Baker County Sheriff Harvey K. Brown
1871 -1907
Small-Town Oregon Sheriff’s Role in Solving
Murder of Former
Governor of Idaho May Have Cost Him His Life
A little after ten o’clock on the evening of September 30,
1907, as former Baker County Sheriff Harvey K. Brown entered the gateway of
the picket fence surrounding his house at 1241 4th Street, Baker City,
Oregon, a powerful explosion rocked the neighborhood. The blast destroyed
the gatepost—there was no gate--just above ground and part of the wooden
walk leading to the front of Brown’s house. Every window on the front of the
house was blown out, as were many windows in nearby houses.
James Kenyon, Brown’s neighbor and mining partner, was the first to reach
the still conscious Brown, who was lying in the front yard to the right of
the walk. Kenyon’s wife, who arrived moments later, cradled Brown’s head in
her lap, while her husband went inside the house to check on Brown’s wife,
Dorcus, and ten-year-old daughter, Ethel, who were unable to the get the
front door open.
Before he slipped into unconsciousness, Brown said to Mrs. Kenyon, “They’ve
got me. They’ve got me. They’ve got me at last.”
Brown was rushed in a horse-drawn hack to the hospital, where he died the
next afternoon.
Headlines on the front page of the evening newspaper read:
ANOTHER STEUNENBERG TRAGEDY!
HARVEY K. BROWN BLOWN TO PIECES LAST NIGHT HE DIED AT 3:15 TODAY
Harvey Kimbell Brown was born August 17, 1871, to William
and Julia Brown. He grew up working on the family homestead located eight
miles northwest of Baker City, Oregon, in the shadow of 9000-foot-high
Elkhorn Butte just a mile west of the Brown place. As a young adult, Brown
worked as a ranch hand and in mining in Nevada. For a while he owned a
livery stable in Sumpter, Oregon, hub of hard rock mining activity in the
Elkhorn Mountains. He acquired his own placer gold mine in Stices Gulch ten
miles south of Baker City, which he worked in his spare time.
William Brown, a Baker County Commissioner as well as farmer, left office in
1902, the year his son was elected Sheriff and Tax Collector of Baker
County. Julia Brown, a devout Methodist, insisted that on the Brown farm the
Sabbath was a day of rest for the family and the farmhands.
Upon taking office July 1, 1902, Brown set about straightening out the tax
collection books. By December auditors determined that the books turned over
by Brown’s predecessor, Alfred H. Huntington, were $12,000 short (equivalent
to about $250,000 today). Huntington, who had already admitted that he was
$3,500 short, traveled to Chicago to raise money to pay back his debt by
selling shares in mining property he owned in Baker County.
County officials feared Huntington would never return to Baker County once
he learned he was being charged with a much larger shortage. Brown found
himself in the rather awkward position of traveling to Chicago, where he
arrested Huntington for embezzlement. One can only wonder what the two Baker
County sheriffs talked about on the long train ride back to Baker City,
where Brown lodged Huntington in the same jail Huntington used to run.
Pleasant Armstrong
Two days later, Christmas Day 1902, Huntington was joined
in the Baker County Jail by Pleasant Armstrong, charged with murdering his
girlfriend, Minnie Ensminger, after a Christmas Eve dance at a farm house
west of Haines, Oregon. The crime would prove to be the defining case of
Brown’s tenure as sheriff.
Haines area men, fearing Armstrong might escape the hangman’s noose by
pleading temporary insanity, conspired to lynch Armstrong. Around midnight
on March 3, 1903, about 150 armed men with faces covered by bandanas showed
up at the county jail demanding that Armstrong be turned over to them. Much
to the lynching party’s dismay, Armstrong was not in the jail. Having
received word of the plot, Sheriff Brown ordered Armstrong taken from his
jail cell and hidden in the Clerk’s vault of the courthouse and later
transferred to the Multnomah County Jail to be held until trial later that
month.
Baker County Courthouse
The Haines men need not have worried about the outcome of
the trial. The jury found Armstrong guilty of Murder in the First Degree.
The judge sentenced him to be hanged on May 8, but an appeal to the Oregon
Supreme Court put the execution on hold.
On January 22, 1904, at 7:00 a.m., the gallows stood ready within a
thirty-two by sixty-foot snow-covered area next to the jail defined by a
fourteen-foot tall board wall. A rope line and special deputies armed with
Winchester rifles kept back a curious crowd estimated at 2000. The gallows
compound was packed with upwards of 500 men who had received black-bordered
invitations signed by Sheriff Brown, including Jacob Ensminger, father of
murder victim, Minnie Ensminger. Among those standing on the gallows, in
addition to Brown, the condemned man and his priest, were county sheriffs
from Multnomah, Benton, Malheur, Union, and Washington (Idaho) counties,
plus the superintendent of Oregon State Penitentiary, who was to conduct his
first execution in Salem the following week.
