The Hill Beachey Project
launched August 3, 2013
8/14/2013

Research Question Number 7:  What enterprises was Beachey obliged to leave behind when he pursued the four suspects?

For me, the heart and soul of Hill Beachey's story resides in his singular decision to give chase to the four suspects.  This decision was his towering act of loyalty, courage, friendship, and sacrifice

Everything else -- the chase itself, the difficulties he encountered in San Francisco and Sacramento, the return of the prisoners to Lewiston, and the preparations for the trial -- represent, in a sense, mere sequelae and consequences of that fateful decision.

Hill Beachey (image borrowed from Steven D. Banting's Historic Firsts of Lewiston, Idaho: Unintended Greatness)

In this installment of I'd like to direct some attention to the responsibilities and enterprises Beachey had to leave behind, put on hold, or delegate to others on account of this decision.

These abandoned activities represented in effect some the sacrifices his decision to give chase imposed on him.

Obviously, he left behind the comforts and relative safety of his home and the warm bed he shared with his wife. 

But Beachy was a busy and enterprising man, too, and so he had to leave behind both ongoing enterprises and new enterprises he was trying to launch. 

It's important, in order to have a full picture of these sacrifices, to inventory the full scope of Beachey's various business pursuits in October, 1863.

Beachey departed Lewiston on October 23rd or 24th and returned on about December 7th -- an adventure spanning a little more than six weeks in all.

The list of enterprises Beachy left behind is impressive, and may include more elements than those we currently know.
  • We know Beachey and his wife owned and ran the Luna House Hotel. 
  • He also is said to owned and operated the stagecoach line that the suspects booked passage on.
  • Beachy also attempted to launch Lewiston's first public utilities in 1862-1863.  Steven D. Banting's Historic Firsts of Lewiston, Idaho: Unintended Greatness (2013, pp. 36-37) tells us: 
Idaho's first public utility services date to an act of the Washington territorial legislature, passed on January 12, 1863, which authorized Hill Beachey and his associates 'to make and sell gas to light the town of Lewiston.'  The prevailing method of the time produced 'town gas' by the deconstructive distillation of coal to coke.  The resulting gas was suspended in water and piped to homes and businesses.  The venture does not seem to have progressed very far, as Beachy left Lewiston soon after the Magruder murderers were hanged in 1864.
  • The Idaho's territorial laws of 1864, first session,  include an act, approved on January 22, 1864, authorizing Hill Beachy and his associates "to construct and maintain a wagon toll road" linking Lewiston with the Mullan military road (pp. 662-663).  It's safe to assume, of course, given the act's January, 1864 date, that Beachey's planning and preparation for this project was in process in 1863.


So, Beachey had plenty to occupy his time in late 1863 -- including a hotel, a stage line, a proposed new public utility, and a proposed new toll road. 

He may well have had still more pursuits and preoccupations.  For instance, he may well have invested in mining prospects in the region or he may have been a part backer of Magruder's trading venture. 

The full array of his enterprises remains to be established.  Leaving these enterprises behind was of course one of the sacrifices Beachey had to make to pursue Magruder's killers.  Hence, getting a fuller picture of his various pursuits is an important part of the story of his decision.

By the same token, the full story of Beachey's departure from Lewiston in 1864 is not known.  Why did he leave?  Keith C. Petersen alluded to a competitive rivaly between Beachey's Luna House and Madame Melanie Bonhore LeFrancois' Hotel De France as one of the reasons for his departure (see Petersen, "Five Lives: Idaho in 1863," Idaho Humanities: The Newsletter of the Idaho Humanities Council, Spring, 2013, p. 3).  "The De France eclipsed the Luna House," wrote Petersen,

which Hill Beachy sold in exasperation in November 1864. He journeyed south and established a stage line from California into the southern Idaho mines, a rival to the one led by John Mullan. Like Mullan, he too went bankrupt.

