Murder & Mob Law in the Big Horn Basin Part 5: The Spring Creek Raid and the trial that changed Wyoming

In the early morning hours of Good Friday, April 2, 1909, violence erupted along Spring Creek, seven miles south of Ten Sleep in the southern Big Horn Basin. Three sheepherders were murdered. Two were burned alive inside their wagon, while a third staggered from the flames, wounded, his hands raised, only to be shot down.

By dawn, hundreds of sheep had been slaughtered or maimed, sheep dogs killed, and wagons and bodies left smoldering on the prairie. Other men were kidnapped, harassed, and later released, and property worth thousands of dollars was destroyed in the course of the violence. Spring Creek had become a crime scene that could no longer be dismissed as frontier excess, marking the deadliest sheep raid in Wyoming history.

Big Horn County officials quickly launched an unusually aggressive investigation.

Hundreds of pieces of physical evidence were collected at the scene. Investigators carefully gathered spent cartridges scattered across the area, including several chambered in .35 Remington. The ammunition was traced to a Remington Model 8 rifle, a relatively new semi-automatic firearm introduced in 1905, at a time when most rifles were still lever-action.

Investigators soon linked the .35 Remington shells to Bill Keyes, while other cartridges were matched to weapons known to have been carried by other raiders. Even the boot prints of one of the killers were documented and used as evidence. For once, a sheep raid left behind evidence that could be traced, matched, and explained.

A grand jury convened in Basin and compelled nearly 100 witnesses to testify. Seven suspects were identified and charged with murder and arson.

The most incriminating testimony came from men who had ridden with the raiders themselves. Two men who were not directly involved in the killings agreed to turn state’s evidence and testify against the others.

Charlie Ferris and Bill Keyes, realizing the evidence against them was mounting and fearing they would be hanged, chose to testify. They described how the seven men planned the attack and rode north toward Spring Creek on the evening of April 1, 1909.

According to their testimony, cattlemen George Saban and Herb Brink laid siege to a sheep wagon containing three herders, Joe Allemand, Joe Lazier, and Joe Emge, firing multiple rounds into the canvas covering and shouting for the occupants to come out. When no one emerged, Brink piled sagebrush beneath the wagon and set it ablaze.

Lazier and Emge never came out.

Allemand survived the fire long enough to stagger from the wagon, wounded, with his hands raised. Brink shot him dead, saying, “It’s a hell of a time of night to come out with your hands up.”

Describing the aftermath years later, historian Clay Gibbons noted that one victim’s head was twisted and turned, his skull cracked open. “His brains were baked inside,” Gibbons said. Another man’s face was unrecognizable, but two small piles of melted gold from his teeth helped investigators identify his body.

Eyewitnesses corroborated the account. Bounce Helmer, a sheepherder kidnapped during the raid and later released, testified. Three men who watched the raid from a nearby house also took the stand. Photographs and surveyors’ maps established the precise location of the crime.

The case was no longer rumor or reputation. It was pages of testimony and hard evidence.

The defendants believed the case against them would collapse. Wyoming history was on their side.

They remembered the failed prosecutions following the 1892 Johnson County War, where intimidation and political interference prevented a trial. They remembered the 1903 Basin jail raid and murders, led by George Saban himself, in which two prisoners and a deputy sheriff were killed and no one was convicted.

But this time, the ground had shifted.

By 1909, large irrigation projects had transformed the Big Horn Basin. Farmers, many of them Latter-day Saint settlers from Utah and southeastern Idaho, along with others drawn from across the nation, now formed a dominant population. They were not invested in sheep-cattle rivalries and were less tolerant of vigilante violence.

Governor Bryant B. Brooks, himself a sheepman, ordered the Wyoming state militia to Basin to maintain order. Witnesses were protected. Intimidation failed. Jurors were seated without difficulty, men who knowingly accepted the risk to themselves, their families, and their livelihoods to fulfill one of the fundamental responsibilities of a democracy.

