Chapter Twenty
It was a beautiful Indian summer day in October 1981 when three deputies drove up the river and parked outside the locked gate on the west side of my ranch. In full uniform, with hats, badges, and sidearms, they entered my property on foot. They continued on to the residential area and headed for the lodge. Having already seen them approaching, Rick and I stepped out to greet them before they could knock.
“Hi there!” I said brightly. “Pretty day, isn’t it?”
“Yep,” one of them said, looking around as if to verify that this was indeed true. “Sure is.”
“Been a dry summer,” Rick said.
“Yep. Sure has.”
“Creek’s gonna get lower before the snow flies.”
“Prob-lee.”
There were several more exchanges between the men about natural phenomena, during which I silently noted the incredible beauty of the blue sky and the sun shining through the golden aspen leaves quivering among the lodgepole pines. At last one of the deputies—I’ll call him Larry—broached the subject they had come to discuss. Almost apologetically, he volunteered that they had been dispatched by the sheriff and instructed by the county attorney to order me to unlock my gates and to arrest me if I didn’t comply.
“Arrest me? On what grounds?”
“On the grounds that you’re blocking a public road.”
“On what does the county base its claim that the road is public?”
The two deputies who weren’t doing the talking shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. None of the three men seemed to know exactly how to answer that question. However, they had been sent on a mission, and they didn’t want to go back to Challis with the gates still locked and me not in custody. They looked at each other.
“Uh… I don’t know,” one of the other deputies hazarded. “You, Larry?”
Larry didn’t. Nor did the third deputy.
When they left, the gates were still locked, and I wasn’t in custody.
The next day Larry came back alone. He was still in uniform but minus his hat, sidearm, and sidekicks. He had returned with the county attorney’s answer to my question about grounds for my arrest. It was the declaration of public road, which he handed to me along with a summons requesting my appearance in the criminal case of Custer County v. Carole King Evers.
With the federal judge waiting for a legal determination of whose road it was, and now with a criminal case against me, I had no choice but to file an action to quiet title in Challis, where a state judge would preside. It was my call whether to have the matter decided by a judge or a jury. There was some risk in leaving the decision in the hands of a single judge who might or might not be sympathetic, but I believed that was less risky than leaving it up to twelve people in a community whipped to a frenzy over my supposedly having denied them the right to drive on a road that had been used by the public ever since the ohhhhhld stagecoach stopped there.
This now made three cases in which I was involved.
Prior to being litigants, neither Rick nor I had felt the need to change our common-law cohabitation status, but now we felt the time had come. We became husband and wife on May 3, 1982.
I probably could have earned a degree as a paralegal with all the hours I spent working with Rick and Steve to understand the ramifications of every “whereas” and “herewith” in the documents pertaining to our case. In addition, I was still homeschooling the boys, milking goats, and doing all the other activities that made up the fabric of my daily life. I was also working on several music projects and visiting my other three children in New York and Los Angeles. Something had to give. It was with a heavy heart that I brought my son to live with his father and sister and attend public school in California.
Rick took on the job of detective, a role he clearly relished. Though he hadn’t been formally educated beyond high school, he had a high native intelligence. He enjoyed strategizing, and he was good at it. One day he sent Richard to Challis to make copies of the cassette tapes of the commissioner meetings at which my road had been discussed. Those tapes were supposed to be available to the public. I didn’t actually expect the commissioners to allow Richard access, but he came back with twenty-two tapes on which he had copied all the original tapes. On one we heard the commissioners debating whether they should ask their attorney to write up a declaration of public road. On another we heard one of the commissioners asking, with an unmistakable contextual reference to me, “What if she sues us?” That question and the discussion around it clearly established the commissioners’ awareness that they might have been doing something actionable.
Having obtained a smoking tape, we now turned our attention to getting information from the Forest Service. It took some doing, but their files supported my position that the road within the ranch was private, that I had every right to lock my gates, and that I wasn’t blocking public access to any public land.
I had purchased a 1982 Franklin computer with primitive software that allowed me to catalog each document, type in fields of information, and search for that information later. Each search took several minutes for the computer to cycle through the data, but I didn’t mind. It was a lot more efficient than searching through physical notes, documents, and our collective memory. After analyzing the documents in this way for a couple of weeks, we were able to pinpoint information about the Forest Service’s deficiency of maintenance and other things that were useful to Steve. We now had more than enough documentation to get the criminal case dismissed. But first we had to prevail in the quiet title action.
During that trial in 1985 the claim that the gates had never been locked prior to my ownership was repeated over and over by the Frenches and others. An elderly lady who had lived on the ranch for many years during the first half of the twentieth century made a compelling witness when she said in her slightly cracked elderly-lady voice, “I lived at the Robinson Bar Ranch for over thirty years, and we never, ever locked those gates!”
Watching that elderly lady and then sexagenarian Dottie French deliver with impunity what I believed to be inaccurate information, my education in Trial Law 101 began with Lesson 1: it is virtually impossible to impeach the testimony of an elderly lady. Lesson 2 was that two elderly ladies delivering the same misinformation are even more difficult to impeach. Disproving such testimony rarely sits well with a judge or a jury. Fortunately, Trial Law 101 included a third lesson. The most effective way to impeach the testimony of however many old ladies is to come up with your own old lady who not only testifies truthfully but brings pictures and a diary.
Working with a private investigator, we found an elderly lady who had visited the area in the 1940s and was willing to fly up from California to tell the truth. From her wheelchair she testified that the gates had been locked when she and her husband had driven up to the ranch many years ago. She brought photographs, a diary, and her own very convincing testimony. The opposing lawyers, of which there were now seven, ignored Lesson 1 and tried to impeach our elderly lady, but her testimony held up through cross-examination. After the trial—four years after Thurlo French had initially sought relief from the county commissioners for a problem he didn’t have—Judge Arnold Beebe reviewed our elderly lady’s evidence along with the documents Rick and I had obtained from the Forest Service and ruled that the road within my ranch was private. With the judge’s decision in my favor, all criminal charges were dismissed and the commissioners settled the federal case out of court.
Not surprisingly, opposing counsel appealed Judge Beebe’s decision. Their appeal had the effect of extending the illusion of credence to their claim for another three years. The status of the road within the ranch continued to be perceived by the public as unresolved until the Idaho State Supreme Court upheld the trial judge’s ruling in 1988 and the news media duly reported that information. Even so, confirmation of my victory didn’t stop some of the mud from sticking. To some of the local old guard, I would always be the wealthy outsider who had locked them out of their God-given right to drive any-damn-where they pleased. Some folks in the American West never would give up on the idea that blocking motorized access to any land whatsoever is a crime just short of Murder Two—unless the land in question happens to belong to one of the local old guard.
Yee-ha.