Gallows
After an emotional speech by Armstrong, a hood was placed
over his head, and, at a signal from Brown, the hooded executioner sprang
the trap door on which Armstrong stood. A few minutes later, he was
pronounced dead by a panel of doctors, and all in attendance dispersed
silently into the cold January morning.
Although several men had been lynched in Baker County, Armstrong’s was the
first and last legally sanctioned execution in the county. And it was the
next-to-last public execution in Oregon, due to a new law requiring all
future executions take place within the walls of the state prison.
Invitation
In spring 1904, voters re-elected Brown to a second
two-year term based on clearing up tax shortages, collecting a backlog of
delinquent taxes, and conducting a flawless execution that received press
coverage around the Northwest. He began his second term with a regional
reputation as an honest and serious law enforcement man.
Baker City, however, had a reputation as a wide-open town allowing liquor
sales on Sundays, gambling, and, in Chinatown, opium dens. City officials
saw these illegal vices as a way to bolster city coffers by levying moderate
fines and, it was alleged, by collecting payments under the table for not
shutting down illegal operations.
With citizens complaining to him about lax law enforcement, Brown turned his
attention to illegal activity within Baker City. After he conducted a few
raids on gambling houses, gamblers were heard rhyming “Brown’s in town,” and
“Brown’s out of town,” and finally, “Brown, Brown, terror of the town.”
After cleaning up Baker City and aware he had achieved a state-wide
reputation as a strict law enforcement man, Brown decided not to run for a
third term as sheriff and instead, in the spring of 1906, filed to run in
the primary election as a Republican candidate for the office of Governor of
Oregon. Brown ran on a platform that declared, among other things, “I am the
only candidate for the office of chief executive of this state, on either
the Republican or Democratic ticket, whose platform demands the rigid
enforcement of all laws.” Brown’s campaign was short, vigorous, but
ultimately unsuccessful. Only in Baker County did he win a plurality of
votes.
Several months earlier, on the evening of December 31, 1905, former Governor
of Idaho, Frank Steunenberger, was blown up outside his residence in
Caldwell, Idaho, by a dynamite bomb attached to the gatepost. Sheriff Brown
by chance on business in Boise was invited to board a special train to
Caldwell containing the present Governor of Idaho and law enforcement
officials.
The investigation of Steunenberg’s assassination soon focused on Harry
Orchard, a supposed sheep man. Upon seeing Orchard, Brown said he was sure
he knew Orchard by another name as a miner at the Bourne mining camp in
Baker County. Brown subsequently participated in a search of Orchard’s hotel
room, where bomb-making materials were found. Authorities arrested Orchard
on a charge of murder.
Orchard soon made a full confession, not just to Steunenberg’s murder but to
numerous other murders of enemies of the Western Federation of Miners at the
behest of its leadership. Steunenberg’s murder, according to Orchard, was
revenge for his having busted a miners strike in northern Idaho in 1898.
Brown’s connection to the Steunenberg case did not end upon his return to
Oregon. Orchard implicated Steve Adams as involved in the plot to kill
Steunenberg. Idaho authorities needed Adams to corroborate Orchard’s story
in order to convict the Federation’s leaders. Adams, it so happened, was
located at a ranch in Baker County. Brown arrested Adams and convinced him
to waive extradition to Idaho and to cooperate fully with Idaho authorities.
Initially Adams corroborated Orchard’s story but later recanted.
Brown was murdered during the Boise trial of Federation official William
Hayward, a trial that drew national attention. But without Adams’
corroboration, Hayward was found not guilty. Orchard, however, was sentenced
to be hanged, a sentence later commuted to life in prison.
Although no one was convicted of the murder of Frank Steunenberg, even the
judge in the Hayward trial was convinced that the Federation had ordered the
hit. But who murdered Harvey K. Brown? Had the Federation ordered Brown
murdered as revenge for his assistance to Idaho authorities in the
Steunenberg case? The identical modus operandi of the murder certainly threw
suspicion on the Federation. However, authorities never developed any solid
leads. Brown’s murder remains unsolved.
Added by permission:
Gary Dielman
Photos: Baker County Public Library
Murder of
Sheriff Harvey K. Brown
Brown Family Photos
Baker County
