Clayton Moore played the masked cowboy riding high on his horse Silver in the TV favorite The Lone Ranger during the early fifties.  With the help of the wise, quiet Indian Tonto, played by Jay Silverheels, the duo went about righting injustices in over one hundred episodes.  Moore had the odd fate for an actor of wearing a mask onscreen so that even during the fame of the show, he was hardly recognized.  Perhaps for this, there is no other actor who clung to his role do diligently, regularly donning the mask and costume to go out in public, some say even while in his car at a drive-through for fast-food.  He was seen wearing his Lone Ranger costume shortly before his death of a heart attack in 1999 at age eighty-five.  Silverheels took much less affinity to his role as Tonto and passed away quickly, though coughing laconically, at age sixty in 1980, of pneumonia. 

As railroad building brought desperadoes into Wyoming, citizens there found use for many ropes.  Several bandits and killers were set swinging in and around Cheyenne and Laramie in 1868.  Where the trees were not available, a telegraph pole served for scaffold.  That was the case with the stringing up of Dutch Charley at Carbon and George Parrot (“Big Nose George”) at Rawlins.  Idaho also attracted horse thieves, stagecoach robbers and killers who had to be eradicated.  Vigilance committee at Payette and Boise did this with dispatch.  The most notorious man strung up by the Boise group was David Updyke, leader of a desperado gang, who had been able to win an election for sheriff of Ada County.  With Updyke and several of his men out of the way, the Idaho crime wave subsided.  It’s amazing what happens as a result of a public hanging.  Chapter three of The Plea will be on the website next week.  Visit www.chrisenss.com.