Big Fight at the Oregon Trail Saloon

During the winter of 1981 the Sweetwater County Sheriff's Office transfered a Deputy to the my town, the little town of Farson, Wyoming. Farson is located at the approximate split of the Oregon Trail, and the continuation of the Mormon Trail leading from South Pass to Ft. Bridger and then on into Salt Lake Valley. Farson was as I have written before a tough little town. There was an odd mix of oil field rough necks, coal and trona miners and farmers. I was the first Wyoming State Trooper stationed in Farson and I was warned by the Patrol staff that if I did not get my bluff in on the inhabitants of the Valley quickly they would run me off.

I quickly found that the farmers and ranchers in the community suited me well and I made many friends amongst them in the years we lived there. The rough necks were a different story, they were hard working, hard partying men who were basicly scoff laws who had no use for the new cop in town. The first arrest I made of this group of people took place on the steps of the only grocery store in town in front of many of the residents of the town present to watch. It happened while everyone came to the post office to pick up their mail. I had to fight the drunk young oil field worker in front of all of these people, and then cuff him and take him to jail. This event did a great deal to solidify my authority in town.

During the four years my family and I lived there, I was the only law within 60 miles in any direction. I broke up family fights, drunken brawls in the Oregon Trail Saloon, you name it I did it because I was the only law in town. So when Brad T. the Deputy transfered to Farson with his family, I was ecstatically happy because he would get the 2:00 a.m. bar fights calls from Albert the bar tender, who had allowed them to get drunk in the first place; and then wanted me to break up fights before they destroyed his bar.

Brad T. was a big man with loads of law enforcement experience. Previous to transfering to the Sheriff's Office he had been a Rock Springs City Police Officer for many years. He knew how to handle himself, but he got religion somewhere along the line and had decided to become a peace maker and not a fighter. He now believed that talking was the answer to all the problems of the world and he was dedicated in his new found philosophy.

For some time before Brad's arrival I had been monitoring the actions of a team of seismographers who were tempory resident of Farson while they were running a seismograph survey through the area looking for oil deposits in the Farson Valley. This was a group of hard partiers whom had created a couple of altercations in the Oregon Trail Saloon, and I knew that before they left there would be a big fight to deal with. I was glad Brad was there to deal with it instead of me.

One night I had just fallen asleep at the end of my shift at midnight, when I received a call from the Cheyenne disptatcher stating that Brad was involved in an altercation at the Oregon Trail Saloon and he needed my assistance. I got out of bed grumpily, put on my blue jeans (out of unifrom) a T-shirt, gun belt and boots and headed to my car. I then traveled the three miles from my home to the Oregon Trail Saloon in thick fog that almost obscured the roadway. It was cold and there was about two feet of snow on the ground.

When I arrived I could just make out a large (for Farson) group of people standing in the parking lot in front of the Saloon, and it appeared that they were all very drunk and upset. Brad was also in the crowd talking to a man whom I found out later was named "Butch". Butch was the leader of the seismograph team and he was a big man. Fully 6'9" and weighing over 300 lbs. I got out of my car as quietly and as unobtrusively as I could after parking it out of sight on the edge of the highway and walked over to the front of the Saloon, but away from what was happening to get the lay of the land, so to speak; without interfering with what Brad was doing. As I watched and listened to Brad trying to talk Butch out of his mad, I found that Butch was upset that someone in his crew had left the bar unbeknownst to him and had removed the coil wire from the engine of his Blazer to keep him from driving drunk and he was mad enough to kill whoever did it.

My location was leaning against the front wall of the Saloon about fifty feet away from the altercation trying to mind my own business, but I noticed a man standing a short distance away near the altercation and he was staring at me, while he held a case of beer under his right arm. This man was really glaring at me and I tried to ignore him, but he seemed to become more and more agitated as he stared at me, until he threw the case of beer on the concrete at his feet and began to run rapidly towards me uttering a rebel yell, YEEEEEEEEEEE,HAAAAAA.

Just before he reached my position he jumped up into the air at full speed with his feet pointed towards me at chest level and parallel to the ground with the obvious intent to strike me a devestating blow to the chest with both feet. I simply used my forearm to deflect the blow away from me and then I struck him in the head with a night stick that I had concealed behind my back. The man was knocked unconscious by the blow, my night stick broke in two and he fell to the ground several feet past my position like a rag doll. I immediately pounced upon him and attempted to cuff him behind his back before he woke up.

