Despite the best efforts by the premier detectives of the day, lavish reward money, and a statewide manhunt, the murder remains a mystery. It is likely to forever be an unsolved crime since 120 years have elapsed since the shots were fired.
Shoshoni was booming. The little town of 500 people today was overflowing with a population of 10,000 people. Most of them were eager to get a jump on the homesteading opportunities about to open the following month on a ceded portion of the Wind River Reservation opened to settlement via the McLaughlin Agreement of 1904.
While most were innocent people from surrounding states and immigrants from across the Atlantic, a handful were there to make illicit profits through gambling, prostitution, and other sordid practices.
Warner Moody stood firmly in the path of the ne’er-do-wells.
Moody was a South Dakota native, a 1900 graduate of Yale Law School, and the son of former senator Gideon C. Moody of South Dakota. He was a classic crusading city attorney in the manner of Eliot Ness in Chicago a quarter-century later.
Boom towns and their associated questionable activities were nothing new in Wyoming. Camp followers, a 19th-century term for prostitutes that followed the Union Army during the Civil War, and later the construction crews on the Union Pacific Railroad, always found a place to sell their wares, a place brimming with money and naïve clients.
Moody knew the types of men who ran these establishments. He’d grown up in Deadwood, South Dakota, a town in the 1880s that was perhaps one of the wickedest on earth. Moody was too young to remember those days, but the stories prevailed among the older residents he associated with as a youngster.
In Shoshoni, these women had previously worked the mining camps of Colorado and Montana.
It wasn’t the women, but rather their handlers, the same men who ran crooked roulette wheels, dealt cards off the bottom, and generally cheated their drunken clientele in the large white tents that passed for businesses around the booming little town.
These men were Moody’s targets, and in return, one or more of them is the likely culprit in his becoming a target.
Moody arrived in Shoshoni in early 1905 after practicing law in Deadwood for four years. When he arrived, the town was just a handful of buildings on a vast plain of sagebrush, filled with jackrabbits, horned toads, pronghorn, and rattlesnakes.
He brought with him his bride Carrie L. Candee, a woman from Iowa who was about to turn 28. They were married at her aunt’s home in Beatrice, Nebraska, on June 28, 1906. A year later, Warner Moody was dead.
On the night of July 20, 1906, there was a dance hosted by Mr. and Mrs. Robert H. Knettle in one of few permanent homes in Shoshoni.
The couple enjoyed the dance and the fellowship of the established residents of the town. Carrie walked home before Warner.
Warner left the Knettle home around midnight. He walked up the street to his house and as he opened the wooden gate out front. He was shot from behind. He staggered, remaining on his feet, and a second shot hit him, dropping him to the ground.
The Moody’s neighbor Frank Anderson heard the shooting and opened the door of his tent, stepping outside. Anderson spotted three men in the shadowy darkness. He saw Moody slumped to the ground.
The three men split up, with two running north and the other south toward the railroad tracks. Anderson chased the single runner and was rewarded with a bullet. He dropped from the impact.
There was no doctor in Shoshoni. The legendary Dr. Asmus Jewell didn’t arrive in town until two months later, in September.
Anderson was treated as best they could before a doctor from Lander could arrive the next day.
Pursuers of the three gunmen organized quickly. Bloodhounds were brought in from Casper on the train. They arrived around 7:30 am the following day.
It was blisteringly hot in Shoshoni on July 21. The heat and arid desert conditions dissipated the scent, and the hounds lost the scent.
Anderson’s condition was stable, but he was unable to provide much detail about the shooters due to the dark conditions in a town with no streetlights.
Blame quickly centered on the gamblers who had been targeted by Moody.
Wind River Mountaineer July 27, 1906
OUTLAWRY AT SHOSHONI
Shoshoni, Wyo., July 24. As a result of the wanton murder of City Attorney Moody and the mortal wounding of his friend, Guy Anderson, Friday night, the dragnet has been thrown out and the authorities have declared that within twenty-four hours Shoshoni will be rid of all questionable characters.
Nearly a hundred “flat-joint” men and “sure-thing” people of both sexes left on the midnight train, and from that hour on the police arrested every man who could not give a good account of himself.
