Diamond Mountain

Diamond Mountain received its name from a hoax perpetrated by an Englishman around the year 1909. This hoax would eventually lead to the death of the man behind the scheme at the hands of his very own friend. The story of Diamond Mountain is one intertwined with betrayal, bloodshed, and outlaws.

Diamond Mountain is located south of Rock Springs, Wyoming. The range itself somewhat resembles the Bookcliffs that originate near Helper, Utah and extend far to the east. At the base of Diamond Mountain, dwarfed cedars grow thick and begin to thin as the landscape opens up to rolling hills covered in sagebrush and grass.

The first people of European descent to live on Diamond Mountain were outlaws. They resided in an area at the foot of the mountain known as Brown’s Park. Brown’s Park was an excellent headquarters for outlaws because it was isolated and remote — a place to escape and hide out after robbing trains and banks. The story behind Diamond Mountain’s name begins with one such outlaw named Salisbury.

Salisbury was described as a soldier of fortune who left England in search of opportunities in the New World. He was a tall, sharp-looking young gentleman who drifted into Brown’s Park looking for excitement, and he found it in the camaraderie and antics of the outlaws he met near Diamond Mountain. These outlaws had their own code and morality that extended to any man residing in Brown’s Park. They wouldn’t steal or cheat their fellow outlaw — although payrolls and banks were offered no protection from their longing for adventure and easy money. This code was honored even at the card table: when one of these men wrote a check to the man who won, the check was considered good the moment it was written, and any man who violated that trust had a high price to pay at the hands of the others.

Salisbury enjoyed gambling and betting his money away, and he wrote many checks during his stay in Brown’s Park. When winter ended and it came time for the outlaws to head back into town and cash the checks they had won, Salisbury became nervous. He didn’t have the money to back the checks he had written. He planned on leaving Brown’s Park before they bounced, but the other outlaws decided he needed to be present when the checks were cashed. He was new to those ranges, and while they trusted the checks written during their gambling, they needed to be sure that trust was warranted. Salisbury knew he had to come up with the money to save himself from the judgement of the outlaws.

Salisbury made contact with an old friend he had in England. He wrote him a letter stating that there was a mountain near Brown’s Park that was full of diamond. He told his friend that if he would fund the venture he would benefit a great deal financially, as the mountain was so rich that any sum provided would net a yield many times that of the investment. He asked his friend for $50,000 to begin developing and mining the diamond held within the mountain. His friend believed him and invested the sum. The money was deposited in a London bank — the same bank that Salisbury had written his checks from. Once the money was deposited, Salisbury told the leader he could go into Rock Springs and cash the checks. The leader brought Salisbury with him and deposited them. Not a single check bounced. The code of the outlaws was not broken, and Salisbury was spared. He remained in Brown’s Park a while longer, riding horses in races and playing cards. Eventually he left and drifted across the United States, never again seen in that country that would later be called Diamond Mountain.

A few months after the checks had been cashed and Salisbury had disappeared into the West and beyond, a young man arrived in Brown’s Park claiming to be his friend. He was accepted by the outlaws immediately.

Over the course of his stay he dropped subtle hints and questions regarding Salisbury and the diamond mine. One of the outlaws became a very good friend to this young man, and he felt it safe to plainly ask whether his friend Salisbury had ever been known to prospect in the area. The outlaw was surprised by the question, and said he had no knowledge of any prospecting between Salisbury’s favorite hobbies — racing horses and playing cards. The young Englishman then asked if Salisbury had been in debt prior to leaving Brown’s Park. The outlaw told him no: the checks, written from a London bank, had been found good, and it was after his debts were squared that he left.

The young Englishman was hurt by the betrayal of his friend. The sharp edge of dishonesty cut him deeply, and from that cut a seemingly endless longing for retribution poured out as blood would from a wound. As the full realization of the deception materialized, the young Englishman saddled his horse and left Brown’s Park, never to return. As the mountain he had been told was made of diamond shrank in his mind, his anger grew unrestricted.

