Twenty-five miles north of Surprise Canyon, high up in the Panamint range, is a ghost town named Skidoo. In the spring of 1908 there were several gold mines there, as well as a post and telegraph office and the General Trading Store, which doubled as the local branch of the Southern California Bank. On the other side of the street was the Gold Seal Saloon, a timber and canvas establishment in which hard men consorted with a handful of ladies who claimed to be French.
The co-owner of the Gold Seal Saloon was a man named Joseph Simpson, known as Hootch because of his unrivalled ability to put away cheap liquor. His binges did not last just one evening or night, but could go on for three or four and sometimes five days in succession. When Hootch was drunk he became mean, roistering around town and brandishing his gun. He had moved from Reno, where he had worked as a part-time pimp and bartender and become a local celebrity. In Independence in the summer of 1907 he had been sentenced to a term of imprisonment, suspended, for shooting up the chandelier in a hotel lobby.
His final binge ended late one Sunday morning, 19 April 1908, in his own saloon. He had been drinking alone since dawn because everyone else had gone to bed. At 11.00 Hootch ran out of liquor and had no money either, having probably spent it on the French women. If he wanted to go on drinking he needed to get hold of some cash.
So he got to his feet and went outside. The weather was fine, the Skidoo News reported later, and the midday sun was blazing down out of a cloudless sky. The street was deserted save for a few dogs slinking along in the shade in the lee of the buildings. Hootch’s eyes were bloodshot. Gun in hand, he staggered over to the General Trading Store and planted himself in front of the counter.
‘Hey, Jim,’ he said to his friend Jim Arnold, who combined the functions of storekeeper, gold miner and branch manager of the Southern California Bank, ‘gimme twenty dollars.’
In retrospect one must assume that Hootch did not have any skullduggery in mind; he simply needed 20 dollars, that was all. As Jim Arnold saw it, however, Hootch was standing at the counter of the Southern California Bank, demanding money with a loaded gun in his hand. Fond though he was of his friend Hootch, Jim could not sanction a bank robbery, so he chucked him out, advising him to cool it and put his head down for a few hours.
Hootch did so. He went back to the Gold Seal Saloon and put his head down. When he awoke three hours later, however, he had a headache and was thirsty. And because he still had no liquor and no money, he returned to the General Trading Store and once more levelled his gun at Jim Arnold’s chest. Witnesses testified that the following dialogue then took place:
‘What have you got against me, Jim?’
‘Oh Hootch, I’ve nothing against you.’
‘Yes, you have. Get ready to die. I’m going to shoot you.’
So saying, Hootch Simpson shot his friend Jim Arnold in the chest.
The shot loudly punctured the little town’s Sunday afternoon stupor and mine workers came running from all directions, most of them inadequately attired and almost all carrying some kind of firearm. Deputy Sheriff Henry Sellers handcuffed the still obstreperous Hootch and, because Skidoo had no jail, locked him up in an empty shed. Some men carried gravely wounded Jim Arnold over to the house of Dr Reginald MacDonald, the township’s only physician, where he died early that evening.
The deputy sheriff launched an immediate inquiry. All the eye-witnesses agreed that Hootch Simpson had, shortly after eleven that morning, presented himself at the counter of the Southern California Bank, pointed a loaded pistol, and demanded twenty dollars. This, they stated, definitely amounted to an attempted bank robbery; the paltriness of the sum involved did not affect its criminality. As to the second, far more serious offence, eye-witnesses were also unanimous that three hours later, or shortly after two in the afternoon, Hootch had once more barged into the General Trading Store and, after a brief conversation with Jim Arnold, deliberately shot him in the chest.
This had been wanton, cold-blooded murder, every inhabitant of Skidoo was clear on that score. Hootch Simpson would end on the gallows in accordance with the written and unwritten laws of the West, but the road there was a long one. First, the deputy sheriff would be duty-bound to write a report of the case and wire it to the sheriff in Independence, 100 miles away. The latter would then ride over to Skidoo – a three-day trip – and conduct an inquiry of his own. After that, Hootch would be conveyed to the district jail in Independence. This would herald the start of lengthy criminal proceedings that would cost taxpayers many thousands of dollars and could have only one correct outcome – though whether it would ever come to that was very uncertain.
Fatal shootings were an everyday occurrence in the little towns of Inyo County, so the judicial authorities were chronically overloaded with work. Hootch Simpson’s murderous act would be ancient history within a few months, and if he pleaded self-defence he would probably be released for lack of evidence and simply warned never to show his face in the district again.
On Monday morning, when the workers went back to the silver mines, Hootch Simpson awoke from his delirium in a semi-sober condition. Although still handcuffed, he behaved in an incomprehensibly cheerful manner, calling himelf ‘a genuine hero’ and ‘a Bohemian’.
On Tuesday clouds rolled in. Bank manager Jim Arnold was laid to rest in the graveyard in a simple ceremony.
On Wednesday the clouds dispersed and the sweltering heat returned. The little town was unusually quiet. The mine workers knocked off punctually and went home, the saloons remained empty. One hour after nightfall every lighted window went dark. People seemed to have gone to bed early. At midnight, however, several dozen men assembled in the gloomy main street and made their way to the shed that served as Hootch’s jail. Without speaking, they pushed past Deputy Sheriff Sellers, broke the door down, and dragged Hootch Simpson out. Sellers later asserted that the men were armed and had outnumbered him fifty to one, and no, he couldn’t identify any of them because of the handkerchiefs over their faces.
