A rather inefficient outlaw, except when it came to escaping, Bill also claimed to have cheated death at the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
William “Idaho Bill” Sloan arrived in Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory, on May 7, 1875, as an advance man for Civil War veteran Charles C. Carpenter, a boomer then organizing an expedition into Indian treaty lands in the Powder River country. A couple of days later, Sloan dropped into the office of the Daily Leader and regaled the newspaper’s editor with the story of his life. He said he had been born 32 years earlier at American Falls on the Snake River (in what is now Idaho) and had since ranged widely throughout the West. He also claimed to be personally acquainted with all the famous mountain men and to speak the Sioux, Crow, Bannock and Shoshone languages. In short, Idaho Bill was the ideal man to act as guide for Carpenter, who was expecting 1,000 men to join his expedition.
Carpenter arrived from St. Louis a few days later, and on May 17 a large crowd met at City Hall. Carpenter outlined his plans and said he was not expecting any interference from the U.S. Army and had been confirmed as commander. Sloan assured the gathering he could handle the Indians “without any assistance from the government” and had been duly elected chief of scouts. Within days, though, Idaho Bill decamped to Rawlins, expressing disgust with Carpenter’s management of the expedition. He now allied himself with a Colonel Mansfield, who was mounting a similar venture from that town. The Cheyenne Daily News poured scorn on Sloan’s contention that Rawlins was the better starting point for an expedition and hinted strongly that Bill had misappropriated a watch and $30 before he left.
Idaho Bill Sloan, whose past remains largely unknown, would continue to make his mark, for better or worse (mostly the latter), on the frontier. He was not a very adroit outlaw, but he had two attributes that many others lacked: the ability to escape from his frequent incarcerations and the facility to spin a plausible yarn. In 1877 the latter attribute got him notoriety in stories printed as far afield as Australia. Still, he is now almost forgotten.
Neither Carpenter’s nor Mansfield’s plans came to much, and Sloan did not tarry long in Rawlins. He was next heard from when jailed at Beaver, Utah Territory, on suspicion of having been the lone highwayman who robbed the Leeds (U.T.)–Pioche (Nev.) stage at Desert Springs Station on December 13, 1875. Reportedly the prisoner somehow produced bonds for $3,000 to secure his own release. Then, on January 18, 1876, he and several cohorts took over the Desert Springs Station, ordering its keeper to cook dinner for them. They also forced the keeper at gunpoint to sign both a promissory note for $1,000 and a written agreement not to testify at Bill’s forthcoming trial.
On February 9 lawmen arrested Sloan in Pioche while he was reportedly “strutting around the streets like a walking arsenal.” A correspondent for The Salt Lake Daily Tribune recalled that some years prior Sloan faced trial for robbing stages but had turned state’s evidence to escape conviction. It was reported he was ready to squeal again, if pardoned, and he was escorted to the Beaver jail.
On March 8 Sloan surprised Sheriff John Coombs by producing a revolver and leveling it at him. Reports differ as to what happened next. One version has Bill freeing himself and going out for an interview with his attorney before returning voluntarily. Other reports say that Coombs drew his own gun and aimed it at Sloan, resulting in a tense standoff until the prisoner agreed to surrender in return for an escorted visit to the attorney.
This incident persuaded authorities to send Sloan to the Utah Territorial Penitentiary outside Salt Lake City for safekeeping. However, the prisoner returned in custody to Beaver on May 14 for a court appearance and managed to escape yet again, with another prisoner.
In mid-June, Sloan was back in the Beaver area, visiting the home of A.L. Winn, one of his accomplices in the Desert Springs Station escapade, when Deputy Marshal William Stokes arrested them both. Authorities returned Sloan to the penitentiary.
