BOONE HELM: MONSTER IN BUCKSKINS

Such, at least, is the story Helm told his ultimate saviour when he stumbled into the camp of fur trader John W. Powell. Most think it likely that he shot Burton, having already resolved to commit the act of survival which was to earn him immortality as a monster in buckskins.

Whether Burton died by his own hand or by Helm’s it mattered not to the sleepy-eyed Kentuckian who calmly butchered and dressed his partner like a steer. After feasting on Burton until he regained his strength, he wrapped a leg in a blanket and again set out. Unfortunately, he encountered friendly Indians who directed him to Powell’s camp.

With the trader’s assistance he made it to Salt Lake City where, it’s believed, he committed three murders while riding with a gang of horse rustlers. In Florence, Idaho, he carved another notch in his gun, that of a gambler named Dutch Fred. Not only was Fred unarmed but he was playing cards with his back to Helm when the latter let him have it. Gunplay may have been the code of the West but cold-blooded murder was frowned upon and, again, Helm had to make tracks.

Even then, bad news travelled fast…
This time his reputation preceded him by means of telegraphic news reports. When, on October 12, 1862, the 34-year-old outlaw strolled down a steamer’s gangplank and onto Victoria’s Enterprise Wharf, he was in for a surprise.

“Boone Helm, who, it is alleged, bears a horrible reputation in California and other localities on the Pacific Coast, was brought up before the police magistrate on remand,” reported the British Colonist, three days later.

Describing the self-confessed cannibal with a distinctive squint in his right eye as being “not a bad looking man,” the newspaper reported that Helm’s lawyer, Robert Bishop (appointed by the court as Helm was broke), complained to Magistrate A.F. Pemberton that his client was the victim of “a prejudice [which] had been created against him in the minds of residents.” Some of them, he charged, had contributed to a subscription taken up to defray the cost of prosecution!

(Pioneer Victorians, it can be seen, were not only public-spirited but keen judges of character.)

Notorious killer arrested for stealing apples!
Arresting officers denied that any such arrangement existed “so far as they were aware,” and the Crown proceeded to prosecute Helm for having taken some apples from a stand and refusing to pay for his drinks at the Adelphi Saloon. The attending bartender testified that Helm had tried to escape his tab by claiming to be “a desperate character”. Police Sergeant George Blake, obviously well informed of the outlaw’s career below the border, was trying to have Helm incarcerated in the Bastion Square police barracks until Idaho authorites could be informed of his whereabouts.

To reinforce his thin case, Blake declared that “people who know the accused best [are] afraid of him”. An unsympathetic Pemberton ordered the penniless Helm to find security to be of good behaviour for the term of six months, himself in 50 pounds sterling, and two securities of 20 pounds each, “in default to suffer one month’s imprisonment”.

Frontier American justice, alas, ground too slowly. Extradition papers from the Florence sheriff arrived three days after Boone Helm’s month behind bars expired.

His immediate problem, of course, was money. In resolving it with his usual dispatch, he earned for himself a dark page in provincial history. Mayne Island pioneer W.T. Collinson had occasion to recall his encounter with the Kentucky outlaw. He and ‘Irish’ Tommy Harvey were accompanying a miner named Sokolowski and two unnamed Frenchmen from Antler Creek to Keithley Creek. When the others paused for dinner, Collinson and Harvey continued on towards Quesnelle Forks, which they reached that evening. They were there the next day when the bodies of their three late companions were brought into town.

“They had made a brave fight,” Collinson sadly recounted. Every man’s pistol (good six-shooters) was empty, and each man had a bullet through his head. Boone Helm and his chum killed these three men.”

“Throw up your hands.”
Collinson’s own turn with Helm came a few days later, at the appropriately named Little Bloody Run, a few miles above Cook and Kimble’s ferry (Spences Bridge). He was making his way on horseback when he was startled by the command, “Throw up your hands.”

