On Thursday, May 27, 1937, a manhunt that had started at Downey, in Bannock County, turned briefly to the farms around Pauline, at the north end of Arbon Valley. Word had come that two farmers there had run across a young stranger with red hair, so lawmen from Bannock and Power counties drove out to have a look at him. He did not fit what was known of the man they wanted, and they let the matter go after a short search. The Pocatello Tribune told the story the next day, May 28, 1937, inside its front-page report on the larger case.
That case was the disappearance of Patrick J. McCarthy. He had been missing for almost two weeks. Near Downey his automobile had turned up drenched in blood, and someone had spotted a red-headed man leaving it behind. The paper dates this both to the evening of May 20 and to May 19. Bannock County Sheriff Maurice J. Rossiter hoped to find and question that man, and the Tribune said plainly that the case might be one of murder. Tips about men with red hair were reaching the Bannock County officers nearly every hour, from DuBois, from the stockyards at McCammon and from a road crew's camp at Swan Lake, and a number of them had come to nothing once checked.
The Arbon Valley lead came out of Pauline. As the story first spread, the man had been found dead out in the grain, which was not true. Power County Sheriff L. E. "Buck" Davis put that rumor to rest. He met Sheriff Rossiter at the entrance to Arbon Valley, and the two drove on to Pauline in company.
At Pauline the officers heard from two farmers. The stranger had been working for Nels Wimmett, hired to help in the fields, until he left one day without a word to his employer. Next he turned up on Harry Hill's land, where Hill came upon him lying in the wheat. When Hill asked about the past 24 hours, the young man's answers were vague and dodging, and that was why Hill brought Sheriff Davis into it.
What ended the hunt was a matter of years. By Wimmett's reckoning the stranger was 21. The suspect in the McCarthy case was thought to be somewhere between 30 and 35, so the officers called off their short search. As Rossiter saw it, the youth was simply a wanderer: Wimmett had fed him, and he had gone on down the road.
What the papers do not say
The Tribune never gave the stranger's name, and nothing in the pages read for this post says whether anyone found him again. The farmer the paper called Harry Hill was very probably Thomas Harry (T. H.) Hill, who came from Moline, Kansas, homesteaded on the Arbon floor in the 1910s and in 1927 bought the Burge ranch about a mile south of Pauline. The 1937 article gives no initials, so that match rests on his name and where he lived. Nels Wimmett does not appear in any other record this site has found, and the spelling of his name may be the paper's. How the McCarthy case ended is beyond the pages read here.
Sheriff Rossiter himself may have known the valley. In 1914 a Maurice J. Rossiter of Crystal gave notice that he would prove up on his homestead, and in 1917 the American Falls Press wrote about the oats, wheat and barley he raised on his 160 acres on upper Cherry Creek, three and a half miles northeast of Crystal. The full name and middle initial match the 1937 sheriff's, but nothing read for this post says they were the same man, so the connection is likely rather than certain.
On this site: Pauline and its families are described on the Pauline and West Fork page, and the Hills are among the families found in land records on the Arbon area page.
The story as reported
Pocatello Tribune, May 28, 1937, pages 1 and 10. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
POCATELLO — Lawmen hunting a red-headed man in connection with the Downey car case spent part of Thursday in Arbon Valley, then gave up after learning that a stranger seen near Pauline was much younger than the man they wanted.
The tip had come from two farmers at Pauline. Early word had the man dead, a rumor that did not hold up. Bannock County Sheriff Maurice J. Rossiter heard the true account from Power County Sheriff L. E. Davis, who met him at the entrance to the valley and rode on with him to Pauline.
On his own farm, Harry Hill had found the young man lying on the ground amid the wheat. Pressed about the past 24 hours, the man could give no clear account, and that is what led Hill to contact the Power County sheriff. Nels Wimmett, for his part, had hired the stranger as a farm hand, only to have him leave one day without saying anything. Wimmett believed he was 21; the Downey suspect was supposed to be between 30 and 35, and that gap ended the officers' interest.
The sheriff's verdict was that the youth was a tramp who had taken a meal at the Wimmett farm and drifted on.
The Pauline trip was one of many leads. On Friday Rossiter pinned his hopes on Tim Murtaugh, a friend of the missing Patrick J. McCarthy, whom he called "probably the only person who knows the name" of the red-head. Some weeks earlier, the sheriff said, Murtaugh, McCarthy and the red-headed man had traveled to McCall together. But Murtaugh was off in the Salmon River country looking for ore, having set out a week before McCarthy disappeared, and Lemhi County Sheriff T. J. Stroud was trying to locate him.
Other reports placed red-headed men at DuBois, near the McCammon stockyards and at a road camp at Swan Lake. Bannock County deputies Dave McNichols and Bert Empey, meanwhile, went out again to the spot that in their view marked where McCarthy died, in his own car, on May 19.