Free Breaking Blue by Timothy Egan

memory, a little boy named Harold Chase drowned in the river, the Indian dipnet fishermen at Kettle Falls said the salmon run was the worst they had ever seen, and the Newport night marshal was killed by butter thieves. On Monday morning it rained.

6.
The Search
    W ITHIN AN HOUR of the shooting, the roads leading into Spokane, south of Newport, were barricaded. There were only two real escape points for the butter thieves: they could race down the paved road toward Spokane, then blend into the city, or they could try their luck in the woods of Idaho, east across the Pend Oreille River in the other direction, perhaps sit it out and wait for things to cool down. Only a few, familiar faces passed through the Idaho border. At the other blockade, the entrance to Spokane, a steady stream of cars came into the city; each was stopped and inspected by two officers.
    Nothing angered a lawman, even a corrupt one, more than the shooting of a cop. Life was a war; the bad guys could gain the upper hand, or retreat, but if they took out a foot soldier in uniform, somebody from the other side had to die. As news of the shooting spread, police from all over the inland Northwest volunteered to help track and find whoever had murdered Marshal Conniff. Hard times had brought a surge of lawlessness to the West: robberies, rapes, assaults, drunkenness, burglary—the new America was frightening. But even then, homicide was rare. In all of 1934, not a single killing happened in Spokane. The previous year there had been only two murders. Now, not quite nine months into 1935, two cops had been shot—thetown marshal of Rosalia, south of Spokane, and Marshal Conniff in the village to the north. Bursts of anger and outrage came from the Spokane mayor, the chief of police, the sheriff, the United States marshal, and the county prosecutor. They would spare no expense, in manpower or resources, to find the killers. This was not the Old West, they thundered, but a civilized area, the richest empire in the Western Hemisphere.
    On Monday morning, September 16, Bill Parsons joined several other Spokane police officers in a search for the marshal’s killers. At roll call, the basic plan was outlined: they would surround the city and move in toward the center, squeezing the dirt out. Eventually, they would find the cop killer. Officer Dan Mangan led a patrol of men out to Hillyard, the rail yards east of town, where hundreds of homeless people camped. They were told not to return unless they came back with a suspect.
    The transient village, Spokane’s biggest Hooverville, exuded a stench of campfires, garbage, and clothes worn for weeks without washing. Everybody smelled of fire, the children especially. They were used to being kicked around, the farmer families who picked hops and apples or cut wood by day and then returned to the camps at night. But they had rarely seen anything like the ferocity of this search, aided by billy clubs. Mangan swatted heads and kicked rib cages. The tall, bespectacled cop was on a tear.
    “Anybody here see two guys show up in a car last night?”
    No, sir.
    “Butter? How ’bout it? You bindle stiffs seen a load of butter moving around here?”
    Butter? Nobody in this gulch of despair had seen butter for months, and if they had, word would have spread. Folks in the camp were living off brown apples and potato soup. They boiled water in tin cans and cleaned what they could in the river. Butter? No, sir. Not in this heat wave. It wouldn’t keep any longer than a Popsicle on pavement.
    Then it was on to the boxcars. The officers went through the cars one by one, looking for the hiding, sniveling bastards who had gunned the marshal down and then put a final bullet into him as he lay on the ground. Seven rail lines came into Spokane from all directions,bringing in silver, wheat, timber, apples. But the most common cargo of 1935 was the broken men and women from the dry lands of the West and the Plains. Searching the boxcars, the