THE SPOKESMAN • TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2022 A9
OFFBEAT OREGON
Manhunt for ‘King of the Western Outlaws’
T
he “Golden Age of Out-
laws” had a good run
— almost 40 years. It
kicked off just after the Civil
War, when thousands of bat-
tle-hardened Confederate
veterans with nothing to lose
spread out across the West-
ern frontier. And it ended in a
field in eastern Washington on
Aug. 5, 1902.
That was the date when the
last Golden Age outlaw, Harry
Tracy, went out in a blaze of
gunfire following the bloodi-
est prison break in Oregon his-
tory, which was followed by a
two-month-long, even bloodier
manhunt.
Harry Tracy was the last of
the breed of Wild West outlaws
like Jesse James, Butch Cassidy,
and Billy the Kid. He wasn’t
technically an Oregonian. His
real name was Harry Severns,
and he was born in 1875 in Pitts-
ville, Wisc., a child of a highly
respected and successful family.
He was bright, outgoing and lik-
able. He gave no early signs to
anyone that he might be headed
for a life of crime and murder.
There are some sources that
claim otherwise, but they’re ei-
ther spinning stories or quot-
ing sources that are. During the
two months when Tracy’s name
was in the national headlines,
the public was hungry for sto-
ries about him and many idle
rumors got quoted and embel-
lished in newspapers and quoted
later in magazine stories. Some
of these are still being repre-
sented as facts in pulpy retellings
today — such as the false claim
that a teen-age Tracy raped and
murdered his Sunday School
teacher.
That changed, though, soon
after he left the nest. He changed
his name to Tracy and launched
a career in robbery and theft
that led him to a gunfight with
a pursuing posse in Colorado,
in which a member of the posse
was shot and killed. He was ar-
rested and imprisoned. Within a
short time, he escaped, skipped
town, and did it again.
By the time Tracy arrived in
Portland, he was still only 23
years old. But he’d been in plenty
of trouble. By the standards of
his peers, he wasn’t a particularly
successful robber, but he was re-
markably good at breaking out
of jail. He’d escaped from several
jails and prisons in Colorado
and Utah and apparently picked
Portland as a good place to get a
fresh start.
Upon arrival, Tracy met and
befriended a local thief named
David Merrill. Shortly after that,
Tracy actually married Merrill’s
sister, Rose.
He may have planned on go-
ing straight in Portland — set-
tling down, starting a family,
thinking about the future. Cer-
tainly there was an unusually
long period of time between
when he arrived in Portland
and when he started getting in
trouble: three years. Tracy wasn’t
a very skillful criminal, so it’s
most likely that he wasn’t actu-
ally committing crimes during
Oregon State Archives
Harry Tracy as he appeared in his prison booking photo in 1901.
that time.
LIFE OF CRIME
Tracy eventually got back into
the business, and he and Mer-
rill started pulling stick-up jobs
around town. They went about
it with a particular style and pa-
nache that quickly got them into
the headlines as “The Mackin-
tosh Bandits” and “The False
Face Bandits.”
Portland police, trying to find
the culprits, started “rounding up
the usual suspects” by contacting
various crooks that they knew
to be at large in town. Tracy, a
relative newcomer to Portland,
was not on that list. But, unfortu-
nately for him, David Merrill was.
When a detective dropped by for
a surprise visit to check him out,
he found clear proof that Merrill
was one of the bandits. He found
him and arrested him.
Then the cops lurked in the
house and waited for Tracy to
return.
The sources aren’t completely
clear on this, but it appears most
likely that the reason Tracy wasn’t
at the house was that he was actu-
ally in the act of robbing a nearby
butcher shop at the time. Com-
ing home with the loot, Tracy
saw a strange, well-dressed man
waiting for him, and decided he
didn’t like the lay. He turned to
run, trading pistol shots with the
detective as he fled. A streetcar
was passing by and he jumped,
grabbed onto it, and rode it safely
away.
But the streetcar’s driver
wasn’t having any of that. After
he realized what was going on,
he stopped the streetcar and in-
tentionally disabled it, so that if
Tracy tried to hijack it at gun-
point it wouldn’t do him any
good.
Tracy jumped off and started
to flee again. But by an odd co-
incidence, the streetcar had
stopped right outside the butcher
shop that he had just robbed.
The butcher’s son was ready with
a shotgun full of bird shot and
Tracy was now at relatively close
range.