On July 17 Sloan and three others took a penitentiary guard by surprise and tied him up. They then used ropes made from blankets to scale the outer wall, stopped a wagon on the nearby road, unhitched the two horses and made off mounted double. Authorities quickly captured one pair, but Bill and his companion got away. Lawmen did catch the elusive con later that summer. Tried at Beaver, Sloan was found guilty of stagecoach robbery on September 23 and subsequently sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Three days earlier the Beaver court had found Mormon official John D. Lee guilty of murder in the first degree for his participation in the infamous September 11, 1857, Mountain Meadows Massacre in Utah Territory. (Lee had previously been tried in 1875, resulting in a hung jury.) It seems Sloan had ample opportunity to rub shoulders with Lee, whom he had met the previous year when both were in the territorial penitentiary. Indeed, Bill seemingly managed to persuade Lee that he was one of the young children who had survived the attack by Mormons and their Indian allies on an emigrant wagon train party at Mountain Meadows.
Lee faced a firing squad on March 23, 1877, and within days newspapers nationwide had published his “confession.” This included a dramatic description of how he came across a group of young children who had survived the slaughter:
I got up, saw the children, and among the others the boy who was pulled by the hair of his head out of the wagon by the Indian—and saved by me. That boy I took home and kept home until Dr. Forney, government agent, came to gather up the children and take them east. He took the boy with the others. The boy’s name was Fancher. His father was captain of the train. He was taken east and adopted by a man in Nebraska named Richard Sloan. He remained east several years and then returned to Utah and is now a convict in the Utah penitentiary, having been convicted the past year for the crime of highway robbery. He is well known by the name of “Idaho Bill,” but his true name is William Fancher.
This gave Bill considerable publicity in the newspapers, and on May 7 a correspondent from The New York Herald secured a lengthy interview with him. Bill convincingly described the unprovoked attack on the wagon train and his subsequent stay with the Lee family. He implicated several prominent Mormons in the massacre or the cover-up, including their leader, Brigham Young, and even claimed to have a letter from Young to Lee promising rewards if he kept quiet about Young’s involvement. Curiously, Bill insisted the leader of the wagon train was named Thatcher, not Fancher, and that his own name was Charles Thatcher. He described being apprenticed to a man named Sloan in Kansas City, then being taken care of by his own uncle. He claimed to have served in the Army throughout the Civil War before returning to Utah Territory, which he said he had to leave “mighty quick,” because he knew too much. He went to Montana and Idaho territories but returned to Utah Territory on several occasions, seeking those involved in the massacre to try to secure some recompense for the stock and money he claimed they stole from his father.
Bill said he had identified himself to Lee in the spring of 1873 and had been promised $12,000 if he stayed out of Utah Territory and kept quiet. He never received a cent though and, when broke, he “got into this trouble about the treasure box on the stage.” Asked about the whereabouts of the letter from Young, Bill replied: “I’m in here for 10 years, and that letter is the only thing, by God, that I’ve got to help me in all this world. I’ve got to take care of myself, and I ain’t sure which side I might do the best with.”
While finding these “startling revelations” plausible, the Herald admitted that Idaho Bill was “reported to be as freakish and slippery a scamp as there is in all this Western region” and conceded that he and Lee might have cooked up the story for their mutual benefit. If Bill thought he could negotiate himself a pardon, he was mistaken. Although some were taken in by the tale, in fact the only Fancher boy to survive was Christopher Carson Fancher, who had been returned to family members in Arkansas two years after the massacre and had died in 1873.
Bill Sloan now turned his attention to staging yet an- other escape. On the night of September 4, 1877, he was one of five prisoners who tunneled out of their quarters and went over the outer wall. Prison officials quickly recaptured one, but the others were able to gather weapons, horses and provisions.
Bill stuck with Eli Lee, a highwayman, and Charles “Polk” Wells, charged with murder. On September 11 the three outlaws were resting at a cabin about four miles from Henneferville (later Henefer) when Lee stepped outside and encountered a posse of four armed horsemen. He was ordered to throw down the shotgun he was carrying but instead cut loose, hitting two of the posse with birdshot.
Firing from cover, Sloan and Wells killed one of the posse’s mounts before slipping away into the brush. Finding himself alone, Lee threw down his gun, jumped on a horse and fled in a different direction. The posse set out after him but lost his trail, and eventually limped into Henneferville, reported the Deseret News, “in a somewhat dilapidated condition.”