For the first time, a sheep raid would be decided in a courtroom rather than erased by fear, bribes, and silence.

Big Horn County Prosecutor Percy Metz was only 26 years old at the time of the trial. Born in Illinois, he moved to Sheridan, Wyoming, as a child. He earned his law degree from the University of Nebraska in 1906 at age 22, the youngest in his class. He opened a law office in Basin and was elected county prosecutor in 1908.

The intelligent and charismatic young attorney chose to try Herb Brink first. Metz laid out an overwhelming case, and the 12-man jury returned a verdict of first-degree murder. Brink was sentenced to hang.

The leather-bound court records from the trial are still preserved at the Big Horn County Courthouse in Basin, their pages a tangible link to the moment justice was pronounced. In careful script, the final words of the sentencing document deliver their blunt command: Brink was to be executed “by such means as is provided by law, that he be hanged by the neck until he is dead.”

The effect was immediate. The four remaining defendants George Saban, Milton Alexander, Ed Eaton, and Tommy Dixon saw the strength of the case and the determination of the prosecutor and chose to plead guilty. Their joint statement was stark: “If you cannot save the life of Brink, we will all hang from the same tree.”

Saban received a sentence of at least 20 years of hard labor. The other three received lesser prison terms. The two men who testified for the prosecution were granted immunity. All five were sent to the Wyoming State Penitentiary within days.

The Hullett Intermountain praised the verdicts, invoking the biblical injunction from Genesis: “Who sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.”

For the first time in Wyoming history, cattlemen were convicted and punished for a sheep raid.

Percy Metz later summarized the meaning of the verdicts plainly:

“It is significant of the beginning of a new era, of a period where lawlessness in any form will be no more tolerated in Wyoming than in the more densely settled communities of the East.”

The impact was swift. After 1909, only two minor sheep raids occurred in Wyoming. No one was injured in either. The long cycle of raids, reprisals, and silence was broken.

The Spring Creek Raid remains one of the darkest chapters in Wyoming history. Three men were killed in an act of shocking cruelty. But the trial that followed forced a reckoning the state had long avoided.

Big Horn County chose law over intimidation. Evidence over reputation. Accountability over silence.

Today, Spring Creek looks much as it did more than a century ago. Rolling hills of grass and sagebrush stretch toward the snow-covered Big Horn Mountains. To those who pass by today, the landscape gives little hint of what happened there. But history remembers not only the violence. It remembers the courage of witnesses who spoke, jurors who listened, prosecutors who pressed forward, and a community that insisted the law mattered more than fear.

In 1909, Wyoming crossed an invisible line into stability and civility not enforced by rifles or threats, but by principle. Once crossed, there was no going back.

Historical Notes

Although women had been allowed to vote in Wyoming Territory as early as 1869, they were largely excluded from jury service until 1950. As a result, the jury in the 1909 Spring Creek trial was composed entirely of men.

After years of lobbying by Buffalo Bill Cody and others, the vast Big Horn Basin was divided into four counties. Park County began operating in 1911, followed by Hot Springs and Washakie counties by 1913.

That reorganization led to the creation of the Fifth Judicial District. In 1913, Percy Metz was selected as its first judge. At 29, he was believed to be the youngest district judge in the nation. He served for 38 years and was reelected nine times. Metz died in 1964 at age 80.

Although Herb Brink was sentenced to hang, the political influence of Wyoming’s cattle interests prevailed, and his sentence was commuted.

George Saban escaped from a prison work crew near Manderson in 1913 and was never seen again. Rumors later suggested he fled to South America.

In 2025, Wyoming ranks among the five lowest states in violent crime per capita.

A special thanks is extended to the Big Horn County Courthouse and District Clerk of Court Serena K. Lipp for their assistance and cooperation.

If you have unique insights into this story, please contact the author at jbernhisel@gmail.com