Breaking Blue

by Timothy Egan

  Initially, Bamonte thought the murder weapon might be tied conclusively to Ralstin, because one of the pistols taken from Logan had been signed out by Clyde. Later, when the case was reopened briefly in 1957, that pistol—still in Sonnabend’s possession—was sent to the FBI to see if it matched the bullets that had been pulled from the body of Marshal Conniff. There was no match.

  By Bamonte’s deduction, the gun used to kill the Newport marshal was the one that Mangan threw in the river in 1935, not the one taken from Logan by Sonnabend. The timing and circumstances, and Mangan’s precision, all pointed in that direction. In the half-century since the marshal was gunned down, the Spokane River’s course had been adjusted several times, not by a wide margin, but the upstream dam-builders had pinched the flow enough to alter the main channel. Mangan had pointed to the froth at the base of the waterfall, against a sheer rock wall, as the burial site for the gun. After his initial interview with Mangan, Bamonte had raised the idea of looking for the gun. Perhaps, at the low-water point of the year, the river could be searched. Spokane police were skeptical, to the point of ridicule. Another blast of angry letters from Pend Oreille taxpayers hit the newspapers. The police chief said, diplomatically, that it is always appropriate for law enforcement to investigate new leads, but his men were stretched. An old case like the Conniff murder would have to be weighed against the more pressing crimes of the day.

  The head of Spokane’s internal investigations unit, Lieutenant Gary Johnson, also had his doubts about finding any physical evidence. Johnson was with the sheriff at the Police Guild when Mangan told him about throwing the gun in the river. He believed there had been a cover-up; he did not doubt that someone, long ago, in his own department had killed Marshal Conniff, and that the crime had been concealed, the secret kept, from generation to generation. But to Johnson, more worried about internal police concerns of the late twentieth century—officers who might be taking drug money to look away, or a shift supervisor who couldn’t work with female cops—the question of justice in a 1935 killing seemed too distant. It was like a hobby. When Bamonte raised the question of searching for the gun, Johnson echoed his chief’s words: the Conniff case was not a priority for the department.

  Besides, he told the sheriff, he did not think the gun would still be lying around at the bottom of the river. “Fifty-four years is a lot of time,” he said.

  The message—from the citizens of the Pend Oreille, from Spokane police, from the prosecutor, from friends—grew to a chorus: give it up.

  In his thesis, Bamonte said the marshal’s murder was never vigorously investigated because the killer was a cop; there are no better protectors of their own kind than those sworn to uphold the law. He had no institutional remedy for this, a dilemma that was not unique to Spokane.

  Most importantly, the Conniff case showed that conscience is a power that answers to its own rules. The burden of conscience had been passed on, like a baton in the night, from the original culprits to their sons and daughters and friends, a counterforce to the cover-up. Thus, by Bamonte’s reckoning, in this epic struggle between criminals protecting their own and the weight of conscience, the truth eventually had forced its way out. Even so, the institution of the Spokane Police Department continued to cover up, following its instinct for survival.

  So, Bamonte concluded in the final words he wrote on the Conniff chapter, the river held the last and most important clue. And, of course, it was impossible to pull back the layers of water that ran over the burial site. A river could not be stopped, no more than a person could outrun his past, or an institution reform itself from within.

  “Do you want some coffee or something?” Betty asked her husband, peeking into the study, startling him somewhat. She was fresh, her hair done nicely, dressed for work.

  “Please.” She went back upstairs, and the student penned the last line of the Conniff section.

  “There was no gun,” he wrote. “The Spokane River holds the final and irretrievable piece of evidence.”

  18.

  Men Without Badges

  ON THE PHONE LINE, Keith Hendrick, police chief of Lapwai, Idaho, said, “Sheriff Bamonte, please.”

  “Can I tell him what this is regarding?”

  “That murder case of his … the one from the Depression.”

  This was hard for Hendrick—giving up an old friend, a man he had known for nearly half his life, a father figure. He still was not sure he had the nerve to follow through with it, so he got right to the point.

