SOUTH HILLS — At the turn of the 20th century, a murder trial in the new state of Idaho captivated the nation — and the man at the center of it all was known as Diamondfield Jack.

On top of Pike Mountain in the South Hills, the story of Jackson Lee Davis — better known as Diamondfield Jack — is one of frontier justice, mistaken identity and outlaw legend.

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America 250: Diamondfield Jack’s murder trial

Historian and CSI professor Justin Vipperman took Neighborhood Reporter Lorien Nettleton to the site on Deep Creek where two sheepherders were found murdered in 1896, a crime that earned Davis a death sentence.

“This is — I mean, this is outlaw American West history,” Vipperman said.

Vipperman said the story captures the tension of the era.

“Diamondfield Jack is such a great story because it’s that kind of — that. You’re on the frontier here, right?” Vipperman said. “We’re watching the sheepmen and cattlemen kind of fight back-and-forth, and Diamondfield is one of those great stories.”

Diamondfield Jack was an enforcer for the Sparks-Harrell Cattle Company in 1895, with a reputation for violence. His job was to patrol the boundary between cattle and sheep territory.

“Diamondfield Jack is supposed to be running the deadline and making sure that sheep herders are staying to the east of the deadline and cattlemen are to the west,” Vipperman said.

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When two sheepherders were found shot to death near the Deep Creek site east of Rogerson in February 1896, suspicion fell on Davis almost immediately.

“When these two men are found dead, people immediately — over there, that’s gotta be Diamondfield,” Vipperman said.

He was quickly tried in Albion and sentenced to hang, despite admissions from two other men who said they were responsible for the deaths.

Vipperman said Davis’s own personality may have worked against him.

“The bravado is what gets him in trouble, and he definitely had the swagger of an outlaw and he definitely carried that idea like ‘I’m a hired gun,’” Vipperman said. “In fact, I would argue that his bravado is probably bigger than his action — the actual thing he was doing.”

After several delays to his execution and 6 years in jail, Diamondfield Jack was pardoned in 1902.

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“I believe in my own research the Bowers and Gray were both the actual real hired guns, and the Diamondfield was — bark was worse than his bite,” Vipperman said.

After his release, Diamondfield Jack prospered as a prospector in Nevada, living to the age of 85 before he was hit by a car and killed in Las Vegas in 1949.

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Carrey shot only one bighorn sheep, but had accrued somewhere between 75 and 110 skulls by the time he was in his 70s. He found many on hunts that he guided, and others were gifted to him.

Carrey would carve some horns into belt buckles or spurs for friends and family. Boggan’s late wife, Sharon, received the last buckle he fashioned before his 2002 death. Boggan keeps the small, horseshoe-decorated treasure safe wrapped in a handkerchief, now.

On the horns he kept whole, Carrey wrote the date, location and name of the person who brought it to him.

In the O’Connor center, one skull bears the name of Buckskin Bill, who was often called “one of the last mountain men” of the American West. He was born Sylvan Ambrose Hart and moved to the Five Mile Bar of the Salmon River in 1932 where he lived in central Idaho isolation until his death in 1980.

Keeping collection information tied to specimens has unique implications for research today, allowing scientists to take a glimpse into a past population’s genetics and distribution. Though it is unclear if Carrey recorded such details for science, personal recollection or another reason, Boggan touts the action as evidence for Carrey being “ahead of his time.”

After Boggan’s initial meeting with Carrey in 1988, Boggan’s boss, New Hampshire businessman Robert “Bob” Senter approached Carrey about buying his ranch. Senter would later want the horns too, which Carrey had kept in his attic.

The two struck a deal. Carrey agreed to sell him about 40 of the bighorn skulls from the collection for $10,000. There had been thieves breaking into Carrey’s ranch and making off with some of the skulls, Boggan said. A plaque in the O’Connor center also attributes the sale to Carrey lacking the space to keep them.

Senter, who owned and operated a ranch in Riggins, promptly had the horns hauled, illegally, to Las Vegas, where they were boxed and shipped, also illegally, to his home in Plaistow, N.H. Senter was an avid, worldwide hunter and had a trophy room on the East Coast, but the collection stayed sealed in those shipping boxes over the decades.

“I used to be a guide,” Boggan said. “So I’d have long horseback rides, and they’d never left my mind — getting them back.

“Horns do not belong on the East Coast. They’re Idaho horns.”

In 2014, Boggan approached an aging Senter about the collection that had weighed heavy on his heart for decades. He knew that once Senter died, the heads would never return to Idaho.

“They’d get split up, you know,” he said. “Nobody else would ever take care of these things.”

Senter had already given away a couple from the collection he had, but after a bit of haggling, he agreed to sell Boggan the remaining 38 for around $2,000. Senter died in 2017.