The Wild West Deep Creek Murders That Remain Unsolved After 130 Years

On a wintry February day in 1896, sheepherder Ted Severe was riding through the Idaho wilderness near Deep Creek to the camp of two fellow sheepherders, Daniel Cummings and John Wilson, when his eyes fell upon "a sight to chill the blood of even the bravest man."

There were no signs of life at the shepherds’ camp except for two weak, emaciated dogs tied to a wagon wheel. The dogs had been forced to chew on a leather harness for sustenance. Inside the wagon, Severe saw the reason for the dogs’ distress: the bodies of Cummings and Wilson lay lifeless in a pile of bedding surrounded by blood.

Investigators later found that Cummings had been shot once in the stomach, while Wilson had been shot once in the face and again in the back. The coroner's report later estimated that the two died on February 4 or 5.

Before dying, Cummings was able to scratch out a note reading, “If I die bury me F care Jerome and Ruthy,” referring to his brother and sister. He also drew a strange diamond-shaped symbol in blood on a sheet of magazine paper. The coroner's inquest later estimated the time of death as February 4 or 5

But who murdered the two young men?

Since the end of the Civil War—as railroad lines opened up the West to new markets—cattlemen had established vast herds across remote, unclaimed lands that were once inhabited by Native Americans.

John Sparks, a former Texas Ranger and one of the wealthiest and most prominent cattle barons, established a string of prosperous ranches with his partner John Tinnin in Nevada and across the border in southern Idaho.

But cattlemen weren’t the only settlers in the region: By the 1890s, sheepherders began expanding their operations northward from overgrazed Utah into Nevada and Idaho. Most were Mormons (now known as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) or shepherds from the Basque region of Spain. 

Cattle barons like Sparks joined other Westerners who held a deep loathing for sheep. Notorious for stripping land of vegetation, sheep—referred to as “hoofed locusts” by famed naturalist John Muir—left vast stretches of land utterly denuded, making them subject to erosion and useless for wildlife or cattle grazing. 

The growing number of sheep herds led cattle ranchers like Sparks to build fences across lands that they didn’t rightfully own, or to establish so-called “deadlines,” boundaries marking areas off-limits to sheep. These lands were patrolled by armed men who fired upon herds of sheep and occasionally at shepherds themselves to scare them off.

Sheep operators weren’t always intimidated by the armed patrols, and they formed local associations to assert their legal rights to open grazing lands. But in remote wilderness regions of the West, might often made right; Idaho wasn’t even a state until 1890, and law enforcement was often unavailable to settle territorial disputes.

If any man could epitomize the rough, devil-may-care side of the Western frontier, Jackson Lee Davis would be a prime contender. Little is known about his early life, but he earned the moniker “Diamondfield Jack” after falsely boasting about finding a rich diamond strike in Idaho. Failing to strike it rich in the Gem State, Davis instead became a hired gun and started working for Sparks’ Idaho cattle company in 1895. 

According to one report, Diamondfield Jack’s instructions were to “...keep the sheep back. Don’t kill but shoot to wound if necessary. Use what measures you think best. If you have to kill, the company will stand behind you—regardless [of] what happens.” 

It wasn’t long before Diamondfield Jack gained a reputation as a trigger-happy gunslinger with a mean streak a mile wide. Shortly after getting hired by Sparks, he shot and wounded a shepherd named Bill Tolman. Realizing he could be in trouble if Tolman died, Diamondfield Jack rode south into Nevada to avoid the long arm of the law. 

But by 1896, Diamondfield Jack was back in Idaho working for the Sparks cattle operation when Cummings and Wilson were found dead near Deep Creek, in an area also known as Deadline Ridge. Suspicion immediately fell on Davis and his companion Jack Gleason; Davis also was said to have bragged about killing sheepherders.

Once again, Diamondfield Jack rode south to escape arrest, but he was jailed in the Arizona Territorial Prison for yet another shooting incident. After his extradition back to Albion, Idaho, to stand trial for the murder of the two shepherds, Davis was quickly found guilty of both killings and was sentenced to hang on June 4, 1897. His accomplice Gleason was arrested but never charged for the murders due to insufficient evidence.

With the help of his attorney, future Idaho Governor James H. Hawley, Davis filed numerous appeals to delay his hanging, and the gambit paid off when two men, James Bower and Jeff Gray, confessed to the murders. Though the pair were eventually found not guilty—their accounts of the murders were riddled with inconsistencies—Davis’s reprieve was extended, and a new execution date was set for July 17, 1902. 

Luck was once again on Diamondfield Jack’s side when his former employer Sparks was elected governor of Nevada. Through some shady backroom dealings, Sparks petitioned the Idaho governor to pardon Davis, and he was freed from prison in December 1902. 

By the early 1900s, the range wars that broke out on the Western frontier had largely subsided as cattle and sheep ranchers settled into established operations without competing for open grazing lands. The murders of Cummings and Wilson soon disappeared from newspaper headlines, and the killings are still officially unsolved.

After his release, Davis found some success in the Nevada mining industry, but lost much of his fortune and spent his later years as a sidewalk barker for Las Vegas nightclubs until he was struck and killed by a taxicab while walking in Las Vegas in 1949.

Severe, the shepherd who discovered the bodies of Cummings and Wilson, penned a story before his death in 1945 in which he described repeated barroom encounters with a man—possibly Diamondfield Jack’s accomplice Gleason:

“This man seemed to have a great weight on his mind and conscience, especially when liquor had a little the best of him. The gist of his conversation went like this, and it was always the same … ‘I saw that murder, Ted, it was horrible, the bloodiest thing I ever saw, we drawed straws to see who did the killing, Ted, I was lucky I didn’t have to do it and Ted you was going to be killed too but you was gone.’”

Severe—who never revealed the name of the man he encountered—had indeed driven his sheep to a lower pasture to avoid a snowstorm several days before the murders. This simple act might have saved Severe from the same deadly fate that Cummings and Wilson met.