As the years flew by, the longing for vengeance never abated. He followed Salisbury across North America and over oceans to new continents and foreign cultures. Salisbury never stayed long in any one place — perhaps because he knew his friend turned foe was close on his heels at every place he stopped to rest. Twenty years passed with this game of chase before the young Englishman closed the distance in a familiar place.

Salisbury had returned to London and found the hotel he had frequented in his younger years still in operation. He booked a room and sat in surrender, for the many years of life on the run had worn upon him and he was weary.

A week passed before Salisbury heard the sound of footsteps approaching his door. He stood before it as the handle turned and it swung wide. Before him stood the warped image of his old friend, aged and worn by many years of pursuit and caustic revenge. Salisbury looked upon him with regret, for the years both men had lost could not be retrieved, and he knew how this story would end. He looked him in the eyes as the young Englishman leveled his pistol and pulled the trigger, completing his revenge.¹

This story is the origin of Diamond Mountain’s name, and it is apropos to the outlaws of Brown’s Park. It gives context and life to the character of the land and the men and women who occupied this region in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It is, however, rather difficult to authenticate. There exist no obituaries or accompanying newspaper articles — but why would there be? A singular man from England was the sole subject of the con, and all of the money went to outlaws. Some thirty years prior to Salisbury’s purported deceit, a hoax of a similar variety was leveled that does carry historical evidence to validate its occurrence and the players involved.

The Great Diamond Hoax of 1872

This story begins in Kentucky, where Philip Arnold and John Slack were born. The two were cousins and had led parallel lives at points — both veterans of the Mexican War, and both searching California for gold in 1849.

In 1870, Philip Arnold was working for a company in San Francisco that developed and produced diamond-headed bits for drilling. It was here that a seed of dishonesty was planted and began to grow wildly. Philip learned as much as he could about diamonds, so much so that he decided to take some of the uncut stones home for further inspection. He mixed them with various other gems, and — re-enter his cousin, John Slack — one of the greatest hoaxes in American history began to take shape.

In 1870, Slack and Arnold approached a prominent San Francisco businessman named George D. Roberts. They played coy, reluctantly sharing their secret of a diamond field deep in Indian Territory, and showed him the uncut stones as proof. Upon examination, Roberts bit, and soon many prominent businessmen had heard tale of the two men who needed financiers for their grand discovery.

Roberts began assembling a wealthy and powerful band of business moguls. When Slack and Arnold produced another bag of gems purportedly worth $600,000, the businessmen were salivating and made an offer to buy the two men out: $50,000 now, and another $50,000 when they returned from a third trip with more valuable gems. With his money, Slack promptly skipped across the pond and purchased more uncut stones in England from a man named Leopold Keller — some $20,000 worth — and headed back to the eager businessmen awaiting them in the American West.

Philip Arnold and John Slack then made yet another trip to their secret lode. But they didn’t collect anything; rather, they salted the ground with a great many uncut gems, arranging the vote of confidence they would need when an engineer was sent to validate the field.

They produced yet another bag of gems for one of the investors, William C. Ralston. Ralston made a prudent decision: he sent them to the jeweler Charles Lewis Tiffany for appraisal. Tiffany valued the bag at around $1,500,000. With that, Slack and Arnold were able to continue their con. Another $100,000 from their investors fueled a trip to London where more uncut gems were purchased, and their scheme ran along without so much as a hiccup.

On the 4th of June, 1872, Slack and Arnold led a mining engineer to their diamond field, and on that day they began producing raw gems from the earth itself in front of him. This engineer, Henry Janin, noted that the men were finding the gems perhaps too quickly — they seemed to know precisely where to look. The production overtook him, however, and he was sold down the river along with Roberts, Ralston, and Tiffany. Hook, line, and sinker.

Money and stocks exchanged hands. Slack and Arnold took their money and disappeared. Whether one of them soon died, or ran a bank of his own, or took a job making coffins begins to devolve into pure speculation. What can certainly be known is that two men swindled some of the most prominent businessmen and jewelers in the country — and got away with it.

The location of the diamond field that Arnold and Slack salted can be found today along the border of Wyoming and Colorado. It is about thirty-five miles from Diamond Mountain, Utah, as the crow flies.