But what happened to the Luna House and Beachy's Lewiston-based stage line after his 1864 departure?  What happened to the public utilities and the toll road projects he'd launched?  Why did he decide to quit the hotel, stage line, and these promising enterprises and projects in Lewiston?  Where did he go, exactly, and what enterprises consumed his time at his new location? 

All these questions remain outstanding and worthy of new historical investigation.

A find:

Victor Goodwin's 1967 article ("William C. (Hill) Beachey, Nevada - California - Idaho Stagecoach King," Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 10(1):5-46, (Spring) 1967), a valuable new online find for me, focuses on Beachey's post-Lewiston career as a stagecoach businessman.   Goodwin wrote (p. 17): 

The discovery of placer gold in the Boise Basin in 1862 and of gold and silver deposits in the Owyhee Range and the South Boise country in 1863, all in southwest Idaho, turned Hill Beaclley's attention to this part of Idaho Territory.  Sometime in the latter half of 1864, Beachey transferred the seat of his operations to southwest Idaho, and immediately became enmeshed in the protracted struggle for transportation supremacy between enterprises originating south of the Owyhee-Boise settlements and those serving them from the north.

A second new-found source adds the following:

Hill Beachy initially opened a stage route from Unionville to Silver City, Idaho, in 1865 for the purpose of transporting supplies, mail, and passengers from the Humboldt mines to the newly discovered mines in southwestern Idaho.  The stage route passed through Winnemucca to Willow Point Station on the Little Humboldt River, over Paradise Hill to Cane Springs, and continued north through the Quinn River Valley and on to Idaho.  The duration of the stage line was a short two months due to stagecoaches and stage stations being burned by Indians.  However, the route was reopened the following year as Hill Beachy's Railroad Stage Lines for the purpose of connecting the advancing Central Pacific railhead with the mining camps of the Humboldt Range and Idaho.  In 1867, a cutoff was built from Oreana to Thacker's Station (north of Imlay) and along the west side of the Bloody Runs connecting with the earlier route at Cane Springs.  This shortcut bypassed Winnemucca, much to the disgruntlement of its residents, but in 1868 when the Central Pacific reached the town, the southern terminus of the Railroad Stage Lines was moved permanently to Winnemucca.  The route continued to be used until 1870 at which time Hill Beachy shifted all coaches, horses, and stations to his new Elko-Cope-Boise City road (Goodwin 1966:6-12, Lavelock Sub-basin Section).


This second source is:

Regina C. Smith, Peggy McGuckian Jones, John R. Roney and Kathryn E. Pedrick, Prehistory and history of the Winnemucca district: a cultural resources literature overview. Bureau of Land Management, Nevada Cultural Resource Series No.6., Reno, 1983.

The passage I've quoted cited "Goodwin 1966," which citation is: 

Goodwin, Victor O., The Humboldt, Nevada's Desert River and Thoroughfare of the American West.  USDA Nevada Humboldt River Basin Survey, 1966.

A find (8/16/2013):

Michael C. Moore, in his booklet Frontier Lewiston, 1860-1890 (1980), sheds a little more light on Lewiston's declining fortunes after mining enthusiasm turned south to Boise Basin.  His contrast between Lewiston in 1862 and 1865 is striking and worth quoting:
Lewiston's population soared to over 2,000 in 1862. That summer, at the height of the gold rush, a visitor reported that Lewiston had 40 log and frame houses, 20 of which were business establishments, 120 tent houses, a sawmill, two express houses, two news depots, seven attorneys, nine doctors, six hotels, two jewelry stores, three drug stores, ten gambling houses, 25 saloons, and "about 20 places whose names might put the paper to blush." It also had a cemetery at the top of the hill with six graves, "five from violence." (pp. 8-9)

And then, re 1865:

When the territorial government of Idaho moved to Boise in 1865, it left behind a shrunken town of 300 souls, a shabby little place of log buildings and dirty streets.  The Boise paper jibed about the "desolate streets of Lewiston," and indeed the future looked bleak.  (p. 25)

Based on Moore's description it becomes a little less difficult to imagine why Beachey sought to improve his fortunes elsewhere.

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