It being Halloween season, this seems a good time to revisit one of East Linn County’s unsolved murders.
Were there others? Maybe, and maybe they still remain undiscovered.
However, a definitely dead body marked this murder, and back in 1959 Doris Gunderson wrote about it for the Democrat Herald.
Lois Rice, a founder of the East Linn Museum, saved a clipping which in turn was referred to by Margaret Carey and Patricia Hainline in their definitive book on Sweet Home, “Sweet Home in the Oregon Cascades.” It will now be, therefore, a thrice-told story, if not fourth-told.
In September of 1894 this murder occurred at hop picking time when people were on the move between hop yards in Brownsville, Pleasant Valley and Lebanon. A man on his way to establish a store in Foster, Charlie Edickson, was the unfortunate discoverer of the extremely unlucky victim.
The body lay in brush along the Santiam River, where an earlier road paralleled the Narrows. A quick conclusion determined the man had been shot while riding a horse and had fallen into the brush.
Nearby lay a hat with powder burns surrounding a bullet hole. Located in the area, too, was a money belt cut open by a knife and cut straps from a missing pack.
In addition, two horses had apparently been tied to small trees. One broke free and was gone. The other had uprooted its tree and was dragging it along.
Although his name has been lost to this account, the dead man was quickly identified as a peddler who traveled down the Willamette Valley from Portland, swinging across to Eastern Oregon by way of the Santiam Wagon Road.
Gewgaws made up his chief stock of trade – pretty trinkets to appeal to men and women who could not find the same in their local general stores.
No doubt he included other goods, also, such as needles and thread or sterling silver thimbles, and pocket knives – articles those living on farms and ranches or in mining camps might run out of when not wanting to travel away from home to the nearest store.
Of Italian heritage, the peddler had used Portland as his base because his brother lived there. In winter, the peddler could shop in the larger town, gathering a supply of wares. Then, with warmer and perhaps drier weather coming in spring, he would start off on his trek.
He must have been a sturdy, hardy and optimistic individual, for at the beginning of his travels he went afoot, with a pack on his back. No doubt his confidence reassured him he could surmount dangers and contingencies he might encounter.
Through enterprise and charisma, he had enough success to buy the two horses, one to ride and one to carry his wares. Along his route both he and his horses became familiar figures. No mention is made of whether he carried a weapon for self-protection.
Dr. Gibson of Sweet Home was called upon to examine the body. Probing for bullets, he found one in the trunk of the body but despite the bullet hole in the hat and a head wound, the second bullet was never found. It seems this forensic examination left something to be desired. The powder stains on the hat make it appear as if someone had ridden up beside the peddler and fired point blank at him.
If the body had been conveyed to Sweet Home, just possibly the mortuary table now in the East Linn Museum may have been used in the post mortem. Whether the corpus delecti was also embalmed is not mentioned.
Gunderson wrote in the 1959 article that a witness to the coroner’s jury’s actions had just recently died, Jess Moss of Lebanon. His brother, Mack, had been appointed as a juror, and as a 12-year-old, Jess skipped hop picking to attend the hearing.
As a new development to the crime, a man was arrested for selling the peddler’s missing horse. Yes, he caught the horse and had indeed sold it, Lyman Emerson admitted, but he’d thought it was just a stray. He knew nothing, he vowed, of the actual murder.
Some did not believe this and could easily suspect Emerson sold the horse because he knew about the peddler’s death and so concluded that the peddler, at least, could not care what became of the animal.
While declaring his innocence regarding the murder itself, Emerson received a stiff sentence, maybe on the chance he would reveal more.
If a question came up about Emerson’s whereabouts two days before the discovery of the peddler’s remains, it’s not said. But, as the coroner’s jury heard, that was when the crime could have occurred.
Josh Wilkins, who lived on a hill above the Narrows, said he heard two shots around 9 a.m. on Wednesday. (Could be he may have taken out a nickel-plated pocket watch and made a note of it.)
It meant, too, the body had lain in the warmth of September for two days, giving nature time to go to work and perhaps also meaning the body would soon have been discovered at any rate.
Testimony clarified the reason for the murder, if the slashed money belt was not testimony enough. The peddler had been extremely careless. Possibly feeling ebullient about his successful trip, he had flashed the currency in his money belt at least twice.
The first occasion was Monday after his stay at a guest house at Fish Lake on the toll road, when he’d removed money from the belt to pay his bill. Again, he’d been observed paying the bill for his Tuesday night stay at a guest house in Sweet Home operated by the blacksmith, Henry Slavens and his mother.
The proprietors estimated that $1,400 had been in that money belt, a goodly sum when men might work for a dollar a day plus board. Also, if the peddler mentioned his good fortune to others while traveling west on the toll road over the Santiam Pass, he could have set himself up as the victim of strangers.
In the end, no one knew who murdered the peddler except the man, or men, who had fired those two bullets into him.
In future years perhaps neighbor watched neighbor, hoping to see an unexplained acquisition of suspicious wealth, $1,400–worth anyway.
And Lyman Emerson’s story of not knowing about the murder is now accepted. No traces of the peddler’s packs were ever discovered. Maybe they’d gone far downstream in the Santiam River.
Aside from the mortuary table, there are a few things in the East Lin Museum which can evoke the peddler’ story – hat pins, a worn pack horse frame, and the listed tolls he would have paid on the toll road: six cents for a horse and rider, six cents for a led horse to total twelve cents for a one-way trip.
At the guest houses, if prices ran 25 cents for hay for one horse, 25 cents a meal and 25 cents for a bed, he might have paid $1.25 to cover two meals at each house. Small sums, but enough to possibly set him up as a potential murder victim when he opened his money belt before curious onlookers.
Though the peddler’s name is not given in this account, somewhere in an old cemetery in Portland it might be visible on a headstone.
And on Halloween night, if the peddler’s unavenged ghost rose in the mist like a wrathful wraith, it would have been at the Narrows on the banks of the Santiam River, even if Highway 20 has altered the terrain and taken out the old road.