Presented to you are two stories that share a number of similarities. The Great Diamond Hoax certainly occurred; the story of Diamond Mountain’s name is difficult to authenticate. But it can’t be said that it simply didn’t happen. Truly — who is to say Salisbury didn’t find inspiration from Slack and Arnold in the year 1872? And, moreover, if you are sitting beneath the stars watching a fire burn down on Diamond Mountain, which story would you tell?²

One such outlaw who covered ground on Diamond Mountain carried many names, but most knew him as Matt Warner. His life is one of hard right turns, daring adventures, hardship, and contradiction — yet not barren of kindness and humor.

Matt Warner was born Willard Erastus Christianson in Ephraim, Utah, on April 12, 1864. His family relocated to Levan, Utah, after fleeing a massacre in Ephraim on October 17, 1865, during the Black Hawk War. Warner found himself on the outskirts of society early in his life.

Around the age of fourteen he hastily left home after erroneously believing he had killed a boy, Andrew Hendricksen, for attempting to steal his girlfriend after a social gathering. The girl who had caught his eye was Alice Sabey, and the prospect of losing her sent Willard to seeing red. He beat Andy Hendricksen’s head with a fence slat while his contemporaries gazed on in horror. In his own words, “[I] beat his head till it felt soft to me under my hands… I thought I had killed him.”³ Fearing the consequences of murder, he left Levan and his family without saying goodbye.

His rapid departure pushed Matt toward a life of crime almost immediately. Shortly after leaving Levan he made his way to Diamond Mountain’s remote cattle country on the Wyoming–Utah border. He surely enjoyed life there, beginning work as a cowboy at only fourteen or fifteen years of age. Cowboying for a man named Jim Warren quickly translated to outright cattle rustling. Warren recommended Matt start his own herd — implying he should carry his own brand to place on calves that carried no mark. At that point in Matt’s life it is easy to understand how he became involved in outlawry; he had no authoritative figure telling him to stay away from such a life.

Matt was young when he started working for Jim Warren, but he quickly gained the respect of the other cowboys. They jokingly called him the Mormon Kid and poked fun at the boy and hand in the making. The name was spoken with different implication, however, when Matt stuck a horse that nobody roaming those ranges had ever managed to stay on. The other hands had set him up to get bucked off a known range demon — a treatment any new cowboy could expect on Diamond Mountain. These men enjoyed a good laugh, but they also needed to know what a man was made of before they would trust riding with him. In his old hornless saddle, Matt never lost his seat as the brute defied gravity, snapping from the ground to the heavens with a voracity that betrayed violence. He immediately gained respect that traveled far beyond the borders of Jim Warren’s ranch. He was known as a horseman by any man who counted cows on Diamond Mountain.

Matt’s first stint in the area lasted around five years. He spent his days refining his horsemanship and his implements of outlawry, shooting through bag after bag of ammunition with his single-action revolver. He learned to draw as quick as any man before him and longed for a chance to test his metal, both figuratively and literally. In his own words, “You never sight a six-shooter. You throw it on your object just like you throw a rock along the line of vision.”⁴

This kind of work led him to many peculiar acquaintances, good friends and short-wired enemies alike. Diamond Mountain catered to men whose ethics and morals were as blurred as the border of ranges without fence. Matt had a dispute with a Mexican vaquero named Polito, who reportedly stole his prized mare. When Matt encountered Polito on his own ranch speaking with his own hired hands, he knew his training and nerve would soon be tested. After confronting him about the stolen mare, both men drew and fired at nearly the same moment. Polito crumpled to the ground while Matt stood unscathed. All those bags of ammunition had certainly paid off.

This was a galvanizing moment. Matt believed that whether a man could live and die by the gun in the West was answered only through a baptism by fire, and from this early success he knew he was born with the appropriate senses to continue life on the distant edges of society. Yet he was much like the general picture painted of the early outlaws of the American West — desperate and wild, but with a code. After shooting Polito, he immediately went to work getting the man medical care, finding a doctor who helped the young vaquero live through his pierced lung and letting him recuperate on his ranch. Once recovered, Polito rode away and was never seen by Matt again.

