He later became long-time editor of the paper that carried his front-page, rather grisly, description of the hanging. We drew lots in the Historical Dept. because everyone wanted to go but we had to keep the place open. I was a lucky winner. Bill Barton had the other slot. He was, at the time, assistant director of the division headed by Katherine Halverson.
Everyone anticipated the interesting day and arrived early so we loaded the State’s large van earlier than scheduled and set off north along I-25. We had plenty of time to get there, so someone suggested we stop at the two-story ruin of the concrete house near Slater that pioneer John Hunton had built for the Virginia woman he met and married when he went east sometime in the 1870s to sign a denunciation of his Confederate Civil War service in order that he could gain the postmaster job at Fort Laramie. Apparently, he neglected to tell the new bride about his current wife, a Lakota woman with whom he lived in the sutler’s house at the fort. Odd that the second wife apparently never caught on, even though their home of concrete sat right next to the Cheyenne-Deadwood stageline along which coaches going each way stopped consecutively at each location.
Back on I-25, the van turned west onto the “Wheatland cut-off,” then a couple of miles to a gravel road leading mostly south, to our ranch destination. People familiar with the area believed we’d have made better time through Federal, but others informed us of a bridge was out along the route, risking a potentially unsafe creek ford at the spot.
Mick, in his mud-spattered pickup, met us at his gate. We followed him down a meandering road to the ranch. While his wife was finishing up cooking dinner, he walked us around the place. “Hope you have your walking boots on,” he said as he led us past the ruins of the old Miller homestead. There, according to lore, Horn first met Glendolene Kimmell. Then boarding with the Millers while she taught school nearby with Miller and Nickels children attending along with others in what then was a well-populated area of small homesteaders. Most raised cattle like the Millers, but the Nickels’ raised sheep, a source of neighborhood tensions. The school-aged children from the two families were said to have fought. Once, when Horn passed through the area, he gave young Victor Miller some shooting tips. Some say he even directed Victor and his brother Gus with some backyard target practice.
We turned slightly to the southwest and walked along the well-worn road about a half mile. We came to a U-shaped draw with steep hills on either side. A few hundred feet into the draw, Mick pointed out a tiny plaque even with the ground. It marked the spot where young Willie Nickel’s body was found. Viola Bixler knelt down, tears coming down her cheek as she must have been thinking about the 14-year-old uncle she would never know who died there in 1902.
Just ahead, about 30 feet, was the gate Willie supposedly was opening when he was gunned down, running back toward where he’d come before falling face down from the shot. Just beyond the gate and to the right of the road was a pile of large boulders. The rocks were just tall enough to conceal a man, crouched in hiding and awaiting the victim o dismount his horse to open the gate. The distance could not have been more than 25 or so feet, an easy shot even for an unskilled shooter. One of our number (I’ve forgotten who) but one who had studied the trial transcript and accompanying maps, opined that the shooter could have been far less skilled with a firearm than Tom Horn. “I could hit a stationary target from that range!” he asserted.
But another reminded us that, at trial, the steep hill to the right had been suggested as the sniper’s location. Mick pointed out that a meandering path, wide enough and level enough to lead a horse up it, came up the other side of what looked like an impenetrable 50 or 60-degree rise on this side. “A far distance, but like shooting fish in a barrel from up there,” one of our number asserted. Meanwhile, all along, the Rogers and Cowan rep was shooting photos and scribbling notes, a positive sign they’d be using the actual site in the movie scene!
We walked back to the house, carefully noting how close the gate was to be in earshot of those in the cabin, especially on a cloudless summer morning in mid-July. But enough of the speculation for now. We washed up for dinner. We sat around a long heavy oak table, Mick at one end and the Rogers and Cowan man at the other while the rest of us were seated at random around the long oval table. After the usual small talk over dinner, Mick and Viola commented about the historic meal. “A Miller hasn’t sat down to eat with a Nickel since before,” one pointed out. “Before,” we all knew was before the shooting on July 16, 1902, more than 75 years earlier.
The afternoon passed quickly with oral history interviews done indoors and on the porch, while some of us (Andy, the man from Rogers and Cowan, and me) walked back behind the hill to the right of the gate. We quickly found that the well-worn path to the top made any approach from the gate side unnecessary. Andy and I both estimated that a skilled marksman could hit even a small target from the top. A challenge if the wind were blowing, it would have been otherwise entirely possible. Reliance on the record would have to suffice, like Tom’s widely quoted statement that it “was the best shot I ever made, and the dirtiest deed I ever done” (pointing to the hillside location). We noticed several spent shells (modern), concluding that deer hunters still found the site useful. The Rogers and Cowan rep seemed impressed—told us that “so little had changed” that nothing would need to be changed for the filming. “We rarely find such a pristine site,” he concluded. “Too bad the scene won’t take more than 10 minutes in the final cut,” he added.