The next morning, a citizen posse managed to surround Sloan and Wells and called on them to surrender. However, the townsmen were haunted by a recent case in which locals had shot down an escaping desperado only to find themselves arrested and indicted for their trouble. They held their fire when the pair made a run for it. Sloan had once again eluded justice.
In 1907 Polk Wells wrote his autobiography, in it relating an account of his tortuous journey on foot with Sloan to Green River, Wyoming Territory. Desperate for food, Bill sold a Masonic badge there to finance a proper supper for them both before pushing on to nearby Wilkins. There they had the misfortune to be arrested on a charge of robbing a ranchman’s wagon and returned in custody to Green River, though the sheriff didn’t recognize them as escapees. According to Wells, three days later during the pair’s preliminary examination in court, the sheriff brought in the real robbers. He released Sloan and Wells, but Idaho Bill just couldn’t resist expressing his indignation at their wrongful arrest in a most insulting way. The judge fined him $25 for contempt of court, and as Sloan was broke, the sheriff returned him to jail. Wells was given 15 minutes to leave town.
Wells heard a rumor that vigilantes near Virginia City, Montana Territory, later strung up Idaho Bill and another escapee, but that wasn’t the case. Just what Sloan did do over the next couple of years is unknown, but he was near Evanston, Wyoming Territory, in the fall of 1879, using the name “Richard Sloan.” Even a detractor conceded, “He was not a bad looking man,” and he evidently succeeded in romancing young Lillie Bell Glasscock, marrying her on October 2, 1879.
On December 26, 1879, Sloan was arrested in Evanston on a charge of obtaining $65 under false pretenses. Authorities held him for an appearance in the district court, but on February 4, 1880, he staged his final jailbreak. Leaving Evanston behind, he reportedly found employment herding government cattle at the Fort Hall Indian Agency in Idaho Territory. The Blackfoot Register there reported he’d been involved in swindling the post trader out of more than $150.
Lillie had meantime returned to live with her parents on their small ranch some five miles east of Evanston. She had had more than enough of Bill and resisted his entreaties to return to him. Eventually Sloan decided to do something about it and made his way from Cheyenne to the Glasscock home, where he and the family exchanged angry words and threats.
Accounts vary as to exactly what ensued, but most agree that Sloan pulled his six-shooter and began chasing the girl and her mother around the ranch house. The accounts also agree that this came to an abrupt end when Lillie’s father, Stephen Glasscock, picked up a pitman rod from a mowing machine and smashed it into Bill’s head as he rounded a corner.
Glasscock hit Sloan three times with the pitman rod, fracturing Bill’s skull so badly that his brains oozed out. Glasscock rushed his son-in-law to town, where doctors pronounced Bill’s case hopeless. There was no escaping the Grim Reaper; He died the next morning, July 13, 1881. Glasscock surrendered to the sheriff, but a coroner’s jury refused to indict him.
The Salt Lake Daily Tribune’s valedictory for outlaw and escapee extraordinaire Idaho Bill Sloan was unequivocal:
The world is certainly better off for the death of Idaho Bill. He was a thoroughly despicable character, a thief, as far as his courage would permit, and a most unmitigated liar. His ambition seemed to run entirely to the direction of being a bad, desperate man and to be known as having a hand in every leading robbery and theft. He met his death in a way wholly appropriate, and the dry eyes over his memory will be very many indeed.
Frequent Wild West contributor Chris Penn writes about the American West from Norfolk, England. Penn based this article largely on contemporary newspaper accounts, though Idaho Bill is mentioned in Wells, Fargo & Co. Report of Losses from Stagecoach and Train Robbers, 1879–1884, revised and enhanced by R. Michael Wilson. Also recommended for further reading: The Life and Adventures of Polk Wells (Charles Knox PolkWells): The Notorious Outlaw, by Polk Wells.
Originally published in the June 2011 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