Matt was in his element on the back of a good horse, pushing cows across wide-open country — whether those cows were legally his or not didn’t matter much to him. What began as liberal use of a hot iron led him further and further into an existence he could no longer deny as his waking reality: a reality that would leave him much the same as the chased mustang pushed beyond the mouth of a boxed canyon.

Over the course of his younger years he was charged with furnishing getaway horses in Oregon, fixing horse races in Colorado, and shooting out candles during a social ball in Vernal, to name just a few of his wild exploits. His life of crime transcended his ability to escape society’s ever-looming encroachment upon a wild frontier when he began building a reputation as a bank robber, running with well-known outlaws such as the McCarty brothers, Elzy Lay, and Butch Cassidy. Indeed, many books that recount the adventures of these outlaws make reference to the Last of the Bandit Riders, Matt Warner.

Matt knew his lifestyle was as volatile as the men who rode alongside him; it was only a matter of time before the law caught up. He was known to say, “A life of crime never pays.”⁵ And it didn’t. It left him near broke and estranged from the people he cared about most. He spent time in the penitentiary, convicted of manslaughter in 1896 for an incident that took place in the High Uintas near Vernal, Utah. It was his outlaw friends who ended up helping him out of that most desperate predicament — to an extent. Good lawyers aren’t cheap.

In a twist of fate, he eventually left his life of crime outright and found himself on the other side of the fence. He was elected by the people of Price, Utah, to serve as a Justice of the Peace — the second time that he ran. The first time he ran under the name Willard Erastus Christianson and lost. When the opportunity next presented itself, he ran as Matt Warner and won by a landslide.

Matt died on December 21, 1938, in Price, Utah, where he is buried. He will be long remembered for daring exploits and a larger-than-life personality that lives on in spite of the interminable passing of the years. It is worth noting, given the context of his life, that Matt Warner never spent much time off a horse. He has a humble marker in Price City Cemetery bearing an alias that became a name, and the faded etching of a horse — saddled and tied, standing alone.

Information regarding the preceding biographical summary was obtained principally — though not solely — through the autobiography of Matt Warner and Murray E. King, The Last of the Bandit Riders. The author believed it fitting to err on the side of a primary source rather than piece together many secondary ones. Matt Warner’s life has been the subject of more than one book; this account is meant to give the reader a general context for a man who cowboyed in one of the most wild and ruthless ranges during a period of acute lawlessness — from his own perspective, in his own words.

The examination that follows is sourced primarily from government documents and newspapers that followed the events in real time. In the attempt to connect the record, inferences had to be made; you can decide what really happened for yourself. As it is said, there exist three realities: your reality, their reality, and the truth. The life of Matt Warner has enough twists and turns to leave even the most detailed inspection void of the whole truth. Any statement made can be doubled back upon and ridiculed — and this becomes more true as time passes, not less. Regardless, what was written during his years navigating Diamond Mountain is at times hard to believe, if not for a few witnesses.

It must have been one hell of a ride.

This portion of the account aims to elucidate the history of Matt Warner on and around Diamond Mountain. There are two major periods of time he spent in this region.

Events are presented in chronological order, with applicable evidence of each having actually occurred. Consider this a burden of proof — a reason as to why a reservoir in so remote a region bears his name.

The only place to start is during the first stretch of time Matt spent on and around Diamond Mountain. He states that he lived there from around age fifteen to twenty. This first stretch was kicked off by his exodus from Levan. Why Diamond Mountain? Because he had been there previously on a cattle drive headed to Wyoming, working for a man named Charley Wagner. Owing to that drive, he took a trail he was familiar with — the Wagner Trail — and it led to Diamond Mountain.

Early in his autobiography, Matt mentions the story of Enoch Rhodes, an old prospector who had been found scalped at the edge of Strawberry Valley — present-day Strawberry Reservoir.⁶ Matt needed to ride through Strawberry Valley on his way to Diamond Mountain, and he told the story to help readers understand that traveling through it during his adolescence was a dangerous venture. The Utes had total control of this area and were hostile to anyone who encroached upon their territory.