  “Sheriff, the man you’re looking for is still alive.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re looking for Clyde Ralstin, that right?”

  “Yes, sir, I am,” Bamonte answered. “Don’t know if he’s dead or run off or what the hell, but I’m—”

  “You know where Saint Ignatius is?”

  “Montana, somewhere.”

  “Montana, north of Missoula. Clyde’s home.”

  “Home?”

  “Yes. He’s not dead. Or he wasn’t dead the last time I checked.”

  “My God! Are you sure?”

  Hendrick sketched out Ralstin, lean as a strip of jerky, a workhorse who used to cut ten cords of firewood every year, handy with a half-dozen guns, a friend who valued loyalty over all else, at times mean enough to stop a train with his glare, but always on the Right Side.

  “He have any trouble with the law?”

  Hendrick fell silent.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m still here.” He wanted to laugh. “Sheriff, up until a few years ago, he was the law.”

  “That’s what they said about him in Spokane, that he took the law into his own hands and—”

  “No, I mean legally. He hired me as sheriff in 1969. He was our judge, our stability, the person who kept everything in line. He decided who went to jail and who didn’t, who was guilty and who was innocent.”

  “We talking about the same Clyde Ralstin?”

  The ages matched. Clyde Willis Ralstin, born September 13, 1899, was just a few months away from his ninetieth birthday.

  Hendrick had been to Clyde’s eightieth birthday party, in Saint Ignatius—and what a bash it was, on a night when the first frost killed the last wildflowers in the high basins of the Mission Mountains, and a mob of stars pressed through the borderless sky of Montana. Most of the town turned out to fete Clyde; a better citizen, an easier neighbor there never was. All evening long, men came up to shake Clyde’s hand or slap his back, and pretty girls gave him kisses, to which he always responded with a touch of charm. He talked about shooting bears, killing deer, felling trees, grub staking in the early days, framing houses later on, chasing wildcat oil jobs in South America—all these grand adventures, from the Roaring Twenties through the tortured years of the Depression, the boom time of World War II, when the Northwest came of age with the big dams and the bomb-building plant on the Columbia River, into the fifties and sixties, the years when he brought his brand of law enforcement to the Nez Percé Indian Reservation. Clyde was at the party with his young wife, a Flathead Indian who called him Dad, and his boy, barely a teenager, just learning how to shoot and cut wood in the mold of his old man.

  “His boy?” Bamonte was incredulous. “You telling me Clyde Ralstin had a kid, at his age?”

  “And a nice kid, too. Clyde used to brag about it, you know, being able to father a child at an age when most people have grown grandchildren.”

  When the boy was twelve, he and Clyde were deep in the woods of the Jocko Valley of Montana, cutting firewood. Clyde’s chain saw slipped and ripped a deep gash in his arm. Most men would have bled to death, far from the nearest hospital, immobilized by shock. But Clyde wrapped a cloth around the wound, tying a tourniquet, and then directed his son into the pickup. Under his father’s guidance, the twelve-year-old drove at top speed nearly forty-five miles into Missoula.

  “Clyde has the strength of three men, in just about every way,” Hendrick said.

  And now that he
was talking about the man he used to idolize, he was starting to feel better about turning him in. If the sheriff knew the real truth of Clyde Ralstin, maybe this business with the Newport marshal would prove to be a frame-up, or some awful mistake. “I remember seeing him, not too long before he left Lapwai to go to Montana, tearing a roof off this house. He was near eighty years old, and he was running the length of this thing, tearing it apart.”

