BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) - In 1921, Ruth Garfield became the first female sheriff in Montana at the age of 28.
It was not a position she sought in the newly minted county of Golden Valley, which was founded just the year before.
County commissioners offered her the job in the wake of a bizarre tragedy - the shooting of her husband, 37-year-old Sheriff Jesse Garfield, by a mentally unstable homesteader. Having the job, which paid $166 a month, helped Ruth endure the murder’s aftermath.
“Kept me busy so I didn’t have time to feel sorry for myself,” she told a Billings Gazette reporter in 1966.
When she ran for election for a second term, she won, and then served briefly as undersheriff.
The tale of Sheriff Jesse Garfield’s murder was chronicled with the passionate prose common to the era by the Billings Gazette newspaper. Yet the events are so unusual they seem hard to believe.
Firsts
Born in Harrisburg, Virginia, on March 17, 1883, Jesse Garfield was the first sheriff to be elected in Golden Valley County. He had moved to Montana at age 13, according to his grandson and namesake, Jess Garfield, who still ranches in the Ryegate area.
Although young, Jesse Garfield was known to be an excellent horseman with a talent for breaking wild horses. He eventually homesteaded near Broadview.
Ruth was a native of Independence, Iowa.
“I came west to visit some friends at Sumatra when I was 16,” she said in 1966. “Later, on another trip, I met Jesse. We were married in 1912.”
They had one son, Ford, who was almost 8 years old when his father died from his gunshot wounds.
Homesteader
On Dec. 6, 1920, the Garfields’ lives were forever changed. In a month that had been warmer than normal for a December in Montana, neighbors of E.F. Lampson complained that he’d been acting “queerly” and “showing symptoms of violent insanity.”
The 55-year-old homesteader was a widower. For five years he had lived with his two sons north of Ryegate in an area known as Tuffley Bench, dry foothills along the southern side of the Snowy Mountains.
The neighbors’ concerns weren’t the first to be expressed about Lampson’s behavior. Two years earlier the homesteader and his oldest son, Walter, had been questioned on “suspicion of insanity” and discharged. One news story said the boy was “declared to be distinctly subnormal, as was the father.”
That may explain the reception Sheriff Jesse Garfield received when he showed up on Dec. 6. Lampson wasn’t cordial, and said the sheriff would need a warrant if he wanted to take him in. Maybe recognizing their father was unstable, the two sons agreed to accompany the lawman.
Sheriff Garfield returned to Ryegate, got the warrant, and drove back to Tuffley with either the two boys, or two neighbors, accounts differ. After stepping out of the car Lampson reportedly shot the sheriff in the “small of the back” with a shotgun. “Then Lampson ran into the cabin and barred the door.”
Wounded
Considering its devastating effect, the shotgun blast must have been delivered at close range.
“Garfield went down with a wound which laid open practically the entire pelvic cavity. Yet he maintained strength sufficient to rise, walk back to his motor car, crank it and drive four miles to the nearest ranch house,” according to one account.
Another story said the sheriff’s vehicle ran out of gas as he fled the homesteader shack, the gas slowly leaking from a hole in the tank caused by the shotgun blast.
“One mile from Franklin, midway between Tuffley and Ryegate, the engine stopped for want of gasoline, and the sheriff, growing fainter and fainter from pain and loss of blood, but supported by Lampson’s two sons, accomplished the remaining mile on foot.”
A family history has Garfield walking, then being transported by wagon and finally car to the Franklin Hotel. From there he was moved to Ryegate where the train took him on to Billings.
News of the shooting spread quickly.
“His arrival and his story set the wires buzzing between Franklin and Ryegate,” The Gazette reported. “‘Get a posse of 20 men and get ready for a fight,’ was the message that reached Undersheriff Harry Ringwald as he sat at the dinner table.”
Shootout
Leaving his meal unfinished, Ringwald had no problem rounding up enough men to form a posse. The two Lampson boys were taken along, as well.