In regard to this account, the story of Enoch Rhodes was used to establish context for the timeline of Matt’s leaving Levan — the issue being that if Matt left home at around age fourteen, he couldn’t have known about Rhodes being scalped, as it happened in 1892.⁷ This does not mar the validity of Matt’s story; he was looking back many years to his adolescence, and memories warp over time. Matt would have been twenty-eight when Enoch was scalped. If nothing else, it proves that riding through Strawberry Valley as a boy in the 1870s would have been dangerous, since a grown man was killed there in the 1890s. This land would have been more desperate the further back you go in time, not less. Fortunately for Matt, his own encounter with Utes traveling through Strawberry Valley resulted in a trade and not bloodshed.

It is interesting that Matt Warner’s alias shares similarity to his first employer on Diamond Mountain, Jim Warren. Warren and Warner are near anagrams. This could be mere coincidence, considering Matt gives a backstory for the name in his autobiography — an alibi that came quickly, within days of his rapid departure from Levan. He states that near Indianola, Utah, the name Matt Warner occurred to him when a Sanpete Valley freighter named Monson asked him what his name was.⁸

It has been mentioned already and will not be covered in depth, but not long after he was hired at Warren’s ranch, Matt earned his keep breaking one of the rankest horses roaming those parts — which elevated him in the social world of Diamond Mountain immediately.⁹ It was on Warren’s ranch that Matt began to fall into the outlaw life, encouraged to start his own herd with his own brand.¹⁰ As the years passed, he honed his skills, and his devotion to the craft culminated in his first gunfight, with Polito. This no doubt further solidified his reputation as a man not to be trifled with.

As far as has thus far been searched, no historical reference to a Jim Warren can be found in the Diamond Mountain region, nor any account of Matt riding a wild horse or shooting a Mexican vaquero. This doesn’t damage Matt’s account — or at least it shouldn’t. It wouldn’t have made sense for a paper to report on the coming-up of a young cowboy making his name in a lawless region.

It was after his first gunfight that Matt found out he hadn’t killed Andrew Hendrickson as he believed. Moroni Hendrickson, brother to Andrew, ran into Matt one day while he was working a ferry crossing the Green River, and it was through this meeting that Matt learned Andrew was alive — but not well. Moroni purportedly stated that Andrew had recovered from the beating but suffered periods of psychosis that landed him in a mental hospital in Provo, Utah. Unfortunately, this culminated in the murder of a man — the grand marshal of a parade — during a Pioneer Day celebration on July 28, 1898. A motive was never derived.¹¹

In his autobiography, Matt mentions the murder occurred fourteen years after his chance meeting with Moroni at the ferry. This timeline puts Matt on Diamond Mountain in 1884, around the age of twenty, and corroborates his story — though it is interesting to note that Andrew Hendrickson had been slated to serve a mission in the year 1883.¹² No evidence of Andrew being checked into a mental hospital could be found in historical records thus far. In closing, Matt stated, “I have never been satisfied about Andy’s case. There is always that doubt as to whether I put him in the asylum or not.”¹³

After finding out he was no longer wanted for murder, Matt penned a letter home that inspired his nephew, Lew McCarty, to head north for Diamond Mountain. It was during this time that Matt says he pulled his first holdup, against a Jewish business owner who was upside down on merchandise he sold at his shop. The goods were to be repossessed, but the man had another idea: he would have himself held up, report the goods as stolen, and keep them to be sold in secret. Warner and McCarty caught wind of the scheme from another outlaw in the making, Elzy Lay, and concluded that if they stole the goods, nobody could say a word — the merchant could hardly report that his stolen goods had been stolen again. The heist was carried out, and sure enough no trouble came of it. In fact, a great party was held in Brown’s Park from the loot; homesteaders showed up in all sorts of funny outfits received from the outlaws, and the party raged until the break of dawn.¹⁴

This story is corroborated by evidence — just not along the timeline Warner gives. In August of 1895, The Wasatch Wave ran a story about a Jewish man from Rock Springs, Wyoming, by the name of S. I. Amdursky, who was held up on Diamond Mountain by masked highwaymen.¹⁵ In Warner’s own words, the man they held up was from Rock Springs. The evidence suggests this was likely not Warner’s first holdup; he would have been thirty-one when it occurred. Amdursky claimed the outlaws who robbed him were part of the gangs associated with Brown’s Park.¹⁶