When the next day dawned, Hootch Simpson’s highly visible corpse was hanging from a telephone pole in the main street with a noose around its neck. The deputy sheriff cut him down, then had him carried into the Gold Seal Saloon, where Dr MacDonald pronounced Joseph Simpson dead and took two photographs, one of which showed him lying on a table. In order to render the second photograph more memorable, MacDonald had the dead man handcuffed and hanged once more with a rope around his neck. For reasons of discretion, however, he was suspended from one of the beams inside the saloon tent, not outside from the telephone pole.
When questioned, all the inhabitants of Skidoo claimed that they were fast asleep and had heard and seen nothing out of the ordinary because it was an unusually dark and silent night. A glance at the lunar calendar for 1908 does, in fact, confirm that the relevant night in California was moonless. In his report, the sheriff came to the conclusion that Hootch Simpson had ‘died of strangulation at the hands of unknown parties’, and he released his body for burial.
The problem was that the only spare plot in the little cemetery was next to that of Jim Arnold, and the townsfolk of Skidoo considered it unbefitting to unite the murderer in death with his victim. Eventually, some compassionate soul fetched the corpse from the saloon, stowed it in a wooden box, hefted this on to a handcart, and wheeled it out of town to an abandoned gold miner’s shaft, where Hootch was laid to rest.
The following day, Skidoo was bombarded with headlines. ‘Butcher lynched by furious miners,’ splashed the Los Angeles Herald. ‘Citizens of Skidoo take the law into their own hands. Sheriff overpowered.’
‘Murderer lynched with general approval’, wrote MR MacLeod, editor of the Skidoo News. ‘That such a man should be at large,’ he commented at the conclusion of a full-page article, ‘is not only a national shame, but a national crime. The method of disposing of such in the way that happened here is JUST, CHEAP and SALUTARY in the lesson it conveys. Local gunmen are already in a chastened frame of mind. Would-be bad men, as they bowl along the road on their triumphal entry of Skidoo, will note the number, the stoutness, the great convenience of the telephone poles, and reflect thereon.’
Then life resumed its course and Skidoo went the way of all ghost towns. The veins of gold in the mountain ran out. A month after Hootch’s death the water line that supplied the gold mine with energy by way of a waterwheel burst. The company could not afford to replace it because its shares had halved in value during the banking crisis of 1907. Hundreds of labourers moved out. The Skidoo News ceased publication and its printing press was sold off to neighbouring Keeler.
The curtain had fallen, the affair was over. Newspapers turned their attention to other sensations. They reported on oil strikes in Iran and the summer Olympic Games in London. New gold deposits were discovered, new companies formed, new murders committed.
But six weeks after the drama the New York Times of 3 June 1908 carried a small advertisement:
How the New York Times came to describe Jim Arnold, a bank employee, as a ‘saloon man’ is not known and was probably due to slipshod research on the part of the journalist in question. The information that Hootch Simpson possessed $25,000 is important because it means that he was far from being a poor wretch compelled to become a bank robber when he came to the end of a long binge with no more small change in his pocket. On the contrary, Hootch was a well-to-do man who could simply go to the bank whenever he needed money.
It has become apparent, a century after the event, that an injustice was done to Joseph Simpson on 19 April 1908. He was mortally offended when Jim Arnold refused him 20 dollars and threw him out into the street – he, who had $25,000 deposited with the South California Bank. He may have brandished a pistol that morning, but it would never for a moment have occurred to him to raid his own bank. He had simply needed 20 dollars in order to go on boozing for another 24 hours. The citizens of Skidoo must have become painfully aware of this when they found the bank book among his personal effects.
I don’t know if his widow ever came into the money. The New York Times never mentioned Hootch Simpson’s name again or printed any more reports from Skidoo.
However, it was a while before his maltreated body really found eternal rest. The very night after its unceremonious disposal, Dr MacDonald armed himself with a scalpel and crept out of town to the abandoned mine shaft, where he cut off Hootch Simpson’s head and took it home to examine it for syphilitic lesions and other abnormalities. Having satisfied his curiosity, he left the gory object on an anthill until most of the flesh had gone, then boiled the skull for three days and henceforth kept it in a linen bag beneath the floorboards, where one of his successors chanced to find it years later. Thereafter, Hootch’s skull was passed from hand to hand. In the middle of the 20th century it was offered as an exhibit to a local museum, which could not accept it, because although the museum statutes permitted the acceptance of Native American bones, those of white men were barred on religious grounds.
What happened to the rest of Hootch Simpson’s remains is obscure. Many people say that his headless skeleton came to light again years later, when an unsuspecting gold miner was working in the shaft. Others claim that a few days after his death, some ladies of dubious reputation drove over from Beatty in a covered wagon, their intention being to give Hootch’s twice-hanged, once-decapitated body a Christian burial. However, the stench became so intolerable on their return trip through the diabolical heat of Death Valley that the ladies abandoned their plan and dumped Hootch somewhere by the roadside.