  Hendrick told Bamonte how he had come to know Clyde, more than twenty-five years earlier. Ralstin was born near Spaulding, a hardscrabble village on the Clearwater River, just a few miles from Lapwai. For centuries, the dry mountain country of eastern Oregon, central Idaho, and southeastern Washington belonged to the Nez Percé. The tribe called themselves Nimipu, or “the Real People.” They spent their summers hunting elk and picking berries in the Blue Mountains, just west of where the Snake River cut Hells Canyon, the deepest trench in North America. In the fall and early winter, the Nez Percé caught chinook salmon and steelhead in the spawning waters of the Snake and its tributaries, the Clearwater, the Salmon, the Grande Ronde, the Imnaha. The tribe held on to its land long after other natives were driven out of their homes, in part because Idaho was the last state to be discovered by Europeans and settled by Americans. To this day, much of the state east of the Snake in the Clearwater mountain range, and south in the Sawtooths, headwaters of the Salmon (the River of No Return), is roadless—without stump farms or dams or any hint of the sloppy attachment to the land that is the trademark of much of the American West.

  The Nez Percé have not fared as well as their former homeland. Refusing an order by the American government to leave their homes in the Blue Mountains, which had been promised them by an executive order, they took up arms against the cavalry in one of the last Indian fights, in 1877. An epic retreat—down Hells Canyon, through the untracked mountains of central Idaho, across Yellowstone Park, and up through Montana on the way to Canada—ended just short of the border, in defeat. Chief Joseph, who led the defiant march, was taken away in shackles, relocated to Oklahoma, and then placed on the Colville Reservation of eastern Washington with a small band of his followers. Other members of the tribe were forced to live on a cutout of scrubland east of the Snake River—the Nez Percé Reservation.

  Five years before Chief Joseph died, Clyde Ralstin was born on his father’s homestead in Nez Percé country. The Ralstins didn’t have a pindrop of Indian blood in them. But with passage of the Allotment Act in 1887, whites were able to buy up tribal land from individual natives, most of whom sold their allotments, at bargain-basement prices, out of desperation. Today about 80 percent of the Nez Percé Reservation is owned by or leased to non-Indians.

  There were five children who grew up in the hillside ranch of the Ralstins; Clyde was the oldest. He never cared for school, but he took to the land as if he had sprung from a petroglyph; he became a flawless shooter, chasing deer, elk, antelope, sheep, mountain goats, pheasant, and other creatures of the Snake River country, which ran from the Seven Devils Mountains in the south to the Clearwaters in the north. As a seventeen-year-old boy who wanted a piece of World War I, he tried to enlist in the Marines but was turned down. In 1928, he parlayed his best qualifications—his fists and his utility with guns—into a steady job with the Spokane Police Department.

  Years later, when Ralstin returned to his home in the land of the Nez Percé, where his brother Chub raised Appaloosa horses, he advertised himself as a man of the world. Not only had he completed nearly a decade with the Spokane police, first as motorcycle cop, then as patrolman and detective, but he was a patriot, he said—an important man in two places where the American war machine was being put together in the early 1940s. After returning from South America and an assortment of jobs on oil rigs and in construction, he had landed in San Diego and climbed his way up to a supervisor’s position for a company, Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation, that built bombers. During the last years of World War II, he was back in Washington, at Hanford, where plutonium for the world’s first atomic bomb was manufactured in the desert along the banks of the Columbia River. Ralstin told Hendrick he was still sworn to secrecy about some of what he had seen and done at Hanford. His job was plant security supervisor for General Electric, a big subcontractor at the nuclear facility. What went on inside the five-hundred-squaremile government camp was one of the best-kept secrets of the war, and Ralstin took a great deal of pride in helping to keep the lid on it. When a commercial airplane crashed inside the nuclear reservation, Ralstin helped to put out the fire and made sure the report of the accident never went public. Though nearly a hundred thousand men worked and lived in the instant city at Hanford, they were essentially phantoms. So loyal was Ralstin to the secrecy of his mission that when one of the workers under him was arrested on a charge of stealing a truck outside of town, Clyde refused, in court, to say what the man did for a living or even if he knew him. The case was dismissed.

