Prisoner George Rock, with a hood over his head, hangs by the neck in front of well-dressed observers at the Montana State Penitentiary in Deer Lodge on June 15, 1908. Three months earlier, in a desperate escape attempt, Rock and fellow prisoner William Hayes attacked Warden Frank Conley and Deputy Warden John Robinson with knives. As he and Robinson were being stabbed, Conley managed to pull out a .41-caliber Colt and fire six times, hitting Rock twice and Hayes twice. None of the shots proved fatal. Conley needed 103 stitches but survived his stab wounds (he’s at far left in photo). Robinson did not, and so Rock went to the prison gallows for murder, and, after a failed appeal, so did Hayes, on April 7, 1909.“In 1912,” writes Lee A. Silva in his Wyatt Earp: A Biography of the Legend,Vol.I,“Warden Conley wrote a letter to the local hardware store that had supplied the .41-caliber Peters ammunition for his Colt, complaining about the lack of killing power…and stating that when he had recovered from his wounds, he had test-fired the Peters ammunition into a board, and the bullet hadn’t even penetrated it, while Winchester ammunition had.” Silva adds, “The story behind this hanging photo graphically illustrates how important the man-stopping .45- and .44- caliber six-guns were to the men who lived by the gun.”
Originally published in the December 2013 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
