Blood On The Ice: The Fur Trapper Massacre On Big Lava Lake

On April 25, 1924, a search party in Bend, Oregon, chopped a hole in the icy surface of Big Lava Lake. The bodies of fur trappers Dewey Morris, Edward Nickols, and Roy Wison floated to the surface. They had been there for a while.

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The trio had originally gathered the week before Christmas in a nearby cabin to spend the winter plying their trade in the area’s game-rich surroundings.

A local resort owner checked in on the trappers on January 15, and reported all on site to be in “jovial” spirits. He reported that the cabin was warm and well tended to, and the group’s hunting had been yielding rich results.

The visitor then walked off via snowshoes and no one ever saw Morris, Nickols, or Wilson alive again – except for their killer.

Concern for the trappers initially arose after no one heard from them for a few months, and passersby noticed abandoned mink traps. Perhaps things had not remained “jovial” after all.

Innis Owen Morris, Dewey’s brother; and Pearl Lynnes, Tumalo Fish Hatchery Superintendent; teamed with Sheriff Clarence A. Adams to look into whether everything was all right. Alas, it was not.

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The men’s cabin stood empty. Pots full of burnt food lay atop the stove, and someone had set the table for dinner. Most forebodingly, a bloodstained clawhammer had been discarded in a corner.

Outside, a transport sled was missing, and a fox pen had been opened. Untended trapping lines contained the frozen remains of 12 marten, four foxes, and a skunk.

En route to Big Lava Lake a quarter-mile away, investigators found bloody snow, clumps of hair, and a human tooth. The men’s sled turned up, too, also stained with blood. Impressions in the ice indicated that someone had chopped a large hole in it just off the shore.

Enough of a thaw had set in for searchers to take a boat out on the water. Once there, Morris, Nickols, and Wilson bobbled into sight.

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Autopsies determined that each trapper had died of a combination of blunt-force trauma and blasts from both a pistol and a shotgun. The wounds indicated a struggle occurred and, indeed, the clawhammer had come in to play.

Suspicion fell fast on a moonshiner named Indian Erickson, who camped nearby alongside Cultus Lake (what’s with all these cool, kind of scary names?). Erickson had an alibi, though, and he walked.

The cabin’s owner next directed police to Charles Kimzey, a local hustler using a fake name who had once accused the trappers of stealing his wallet. He had reportedly even threatened to come back after the dust-up and kill Nickols.

Once they got past Kimzey’s assumed identity, police discovered he was an ex-con who did time in Idaho before escaping from jail. More recently, Kimzey had been arrested in 1923 for robbing and beating an Oregon rental car driver named W.O. Harrison. Kimzey had even tossed his victim down a well to die.

Harrison lived, but Kimzey skipped town before his trial.

Further building the case, a traffic cop identified a photo of Kimzey as being that of a man who he saw carrying a gunnysack of furs on January 24. The man even asked the officers for directions to a place where he could sell his bounty.

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Law enforcement promptly offered $1,500 for any information leading to Kimzey’s capture. Nobody came forth, though. Deschutes County Sheriff Claude L. McCauley later wrote in his account of the crime:

“For the next four years, the hunt for Kimzey went on unceasingly…. Every report was investigated, and sometimes Kimzey was reported seen in a half a dozen places at once. Gradually, the Lava Lake murder mystery was more or less forgotten by everyone except the officers of the law and friends of the murdered men.”

Ultimately, Kimzey spent nearly an entire decade on the lam. In 1933, he finally got nabbed in Montana and shipped back to Oregon.

The trader who purchased the furs on January 24 could not positively identify Kimzey as the seller, though. As a result, the cops couldn’t hold their prime suspect for the triple homicide.

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Authorities did, however, finally take Kimzey to trial for the attempted murder of W.O. Harrison. He got life behind bars at the Oregon State Penitentiary. Some may feel that at least some justice may have been served for the murder of the trappers.

As a still officially unsolved crime, though, the mystery of who killed Dewey Morris, Edward Nickols, and Roy Wison remains just that: a mystery.

Read more:
That Oregon Life
The Bend Source
Deschutes Pioneer Gazette
Christmas Valley

Main photo: Fur Trapper [WikiMedia Commons]

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