He found himself looking into the business end of a double-barrelled shotgun not four feet from his face. Holding it was Boone Helm. He glowered menacingly while his partner emptied Collinson’s pockets and slashed open his saddlebags. The five minutes or so seemed an eternity to Collinson. Upon being relieved of three British shillings and three Mexican dollars, he was given back his emptied revolver and told to be on his way. He considered himself fortunate indeed—all the more so as the highwaymen had overlooked the pouch of gold dust he’d rolled up in an old shirt.

Collinson again met Helm at Sumas, the latter then accompanying a Cariboo-bound packtrain. Collinson made haste for Yale to charge him with armed robbery. But, he said, a U.S. marshal was already there, waiting to arrest Helm.

Another Cariboo veteran, A. Browning, remembered Helm. He’d been on his way to the gold fields, he recalled, and near the Forks of Quesnelle he’d met another procession, “carrying three stretchers. I found on meeting them that they were carrying three dead men. They were found on the trail coming from Cariboo, robbed and murdered, for it was known that each of them was carrying bags of gold dust from Williams Creek to the coast.

There were no witnesses but everybody believed it was Boone Helm’s work
“Who was the murderer, or who were the murderers? Everybody said in whispers it was Boone Helm, a gambler and cutthroat who had escaped from the San Francisco Vigilance Committee. He was known to have been on the trail and he it was I probably met a few hours after the murder was [sic] committed…”

Upon later hearing that Helm was “hung to a tree for horse stealing, we thought the murders of Quesnelle were avenged”.

Returned to Bastion Square police barracks—on an American warrant, not for the Cariboo slayings—Helm broke rocks on city streets with the chain gang as he awaited extradition. Then he was gone from the provincial stage, to face trial for murder in Idaho. However, when older brother Tex had finished talking to the witnesses, no one would testify to having known anything about Dutch Fred’s back-shooting.

Released, Helm moved on to Montana Territory where he took up with the notorious Henry Plummer gang. But his luck finally failed him, his arrival in Virginia City coinciding with its citizenry losing patience with lawbreakers.

At long last, the end of a rope for Boone Helm
On a warm January day in 1864, 1000 spectators crowded around an unfinished cabin whose ridgepole had been pressed into service as a gallows. Five men, hands trussed behind them, were made to mount five packing cases. The nooses were fixed in place and, one at a time, the condemned men were launched into eternity.

Among them was Boone Helm.

A notice in the Colonist was to the point: “Hung at last.”
Legend has it that, shortly before execution, Helm confessed to having killed 18 men, including the three Cariboo miners and a previously unsuspected B.C. victim, “Little Billy.” For the magnificent sum of $5 he’d cut the English carpenter’s throat and thrown his body into Pemberton Lake.

At least he met his fate bravely. When asked if he had any last words, he told his lynchers to get on with the job.

Over a century and a-half later, the Kentucky killer’s memory lives on in Virginia City; his headboard in Boot Hill is a popular subject of tourists’ cameras. In the Cariboo, it’s believed he hid the gold taken from the Sokoloski party. Popular legend places the murdered miners’ fortune as high as $32,000, its hiding place the base of a certain cedar tree on the trail which once linked Quesnelle Forks and Antler Creek.

But what of Helm’s accomplice?
If, in fact, Helm murdered the three miners, he had an accomplice who was never apprehended. Did this man escape with the gold? Or did Helm do for him as he’d done for so many others? In any event, he had no fortune in gold dust on him when arrested by B.C. Police on the American warrant.

In the context of his times, when the American West truly was wild and spawned a legion of gunslingng killers, how does Boone Helm rank with the likes of Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy and a host of others? Eighty years ago, Hoffman Birney, the author of Vigilantes, wrote: “…One man…leads all the rest. Worst of the bad men, wildest of the wild bunch; depraved, degenerate, savage and bestial was Boone Helm”.

Today the Victoria’s old provincial courthouse, vacant since the departure of the British Columbia Maritime Museum, stands on the site of the castellated police barracks of old. If ghosts do exist, perhaps one of those which haunt Bastion Square is that of lanky, droopy-eyed Boone Helm—who not only murdered more than his fair share of men but, on at least one occasion, ate his victim.

–Excerpted from Capital Characters: A Celebration of Victorian Eccentrics by T.W. Paterson.