The proverbial excrement hit the fan when Butch shoved Brad away from him and began bellowing like a bull and running towards me. Still in the process of trying to cuff my suspect, beer bottles began to rain upon my head from the twenty of so seismograph crew members maddened that I had hit their friend. Butch continued his attack towards me and so I pulled my sidearm and began scraming at him that I would shoot him if he didn't back off. To his credit Butch screeched to a halt and began back peddling away from me and into the crowd of his followers who were intent on breaking my skull with anything they could find to throw at me.

I screamed at Brad to, "Get that SOB, meaning Butch and so Brad who was well over 6" grabbed him and jumping upwards placed Butch in a choke hold and pulled him to the ground on his stomach. In the mean time I successfully cuffed my suspect. I dragged my suspect to Brad's pickup and threw him unceremoniously into the front seat of the vehicle and left him there still unconscious. I then went to my vehicle and grabbed a spare night stick and headed back into the fray with the intent of backing off the people who were kicking Brad in the back and sides as he tried to get Butch to give him his hand that he was holding under his body to prevent Brad from cuffing him.

When I reached Brad's location I began to stike out blindly at the crowd of people surrounding Brad who were trying to extricate Butch from Brad's choke hold. They backed off from us but they still continued to bombard us with beer bottles, striking us on the head and back with force and shattering many of them on us. I then straddled Butch's back next to Brad and began screaming at Butch to give me his hand; he responded with an unprintable expletive and so I took a hand full of his greasy blond hair and began to slam his head into the asphalt of the parking lot. He was knocked unconscious and so I extricated his hand from underneath him and we successfully cuffed him.

Still dodging bottles and hard projectiles from the crowd, Brad and I dragged Butch to my patrol car and placed him on his face on the rear seat handcuffed to the rear and locked him in my car. Brad and I both were tired of the bottles being thrown at us and so we went after the crowd attempting to beat them away. One woman jumped on my back and began clawing me in the face with her finger nails and so I reached over my left shoulder and grabbing a piece of her coat pulled her over my shoulder and slammed her into the ground. While I was trying to cuff her an unknown man who screamed at me that the woman was his sister, struck me in the back of the head with a beer bottle almost causing me to lose consciousness, I turned my body towards him and struck him full force with my night stick in the face. The blow knocked him out and he collapsed to the ground, meanwhile the woman got away from me and disappeared into the crowd. I cuffed the unconscious man I struck with the stick and dragged him to the front seat of my car and placed him in the passenger's side of the seat still unconscious.

Meanwhile Brad kept the crowd at bay by grabbing his shotgun from his car, and when I returned to his position he asked me, "Where is the dude you first hit, when Butch attacked you?" I stated, "Isn't he in your truck?" He continued with, "No, he's gone." We both walked to Brad's truck and sure enough the man was gone. By this time the crowd knew they were in trouble and began to disburse away from the area and back into what ever black hole they came from and Brad and I went looking for the suspect. We were walking in the alley behind the general store and the Oregon Trail Saloon when we encountered two men carrying rifles. Brad and I both drew down on them screaming, " Drop your guns!!!" They both did so immediately and then explained that they were merely tying to help us in the fight. I recognized one man as the upstanding citizen type, so we thanked them and asked them to return home. I determined that I was going to transport Butch and the other man to Green River to the County Jail, and Brad would continued to look for the escaped suspect.

We parted and I began the 47 mile trip to the hospital in Rock Springs to deposit my still unconscious sister protector and then from there to the jail in Green River. I did not drive slow. Even though both men looked to be in rough shape I looked in the mirror of my car and saw that blood was caked on my face from scratching finger nails and I had numerous cuts in my hair and the back of my neck from the broken bottles exploding on my head. My Patrol jacket was shredded in places and it looked as though someone may have taken a slice at me with a knife because there was a portion of the back sliced open about six inches. When I arrived at the hospital emergency room I was almost attacked by the on duty emergency room nurses. When they saw the man I had struck in the face with the night stick, his head was swollen to twice it's normal size and both eyes were swollen shut and his nose was broken from the impact of the stick.

They began screaming and berating at me for beating him, but no one said a kind word for doing my job even though it would turn out I was in as bad of shape as he was and didn't know it. I left him in the hospital's care and with my tail between my legs re-entered my Patrol car and continued transporting Butch to jail. (To be continued)