Ladd Hamilton

"This Bloody Deed" is a well researched look at Idaho's first murder trial. Hamilton relates the known facts with a novelist's license for imagined dialouge and motivation. While historians may shudder, this makes the book highly readable.
Three thugs from Sheriff Henry Plummer's gang befriend and then murder packer Lloyd Magruder and party as they are crossing the Bitterroot Mountains from Bannack( now western Montana,then Idaho Territory) to Lewiston Idaho. Magruder's true friend Hill show more Beachy tracks the killers to San Francisco and returns them to Lewiston to face Idaho's first murder trial, if he can keep them from being lynched.

I grew up with this story as a folktale and as good as the narrative is the best parts of the book are Hamilton's asides into everyday life on the Idaho frontier, boom-bust economics of mining and territorial politics.

My only historical quibble is that my family always accepted that the prosecution's chief witness was also a Plummer gang intimate.

A solid picture of the frontier as it probably was. show less

This book tells the true story of a hunting party that headed for the Idaho mountains in 1893, and when the hired cook took ill, his companions left him to die in order to save their own skins. Not right away, of course, but it comes to that painfully and inexorably through the selfishness and complacency of the group's leadership. At the end I couldn't really blame the survivors for that final decision, yet there were so many things they should have done differently to avert disaster that show more everyone shares at least part of the blame, including the cook himself.

The parts focusing on the hunting party---their route, actions, thought processes, group dynamic, etc.---are pretty gripping reading, but the book loses steam and my interest when it goes into encyclopedic detail (e.g., with exhaustive lists of supplies) and introduces a massive and personality-free cast of characters (with who's involved in the different rescue efforts, where they're going, how many mules they had when they started, how many mules they had left by the time they gave up, and so on). Eventually two of the rescue units admit defeat and I got to focus on the one who clearly will be successful, and then it begins to feel less like the list of Civil War battles and generals I failed to commit to memory in high school.

Overall it was an interesting read that kept my attention, and knowing it happened somewhat locally and that the escape/rescue route where the most drama occurred is essentially today's Highway 12 means I now have a hankering to go exploring myself. show less