Matt Warner then states the reason he left Diamond Mountain the first time had nothing to do with bank holdups or stolen goods, but with cattle rustling. There are different types of rustling: at the low level, throwing a brand on a calf in the open range is illegal, but not the kind of illegal that would leave a man dangling from a tree. The kind he engaged in at the close of his run could have left him dead or wanted. He needed cash and found it in a rustling operation run by a man he called Cherokee Bangs. They had pushed cattle all the way to the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming when they were caught. Warner managed to escape, but shortly after returning to Diamond Mountain he discovered he was suspected of working for Bangs. This sent him into a life of outright outlawry that had him always on the run. A source mentioning the raid on Cherokee Bangs could not be found thus far — which, again, may simply mean the details of the outlaw world were left out of the public record.

After leaving Diamond Mountain, Matt made his way south toward Holbrook, Arizona, through various Indian reservations, accompanying his father and acting as a scout for a party of railroad workers. This was as dangerous a path through as remote a region as a man could find.¹⁷ A timeline clue is dropped when he states, “The Elk Mountain Utes had killed whites the year before and, for all we knew, they were still on the warpath.”¹⁸

A few incidents involving Native people were discovered when examining the year 1885, give or take three years, in the Utah-to-Arizona region. If Warner stayed on Diamond Mountain until age twenty, these would be the years any conflict with the Elk Mountain Utes would have been recorded. Given the volume of evidence for conflict between settlers and Utes during this period, his statement is more than likely accurate. On June 19, 1885, six Utes were massacred by cattlemen near Dolores, Colorado; the Utes, reportedly not given enough rations, had left their reservation in search of game, the cattlemen claimed they were stealing cattle, and the Utes retaliated by killing a white man and wounding his wife.¹⁹ In August of 1887 a conflict transpired that would later be known as “Colorow’s War.” To examine it fully would be beyond the scope of this account; the point of reference is to give validity to Warner’s claim of leaving Diamond Mountain near these years.²⁰

This concludes the examination of Warner’s early years on Diamond Mountain. After leaving the region around age twenty, his outlaw lifestyle fanned like the flames of a prairie fire. To fully understand how he made his way back would require examining his life during the in-between years, which is beyond our scope. One precipitating event outside of Diamond Mountain, however, is within it.

On September 24, 1892, five men robbed the Ben E. Snipes & Co. Bank in Roslyn, Washington. One of them was Matt Warner, then going by Ras Lewis; he would have been twenty-nine. In April of 1893 he was taken into custody after being caught at the 7U Ranch in Oregon and interned in the Kittitas County courthouse in Ellensburg, Washington. He calls it the Ellensburg County courthouse in his autobiography — the sort of mistake that lends a vote of confidence to his story. He made an escape with George McCarty on May 22, 1893, that ultimately resulted in both men being caught and an innocent bystander being shot, though not mortally. On the 7th of September, 1893, Warner and McCarty were released after a hung jury due to lack of evidence. At this incredible luck, Matt decided he was going straight and headed home for Diamond Mountain, where he could hopefully rebuild the rocky relationship with his wife (who had fled prior to his capture), raise his daughter, and make an honest living as a rancher.²¹

After being acquitted, Matt made his way back to his original homestead after trading away the 7U ranch. The cabin he had built was still standing and empty. He went to work fixing the place up and acquiring horses — and soon enough all of his old outlaw buddies started hanging around Matt Warner’s ranch. There were plenty who did so, but Matt mentions Charley Crouse in his book. That name is important; we will return to it.

Surrounded by his old friends, Matt quickly began moving toward the outlaw way of life yet again. But in a chance meeting with his father-in-law, he was able to convince his wife Rose to bring herself and his daughter to Diamond Mountain, which pulled him away from those influences. There must have been a brief period after this when Matt Warner was exceptionally happy and free. Then, in a cruel twist of fate, Rose was diagnosed with bone cancer and had to have her leg removed. She needed care and had to reside in Vernal, Utah — far from Matt on Diamond Mountain. This awful turn placed him in vulnerable proximity to the wild and fast outlaw lifestyle once more.

