Hunted

The Rest of the Stories

In [MONTH YEAR], a contributor to the Adirondack Daily Enterprise reprinted a 1932 newspaper account of a manhunt near Indian Lake and asked whether any readers knew more. Several pointed him to my research, which I had presented at the Adirondack Museum in [YEAR]. He invited me to write a column. "The Rest of the Stories" ran in two parts on [DATE] and [DATE]. The text below is as I wrote it.

Only three men knew the full story of what transpired in the desolate Adirondack country between O'Neil Flow and Donnelly Mountain in 1932. One never made it off the mountain alive. The other two are long in the ground. The rest of us are left to make sense of an apocryphal tale with only one certainty: the man who died on the mountain was Black, and the men who killed him were white.

This much seems true: Ernie Blanchard and Lester Turner of Indian Lake came upon a stranger living rough in the woods some miles east of Blue Mountain in early March of that year. What happened next is unclear, but in the aftermath of this encounter, they filed a complaint with the state police. Over the next three days, a shifting roster of three civilians, two state gamekeepers and four state troopers pursued the man across the wilderness to his death, later claiming that he initiated a gunfight rather than surrender. He died before revealing his identity and was buried, nameless, thirty miles away in North Creek.

Newspapers across the nation cast the Adirondackers as a stalwart "posse" on the trail of a dangerous outlaw. Official reports gave a more sober account of an unfortunate but justified shooting. Some of those involved would live to develop reputations inspiring faith in their integrity, including Blanchard, who died a celebrated Adirondack guide, and gamekeeper Merritt Lamos, who became a widely-respected Hamilton County Sheriff. Amidst broad support for the killers, a lone voice dissented. The Glens Falls Post-Star wasn't buying it, for good reason.

The Star's objections could have been lifted straight from today's headlines. The "giant negro" described by many newspapers turned out to be all of 5'6" and 130 pounds at his autopsy. Could nine well-fed men not have subdued him, or waited him out? What crime had he actually committed? As with similar cases today, the legitimacy of the shooting hinged partly upon the justification for summoning the police in the first place. Justification, in turn, hinges upon which version of the story is true.

That determination is no simple task, for even official accounts do not agree on exactly what happened when Blanchard and Turner first encountered the victim.

The police report claims the men were "confronted by a negro" in the woods. Blanchard, by contrast, told a coroner's inquest that they came across his tracks, followed them for nearly a mile, found him gathering firewood and "hollered at him," suggesting it was they who initiated the confrontation. While the two men were often described as "trappers" in the press, both official accounts indicate that they were hunting, and therefore, presumably, carrying guns - a crucial point glossed over by the inquest. Turner reveals they had a dog with them. Both documents agree that the man was startled, ran to grab a gun, pointed it at them from a considerable distance and told them to stay away because he did not want to shoot them, at which point they retreated. Dick Farrell, posse member and caretaker of a nearby sportsmen's camp where the pursuers bunked overnight during the manhunt, further testified that someone had recently peered through a camp window before running away, and that some shotgun shells had gone missing.

The newspapers could hardly have told this tale differently. "Adirondacks Combed for 'Wild Man,'" announced the Albany Times Union on March 4. "Indian Lake Trappers Terrorized by Man Clad in Deer Skin," ran the strap line, while the article below claimed that authorities were on the hunt for "a wild man fugitive, roaming through that section and terrorizing guides and trappers with a sawed-off shotgun" after breaking into multiple camps from Indian Lake to Speculator. The Malone Telegram, which misprinted Turner's name, alleged the man had "threatened to kill them."

The story grew ever more implausible as the decades wore on. Post-Star columnist Don Metivier, interviewing survivors in the 1970s, was told of "a huge creature covered with hair from head to foot" with a footprint "nearly a yard across," about which the State Police had received "several calls" after the creature "burned down several lumber camps and hunting cabins." By the time Bob Elinskas came by the story for his 2005 volume A Deer Hunter's History Book, the diminutive victim, far from warning them off from a distance, was a "big guy" with "huge foot coverings" who "jumped out" at them and "had a double-barreled shotgun pointed right at Ernie's chest."

"Sensationalized" does not begin to capture the extent to which this story has been inflated by second-hand sources. Within hours, the man had been dehumanized as an animal, pathologized as a lunatic, and criminalized as a burglar, an outlaw and a terrorist. A conservation official speculated that the victim would have raped a white woman if he'd had the chance. The passing decades would inexplicably add arson to this litany of fictional crimes, and further dehumanize him as an "Adirondack Bigfoot" - the literal title of Metivier's chapter on the subject in his 1993 collection Metivier On.

Over ninety years of revisionist history, not one author has ventured to run a mile in the victim's shoes. What must have gone through this man's mind as two large, armed white men tracking him with a dog emerged from the bush and entered his camp in the remote Adirondack backwoods in 1932? Who was terrorizing whom? For all the fanciful imagination it takes to conjure wild men, desperadoes and Sasquatches, an alternative narrative - say, Black man pays with his life for standing his ground against white assailants - seems to have occurred to no one.