Today the jail is taxed to its capacity. The occupants will be given a choice between deportation and hard work. The authorities are in earnest this time and will not desist until every suspicious character has left town.
Two holdups occurred last night and both offenders were arrested. One of the holdups, after being placed in jail, was released by a confederate sawing away the iron bars of a cell window. He was later discovered in a hop joint conducted by Ah Wing, an Omaha Chinaman.
The officers raided the joint, capturing eight, including the fugitive and the notorious “Dopy Liz” of the Pacific coast.
A tent occupied by Chinamen was also raided, six arrests being made and a lot of burglar tools being found.
Despite the warnings and arrests, a number of Chinamen are still here, and, aided by the railroad detectives, the local police are serving final notice on these that they must leave on the morning train. It is said that these desperadoes have attempted to bluff the officers into allowing them to remain by causing a report that “Moody wouldn’t be lonely very long” if the Chinamen were driven out.
Sheriff Stough has arrived from Lander and is personally looking after the murder case. He refused to talk after his consultation with the Shoshoni Police but saddled a horse and rode east of town. It has been learned that the bloodhounds followed the trail from the dead body of Warner Moody to a point east of town, where a horse had been tied, and the murderer made his escape in this manner.
The registered letters taken in the post office robbery have been found on the outskirts, the envelopes being ripped open and the money taken.
A hundred citizens held a secret session last night for the purpose of organizing a vigilance committee to work with the authorities for the suppression of crooks and all dangerous characters. Tomorrow morning information will be filed against eleven men caught in Saturday night’s dragnet. The charges are grand larceny and highway robbery.”
Moody was a popular, honest young man, and talk began to spread of lynching the gamblers.
Shoshoni mayor O.P. Quintrell took the rumors seriously and telegraphed Governor B.B. Brooks in Cheyenne for help.
Brooks sent a U.S. Cavalry unit from Camp Douglas by special Chicago North Western train.
With martial law in place, the town calmed down.
Another group of soldiers became suspects when two cartridges used by the shooters were recovered and found to be U.S. Army issue. There were occasional soldiers in Shoshoni from Ft. Washakie about 50 miles to the west. The shell casings matched the bullets pulled from Moody’s body, but military cartridges were common among civilians.
Shoshoni Capital – July 24, 1906
“On the 7:30 train this morning blood hounds arrived from Casper and the work of picking up the trail commenced. After but little difficulty the hounds caught the trail and started on a high run to the west. Following the scent a distance of about 100 rods they veered to the south and recrossed the railroad track onto the Poison Creek. Here the hounds turned east and followed the bluffs to a point directly south of the depot, from which point they turned north and struck the track between the depot and the King Lumber Company’s office. The trail followed the railroad from here east to the town limits, at which point the hounds gave out and the hunt stopped in order to give the dogs an opportunity to rest.”
Another rumor spread that Moody was assassinated by enemies he made as an attorney in Deadwood. None of these rumors ever panned out.
Deputy U.S. Marshall Joe LeFors of Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch fame was called in to investigate.
LeFors, despite his evident skill and experience as a Pinkerton Agent and a federal marshal, had no luck at all.
Moody’s service was held in Casper. He was interned in Hollywood, California, where his brother lived.
Moody’s story went nationwide in nearly every newspaper in the United States.
Cowley Progress – September 28, 1906
On Trail of the Murderer of Moody
“If the statement of a United States deputy marshal made a few days ago to a thoroughly reliable Deadwood man be true, the murderer of the late Warner Moody, former Deadwood attorney who was killed in July at Shoshoni, may be caught, says the Deadwood Pioneer-Times.
The information comes to this office through a gentleman just returned from that country. During the course of a conversation with United States Deputy Marshal Joe Lefors of Cheyenne, the latter made the remark that within a few days the murderer of Warner Moody would be not only known but in the toils. Lefors declares that he personally had been on the track of the slayer and was awaiting a certain development before closing in on his quarry. He stated further that he had worked up sufficient positive evidence of the man’s guilt to convict him before a jury.”
The end of gambling was brief in Shoshoni. It returned with games operated by Clarence Woodard in the 1920s and continued in the little town until Fremont County Attorney Jerry Spence finally ended the slot machines, tables games and roulette wheels in the 1950s.
No one was ever indicted for Warner Moody’s murder.