Wounded, Tracy managed
to run a short distance, but was
quickly surrounded and arrested.
And that is how Harry Tracy
came to be a resident in the Or-
egon State Penitentiary. He and
David Merrill both “checked in”
in late 1901.
JAILBREAK
According to the book by the
pseudonymous Prisoner No.
6435, both Tracy and Merrill
were a lot of trouble as prison in-
mates. The glib, friendly Tracy
was able to talk his way out of
a lot of trouble. But Merrill was
always a problem, and the war-
den took to keeping an “Oregon
Boot” shackle on him for ex-
tended periods of time. He wore
the boot so often in his short time
in the pen that it actually disfig-
ured his ankle.
Then came the morning of
June 9, 1902. That was the day
Tracy planned for their breakout.
He had gotten someone to
sneak some money in for him,
and he’d used it to bribe someone
— nobody knows who — to hide
a pair of .30-30 Winchester ri-
fles in a pattern box in the prison
foundry. He had also bribed
a soon-to-be-released inmate
named Harry Wright to, after he
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Oregon State Archives)
The Oregon State Penitentiary’s
report on the Tracy-Merrill prison
break, with Tracy’s mugshot at-
tached.
was out, get a rope ladder and
toss it over the prison wall for
them. Wright had been released
on schedule and had done his bit.
They had the ladder.
That morning, Tracy and Mer-
rill reported to work in the prison
foundry, went straight to the
designated boxes, opened them
up, reached inside, and came out
shooting.
The two guards in the room
were shot dead before they knew
what was happening, and the two
men ran to the door.
Outside, they shot the guards
out of the two watchtowers clos-
est to their ladder, shot a fellow
inmate who tried to stop them,
and used a fifth guard, whom
they had taken at gunpoint, as
a human shield while they re-
treated out of rifle range. Then
Tracy coldly murdered the
“shield” and they ran.
What followed was a two-
month manhunt covering most
of northwest Oregon and much
of western Washington, as Tracy
and Merrill tried to make it to
Hole-in-the-Wall Pass, Wyo-
ming, headquarters of the Wild
Bunch gang — not knowing
Butch Cassidy & Co. had fled to
Argentina the previous year.
Posses were on their track al-
most immediately. Bloodhounds
were brought in from Walla
Walla, Wash., but Tracy circled
around and mixed his scent with
that of the posse, and the dogs
lost his trail.
The governor offered a reward,
then doubled it. As the weeks
went by the reward was raised
until it was $8,000, dead or alive.
That’s $280,000 in modern cur-
rency — an enormous bounty.
This inspired dozens of ad-hoc
packs of citizens grab a shotgun
and a flask of whiskey, posse up,
and join the hunt.
The result was a chaotic land-
scape of heavily-armed drunks
looking hopefully over every
backyard fence for signs of Tracy
and Merrill.
“The whole damned coun-
try was full of militia, and many
of the boys were potted,” De-
tective Joe Day of the Portland
Police Department told writer
Stewart Holbrook many years
later. “They shot at everything,
and Clark and Cowlitz counties
sounded like the Spanish Amer-
ican War all over again. It was
the most dangerous place I was
ever in.”
These boozy posses may have
made the countryside danger-
ous for everyone, but they would
have been no match for a pro-
fessional killer like Tracy. Even
stone-sober law enforcement
professionals had trouble on the
few occasions when they caught
up with him that summer.
Tracy wasn’t long in Oregon.
On June 16 he and Merrill held
up three men on the south bank
of the Columbia River in Port-
land and made them row them
across to Washington.
Newspaper readers then got
to follow their progress by the re-
ports of farmers and homeown-
ers. The outlaws would approach
them with guns out, “request”
dinner, make some small talk,
requisition some supplies, and be
on their way.
One such homeowner re-
ported, on July 3, that Tracy had
appeared alone. Tracy told him
that he had killed David Merrill.
“I was tired of him anyhow,”
Tracy said, according to this cit-
izen.
Tracy had said he was headed
for Hole-in-the-Wall Pass. For
some reason, he didn’t seem in
too big a hurry to get there. After
reaching Washington, his trail re-
ally meandered. He spent months
lurking around the Seattle area,
hijacked another boat to get to
Bainbridge Island, came back,
forced a farmer to buy him some
See Offbeat / A12