The story was blazoned on the front page of The Salt Lake Tribune. Sharing the page were stories about Italian troops furiously engaging Austro-Hungarians at the gates of Vienna. Russians were being pressed by Germans at Warsaw. Australian troops under British command were landing on the Turkish peninsula of Gallipoli. It was 1915. The world was at war.
But not the United States. Not yet, anyway. Utahns were preparing for Pioneer Day. Not that there wasn't excitement close to home.
The previous year, visitors to Yellowstone Park had been waylaid by highwaymen. Fifteen stagecoaches had been stopped and their occupants relieved of $8,000. Federal lawmen captured Edward B. Tafton, who was charged and convicted. According to the Justice Department, Tafton had confessed to planning a campaign of robbery and kidnapping. Wealthy people would be his target. Ranchers. Men of means.
The thought that LDS Church President Joseph F. Smith would make a good subject for ransom had, he told the federals, crossed his mind. To him, $100,000 sounded about right.
But with Tafton's capture, authorities assumed the gang had been broken up and filed away the confession.
A year after Tafton's spree in Yellowstone, E.A. Empey, a wealthy rancher from Idaho Falls was kidnapped. The culprits demanded $6,000 in gold for his safe return.
Hundreds turned out to form a posse to look for Empey and the "desperadoes." Most were turned away because law enforcement wanted only "experienced frontiersmen and cowboys." The country they'd be covering was wild.
The next day, Empey's family asked the sheriff to call off the search. Fearing for his safety, they'd made plans to gather the ransom.
Federal authorities in Denver remembered Tafton's confession and deduced that the Yellowstone gang was still in business. Newspapers were alerted that the Mormon prophet was a possible target, and they ran with it.
The LDS leadership's response sounded a little puzzled and amounted to, What kidnap plot? Nobody told us anything about a kidnap plot. And, hey, the prophet doesn't even have plans to leave town.
On the day the family was going to make the ransom drop, Empey wandered out of the mountains. He had made his escape when the kidnapper fell asleep in a sheepherder's shack. Empey was tired but none the worse for wear. His kidnapper later claimed to have given him the best of the food he stole while waiting for the ransom.
Awaking to find his prisoner gone, Leonidas M. Dean, formerly of Salem, Utah, had pounded down the mountain in pursuit and into the arms of alerted cowboys. Dean had acted alone. He formed the idea for the kidnapping five years earlier when he had worked for Empey. Seeing the man's wealth, Dean "took this means of getting money as I thought I could do more good with it than those who had it."
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* PAT BAGLEY is the editorial cartoonist for The Salt Lake Tribune. Thanks to historian Joseph Johnstun
from Hamilton, Ill., for suggesting this column.
