Queho: An Indian Outcast

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In the early 1900s, Las Vegas, Nevada, was a small community that provided supplies for mining operations at El Dorado, Nelson and Searchlight. Nearby was an Indian reservation, home to a mixed group of Paiute, Mohave and Cocopa. It is there that the story of a killer named Queho begins.

Tracing Queho’s early years is difficult. Indian tribal records hold no information about him, but it is generally agreed that he was the son of a Paiute man and a Cocopa woman. And he was born with a clubfoot. Because of Queho’s deformity and his mixed birth, he apparently became an outcast, accepted by neither tribe. A present-day psychiatrist, reading Queho’s case history, might say that all his personal conflicts and inadequacies became too much for him to handle, and in 1910 he began to ‘act out’ his aggressions. Law enforcement officers and Las Vegas area residents of that time would have put it more bluntly. They would have told you that a crazy Indian had run amok and was endangering everyone in the vicinity.

Shortly after Thanksgiving, 1910, Queho shot and killed an Indian named Bismark on the reservation. There are also unconfirmed accounts that he killed two other Paiute Indians on the same day and stole their horses to escape. While stocking up on supplies in Las Vegas, he argued with merchant Hy Von and then beat him with a pick handle, breaking the man’s arms and fracturing his skull. Queho fled south to Nelson, where he left the horses and entered the El Dorado Mountains on foot. A hastily formed posse from Las Vegas trailed him into the mountains. At about the same time, word was brought to Nelson and Searchlight that a local woodcutter named Woodworth had been shot and killed by Queho.

Because the first posse could not be immediately contacted, a second posse was formed under the leadership of Deputy Sheriff Howe, and the group set out at once for the scene of the Woodworth killing. There, they found the distinctive print left by Queho’s clubfoot. The tracks led down the El Dorado Canyon to the Gold Bug mine. At the mine, Howe and his posse found the body of ‘Doc’ Gilbert, the watchman, and noted that his special deputy badge No. 896 had been ripped from his shirt and taken. The trail continued down El Dorado Canyon toward the Colorado River, and the second posse continued in swift pursuit. Queho eluded capture, however, and eventually both posses gave up the chase.

Nevada State Police Sergeant Newgard was called in to continue the search. Newgard went to El Dorado Canyon with several Indian trackers and two experienced hunters. For days at a time they would find no sign, but then they would uncover the characteristic clubfoot track, and the pursuit would go forward again. Finally, Newgard and friends were forced to give up the hunt; they returned to Las Vegas in February 1911, tattered and fatigued.

During the next eight years, a number of mysterious killings occurred in the same Colorado River area where Queho had been hiding out. For reasons unknown, four adults and several children were shot to death on the Arizona side of the river. Lone prospectors and sheepherders were found dead in isolated areas on the Nevada side. In those cases, the victims’ shoes and food supplies were usually stolen. Fear and rumors ran rampant along the river.

In January 1919, Maude Douglas was shot to death and her cabin ransacked near the Techatticup mine in El Dorado Canyon. Undersheriff Frank Wait and Deputy Ernest Lake found Queho’s footprints heading down the canyon toward the Colorado River. They formed a posse to search the rugged cliffs and canyons along the river. At about the same time, two prospectors, Eather Taylor and William Hancock, were found in a canyon a few miles west of the Colorado River; they had been shot in the back, their bodies mutilated and their supplies taken. When Wait’s posse arrived on the scene, they saw Queho’s familiar tracks.

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Tags: Native American History, The Wild West, Wild West

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