In 1894 a homestead claim was filed and published in the Daily Tribune of Salt Lake City. The land office reported that William Erastus Christiansen filed a homestead claim for 160 acres on the northeast quarter of Section 23, Township 1 South of Range 34 East. It is interesting that Matt used his legal name to file — somewhat ironic, as it was the only name that carried no legal ramifications at that point. He would have attracted attention using Matt Warner or Ras Lewis, most notably after the recent trial regarding the Roslyn bank robbery.

An interesting point about the filing is its date. In 1894 Matt would have been thirty years old — ten years after he left Diamond Mountain the first time, per his autobiography, and two years prior to the shootout in the Uintas. It is also worth noting that the original filing does not reflect the location of Matt Warner Reservoir. The reservoir occupies Township 1 North, Section 34, Range 23 East. It causes the imagination to run a little when you consider the possibility that Matt Warner Reservoir was named so because somebody misread the homestead filing.

At the location the filing actually represents, one finds Crouse Reservoir, named after Charley Crouse. Matt and Charley Crouse surely knew each other at the time, as Matt mentions him by name in his autobiography. Speaking of his return to Diamond Mountain, Matt writes of “… Charley Crause, good-hearted old cattle rustler from Brown’s Park…”²² An inquiry to the Uinta County land office records has been placed; if there is an answer to the confusion over these locations, the land records may clear it up entirely, and this account will be updated accordingly.

An interesting article regarding Matt and a man named Tolliver ran near the end of 1896, on December 26th, stating that Mat Warner and Joseph Toliver had possibly found a rich gold deposit in the Uinta Mountains. In his book, Matt mentions a Tolliver once: “On Diamond Mountain I met a girl in Brown’s Park and kept company with her awhile. A man named Tolliver wanted the same girl, and that led to the most wicked and bloody rough-and-tumble fight I was ever in.”²³ If the timeline is correct, Matt had this fight prior to departing Diamond Mountain. No other connections between Tolliver and Matt have been found; if the timeline is accurate, they must have reconciled after the fight. Considering the headline mentions gold, the author believes there is a great story hiding in these details — particularly given the events that would take place around two years later.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, we need to talk about the Jewish merchant again. Given the details Matt provides, it seems particularly unlikely that a Jewish man from Rock Springs was robbed twice in the same manner. The author believes Matt may have misreported this event on his timeline because he wasn’t proud of it — not on purpose, but because the years go by and the stories meld. Is it not human nature to build a narrative around our choices that makes sense to us as the years race along? By 1895, Matt had pulled off many seriously dangerous and complex holdups. Matt says it himself: “… But it wasn’t honest robbery, and I ain’t proud of it.”²⁴

There is an inflection point here that must be outlined. Does it make sense to judge the actions of men and women who existed more than a century ago by a modern standard? Matt says as much himself — he wasn’t going to put everything he did into his book, because some of it nobody would want to revisit. It is very easy to read about the man and pass judgement, particularly in an age where everything he stated can be fact-checked. That is the power of the internet in the information age.

In our modern world we don’t contend with the same variety of dangers that men, women, and children faced in the later 1800s and early 1900s. The idea of a man robbing banks and eventually becoming a justice of the peace is completely foreign, because such things don’t take place any longer — they quite literally can’t. If you so please, you can dig deep into the story of Matt Warner and find the dirt you seek. It isn’t the work of the author to withhold it; it will be presented — but with a point in mind. People change. People can grow. People can do horrible things out of necessity, or for no reason at all — and these same people can live on to regret it, learn from it, and overcome it. Matt’s story isn’t all Robin Hood, but it is a study in the resiliency of an individual to reform. Keep this in mind as the life Matt Warner lived on Diamond Mountain comes to a dramatic close.

Two years after returning to Diamond Mountain, Matt Warner found himself jailed in Vernal for the first-degree murder of Dave Milton and Dick Staunton.