After taking pictures from every conceivable angle, we returned to the house. Bill, having wrapped up his joint interview of Mick and Viola, was anxious to load up and get on the road. The van was due before closing time (6 or 7 p.m.) at the State Motor pool. Otherwise, we’d end up paying for the “extra day.” Mick agreed Andy and I would be welcome to come back for surveyor measures and ballistics tests in the near future. Even more promising was his conversation with the Rogers and Cowan man, granting full permission to use the site for the forthcoming film.
We had an uneventful trip back, the same way we had come. The older participants, who were closer in time to Horn, told us anecdotes they recalled being told to them in their childhoods. As a young historian, I kept thinking about it being a generation too late for the actual eyewitness accounts—for the actual event—but the folk tales that our friends told about pre-war life in Wyoming were priceless. Never too late for those.
The Rogers and Cowan man continued fiercely scribbling notes. Bill and I were confident that, at last, there would be an accurately researched and produced film about Tom Horn. How much easier it would be to tell the real story after that!
For the next six months, we continued to receive photocopy requests from a variety of people from Rogers and Cowan, as well as direct from the Steve McQueen production company. Eventually, we lost touch with the Rogers and Cowan man who took the tour. Finally, we received notice that he had been “reassigned” to another account. And, oh, “we decided to film everything here in California.” We found out later that they had gone through a number of script writers, apparently not happy with those who followed the true story so faithfully.
More than a year later, the “sneak preview” was scheduled to be shown to a select audience, including all of us, at the Lincoln Theater in downtown Cheyenne, As I recall. It was set for midday in the middle of a week.
After a brief introduction, in the form of an apology from a perky well-dressed young woman (trying to look like the star Linda Evans who played Glendolene in the movie but in high heels and a business suit), the curtain rose and the film began. Five minutes in, we were looking at each other in the dim light, assuming the company had brought the wrong movie!
Nothing was right. Not the names of the characters, not the scenery, not the storyline. Something about two naked people swimming in an oversized stock tank and then a fast-forward to the Tom Horn character, played by McQueen, sitting on his horse and shooting a young boy doing the same thing. Confusing. Wholly made up. Entirely predictable as it evolved. Fast-forward again to a “trial” held outside under a big tent in the middle of a dirt street of a typical tiny set made to resemble a Western town—hardly the modern courtroom in a two-story courthouse in a town of 10,000, the capital city of the state! I was immediately amused by seeing Verna Keays’ design of the Wyoming state flags arrayed around the supposed 1902 outdoor “courtroom”—it was 17 years later that Verna even submitted her design to Grace Hebard’s competition. I mused briefly on how Verna, till alive and living in Buffalo, would have reacted to seeing the anachronism of “her” flag flopping in the breezes around the open-air “courtroom.”
The film ended, with lines crediting (or blaming) us for the travesty we’d just witnessed. The sincere young woman sensed our anger. “Well, before I ask your opinion, I emphasis that we’ll do our best to correct the errors….” Someone interrupted, “You can do that by burning it and starting over!” adding sharply, “You can take that up with Steve McQueen…” The young woman stammered, “Didn’t you see ANYTHING you liked?” A male voice responded, “A naked Linda Evans…” The first applause of the afternoon followed. Another person, referring to the curious scene in “Heaven’s Gate” of Nate Champion roller-skating with Etta Place (an anachronism itself—Place would have been little more than a toddler at the time), “At least you didn’t bring out the skates!” The laughter continued until the theatre was nearly empty.
We learned later that the film had been mired in controversy. Not only had it gone through numerous script changes and writers, but through three directors. It was a box office flop when it was finally released in March 1980. The critics panned it unmercifully. It was to be McQueen’s last film. He died of cancer at the age of 50 in November 1980.
Once in a while, the box office disaster shows up on television in the middle of the night. Thankfully, they rarely show the credits—at least, to the end of them. I’m spared the embarrassment of seeing my name and the name of our agency–thanking us, essentially, for nothing but our attempts to keep the story trueful and more interesting than the fictional piece it became.
If there is a moral to the story, it would be not to tell a box office star how to shoot Tom Horn. Something like “you can lead a horse to water…” He’ll do it in his own way.