“It was dark when the posse reached the cabin. Lampson greeted them with a burst of Winchester fire from the interior of the shack. The posse deployed, returning the fire. During a brief pause the two sons, at the prompting of the undersheriff, called out to their father to give himself up, but the only response was another fusillade. It was apparent that the fugitive was armed with two revolvers, the Winchester and a shotgun.
“From just before 7 o’clock until 4 o’clock the posse maintained a running fire, and received an answer in kind. It is estimated that Lampson fired between 20 and 30 shots, and the posse more than 100.
“At intervals the undersheriff and the two sons urged the demented man in the cabin to surrender, but there was never any answer other than a spurt of flame from a gun.
“Knowing Lampson to be heavily armed, members of the posse hesitated to leave concealment. A council was held at about 10 o’clock and it was found that one of the special deputies, a coal miner, had brought along several sticks of dynamite. In the explosive was seen an opportunity to break the stalemate. Arrangements were made for one of the posse to steal upon the cabin and plant the dynamite beneath it. As the volunteer was about to venture forth, however, it was found there were no detonating caps. Eventually it was decided to try the dynamite without detonators, and the volunteer reached the cabin, planted the sticks, lighted a fuse and returned to his companions. But there was no explosion.
“At later intervals other attempts were made to explode the dynamite, but none met success.
“It was then decided to force the surrender of the man in the cabin by fire. Darkness protected members of the posse as they crept again to the cabin and kindled a blaze against the flimsy wall.”
Whether Lampson was killed in the fire, was fatally struck by one of the posse’s many bullets or died by suicide is unknown. The coroner never performed an autopsy.
“Lampson remained within and died there, charred fragments of his body being found later among the blackened debris of the flimsy homestead house.”
Days later his older son, Walter Lampson, was committed to the asylum in Warm Springs. The other son reportedly went to live with family in Wyoming.
Headlines
The violent shooting of the Golden Valley County sheriff and resulting posse attack on Lampson made national news. Headlines trumpeted: “Sheriff shot by maniac who was burned in shack,” “Posse fires cabin of demented homesteader” and “Insane man cremated in cabin after battle.”
A Dec. 19, 1920, Billings Gazette article said of the sheriff’s shooting: “The fray in which he received his death wound was one of the most sensational that has occurred in the state this year.”
As the posse exchanged gunfire with Lampson, Sheriff Garfield was rushed to Park Hospital in Billings where he “clung to life for 11 days” before dying.
Ruth
“Those next two years were hard,” Ruth said in 1966. “I had to adjust to Jesse’s death and had to raise our son.”
A 1921 article in the Anaconda Standard described her as “possessed of self-confidence, health and vigor.”
After serving out her appointment and then winning an election, she served as undersheriff before leaving the job and state in 1926.
Ruth never wore a gun while serving as sheriff, even though she knew how to shoot.
“If I had, some man could have taken it away from me,” she said.
Luckily, Golden Valley County was fairly peaceful after the shooting of her husband. Much of her work dealt with stock rustling, settling homesteader quarrels over boundaries and serving hundreds of foreclosures as homesteaders plagued by drought, wheat blight and mortgage debt went bust. It was the Prohibition era, so she also attempted - usually unsuccessfully - to bust bootleggers.
“No matter how fast we acted or how secretive we tried to be about it, those stills were always gone when we got there,” she said. “All the bootleggers had friends. And nobody in the county took Prohibition very seriously.”
Legacy
Ruth died in 1974 at the age of 82. Her son by Jesse, Ford C. Garfield, died at age 92 on May 11, 2005, at the Roundup Memorial Extended Care Unit. He was an “active local and state director of the Montana Stockgrowers Association.” Ford married four times, his last wife around age 85, and had five children. A Golden Valley rancher, he outlived three of his spouses.
Ford named his first son Jess in memory of his deceased father.
“It seemed very normal,” Jess said recently from his Ryegate-area ranch. “They wanted to carry on his tradition.”
Jess said his father talked little of the shooting, partly because he was so young when it happened, and also because the incident made him “pretty upset.”
“It affected him pretty severely,” Jess said, calling his father “fairly definite with everything, trying to have everything just right.”
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