I belabor the details because the devil within them defines the difference between a posse and a lynch mob. And yet they are insufficient to prove that distinction on their own, for the context of these events casts doubt on the veracity of even the official account.

Ernie Blanchard and Lester Turner were no strangers to crime. The men who lodged an indignant complaint with the authorities that spring were themselves acquainted with a range of infractions - from illegal construction to rum-running to illicit hunting - some the subjects of fines in their day, some of casual boasts long after the commission.

Such crimes hardly distinguished them. Adirondackers have long subsisted by hook or by crook from a landscape that has receded ever further from their legal purview over the course of two centuries. The State of New York, once eager for colonists to line its coffers with the surplus generated by Adirondack development, had by the 1930s reinvented itself as forest guardian, a posture that put locals and lawmen on opposite sides of a long war of Adirondack attrition. It was thus a convenient marriage of strange bedfellows that set out after the suspect.

While considerable confusion emerged in the testimony given at the coroner's inquest some three weeks later, all agreed upon the following account.

A preliminary search on March 2 turned up only tracks. The next day, they retreated from the woods to report and resupply. On March 4, a detail of nine departed O'Neil Flow Camp: complainants Turner and Blanchard, Game Protectors Merritt Lamos and Jack Farrell, Jack's brother Dick, State Police Lieutenant CB McCann, Sergeant Ed Skowyra, and Troopers AJ Hall and FJ Donnellan. All but Blanchard and Turner were armed. Their orders, according to senior officer McCann, were to approach the man carefully, convince him to lay down his arms, and persuade him to talk.

That is not what happened, as McCann would later learn. He was last in a long line of men led by Lester Turner, who was a quarter mile ahead of their official commander when they spotted their quarry just over the Essex County line into Newcomb near Dunn Brook Mountain. The troopers, struggling in their snowshoes, had fallen behind the more experienced local woodsmen. Skowyra had given his Winchester to Turner by the time they overtook their man.

Those at the front of the posse shouted, and the suspect broke into a run. Plan A blown, they fanned out to surround him. A gunfight ensued, during which Turner, Hall, Lamos, Skowyra and the suspect fired. In the midst of the melee, he was alleged to have cried that they would never take him alive, according to various witness quotes, all of which would have been at home in a dime store novel.

Turner was hit but unharmed, and one of his bullets apparently landed the fatal blow.

It was over in minutes. The lawmen tried to ascertain his identity while he bled out, but he never spoke again. By the time McCann caught up with the others, they had removed his body to an abandoned lumber camp some way down the mountain, where he had apparently been sheltering.

The coroner's inquest raised more questions than it answered. The facts reported could not have covered the State Police in glory even in 1932: a civilian accuser not only joined but led a manhunt ending in the death of a suspect wanted for questioning in a dubious "crime," firing the fatal shot with a police weapon while the officer in charge was stuck in the snow.

The facts left unsaid are even more troubling.

Did the suspect fire first? Turner and Blanchard made this claim, having witnessed the gunfight from the beginning. Jack Farrell answered both yes and no to this question. The others could (or would) not confirm it.

Did the physical evidence support their allegation? While the suspect was said to have fired some five times with at least one of two shotguns, no shell casings were collected at the scene. A pellet from the suspect's gun allegedly struck Turner in the hip, miraculously stopped by a wallet in his pocket. These artifacts might have proven that the suspect discharged his weapon, given that the only other man with a shotgun, Dick Farrell, never fired at all. But they were never entered into evidence; Turner said he just took them home.

Did the posse identify themselves as police? This critical question was neither asked nor answered. Could the suspect have identified a uniform from the 150 yards said to lie between himself and the Game Protectors at the outset? Unknown.

Were the civilians issued clear instructions? Responses varied, but Turner recalled none at all. What were the civilians authorized to do? The Elinskas account states that Turner and Blanchard had been deputized, but this was never mentioned at the inquest.

Why did no one else confirm a claim by Skowyra - the only witness to call the man a n_____, rather than a "negro" - that the suspect feigned surrender and then went for his weapon in an unsuccessful ambush attempt? No one asked.

Did anyone render the man medical assistance once he was down? The subject never came up.

Based on the evidence provided by survivors, any rational reader is left to conclude that what the victim could have seen coming at him through the woods was not the law, but a lynch mob.

The coroner exonerated the posse of all wrongdoing.

I can offer no definitive verdict on what happened in the woods in 1932, beyond a profound disquiet with the callous disregard for this man's life, then and now. Anyone who cares about justice should be troubled by the way this case was executed and investigated. Anyone who cares about history should be dubious about the perpetuation of its myths. Anyone who knows racism in America will recognize its ugly trademark in these details.

The law denied this man due process in life. Henceforth, I hope the rest of us will grant him that much in death.