  Lewis and Clark had put the Nez Percé population at six thousand in 1805—one of the largest tribes in the West, and the most populous of the Sahaptin-speaking peoples of the Northwest. In the early 1950s, when Ralstin moved back to Lapwai, the Census Bureau counted 608 full-blooded Nez Percé in Idaho. The reservation land was bleak; the wind blew through homesteads constructed a half-century earlier and long since deserted and left to rot. It seemed as if the land, dry and harsh, had been scraped bare by a marauding force of nature. The big chinooks that used to swim more than seven hundred miles inland from the Pacific, following a migratory route up the Columbia to spawning waters in the Salmon, Snake, and Clearwater rivers, had disappeared—centuries-old runs killed by the hydroelectric dams constructed in a single generation’s time. Most of the Indians had no jobs; those who could find work cut timber, or fought fires for the Forest Service, or picked wild rice around Saint Maries. Staggered by alcohol, deprived of most of the land on their own reservation, they quarreled among themselves, committed acts of thievery and domestic abuse.

  For Clyde Ralstin, veteran lawman, keeper of the peace in depression-torn Spokane, and protector of America’s nuclear secrets along the Columbia, it was a perfect situation. The tribe needed law and order; he arrived in Lapwai with a resumé and a mastery of guns to back it up. The little reservation town had a long tradition of subjugating its culture and destiny to non-Indians. Henry Spaulding and his wife had established a Christian mission there in 1836—the first place in Idaho where whites lived on a more or less permanent basis. Ralstin had family throughout the Nez Percé country. His brother Chub had achieved a degree of local celebrity when he sold one of his prize Appaloosa ponies to John Wayne. If the citizens of Lapwai had checked Clyde’s personnel file in Spokane, they would have found nothing about the affairs he ran out of Mother’s Kitchen, or the reprimands and disciplinary actions taken against him, or the time he nearly killed his son-in-law, or the report of the woman who said Clyde tried to rape her, or the suspicions of Detective Sonnabend. For that matter, they would have discovered nothing at all—his file had disappeared, with Clyde, when he left the force in 1937.

  “He tried to look after our little town,” Chief Hendrick said. “Tried to look after the best interests of everybody. He was a real wise man in that way.”

  Until Hendrick was hired in the late 1960s, Ralstin was the law in Lapwai, first as enforcer, later as judge. He held court at night—“after all the suspects had a chance to sober up,” Hendrick said—and his sentences were usually stiff. Nine out of ten people who came before him were Indians who had run afoul of the law because of alcohol. A drunk could expect to spend ten days in jail. When the town had some crisis—political, financial, or other—Ralstin was always the first citizen to rally the resources. Hunting season was sacred to him. While in Lapwai, he still saw Virgil Burch; the old buddies kept a hideaway on the Idaho-Montana border, where they stashed good whiskey, antique rifles, and stories that never left the walls of the cabin. A particularly valuable gun, a .30 carbine with a bayonet, was
stolen in a burglary; later, in the 1980s, it turned up in Clyde and Virgil’s hunting cabin. But this story did not come out until Virgil was dead and Clyde had given up his official duties.

  Ralstin hired Hendrick, giving him the badge in the way that sheriffs used to do in the days when western towns were built in a hurry. But even after Ralstin retired from active law enforcement, when his job was pounding a gavel and sentencing small-time lawbreakers to short-term residency in the Lapwai hoosegow, he kept a hand in the physical end of the law. Clyde liked to beat people up. “He’d see somebody assaulting somebody else, and he’d jump in,” Hendrick said. “No matter how old he got, he enjoyed using his fists.”

  Ralstin left for Saint Ignatius, the land of his wife’s people, in 1970. Most of the town of Lapwai was sorry to see him go. When he arrived in Saint Ignatius, about 180 miles northwest of Lapwai, he built himself a house that was said to be worth $100,000 at a time when homes that sold for a fifth of that price were considered lavish by the standards of the Mission Valley. In his eighties he took up another career, working around Saint Ignatius as a carpenter for hire. He constructed kitchens, bedrooms, garages, shelves. His ears grew floppy and oversized, like those of Lyndon Johnson; his hair thinned; his nose seemed to become even more pointed as the rest of his face shrunk; and his eyes receded behind layers of weather-buffed skin. He hunched over a bit, but he never put on an ounce of fat.