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56 “John Wright gave me a brown horse to do what I did, and then he came over and took it from me. It was Wright’s intention to take Old Lady Powers and leave the country with her. That was his intention . . . Old Man Powers was killed . . . There were four or five implicated in it.”1 In those laconic and impersonal terms, and with only minor variations in the reporting of his exact words, Tom Ketchum described the murder of Jasper N. “Jap” Powers, “one of the first crimes that I was ever implicated in.” There must have been a great deal more to it than that. If, as he implied, he was hired to assassinate Powers, Tom would have wanted more from Wright than the gift or loan of a horse. Tom had never killed a man up to this time. It stands to reason that he would not have murdered Powers merely to indulge a whim or oblige a friend. Mrs. Sallie E. Powers may have connived at the murder, and Dave Atkins may have been as deeply involved in it as Tom himself. So, according to the authorities, was George W. “Bud” Upshaw, although Tom later maintained that Bud “knew nothing about it.”2 John Loomis wrote that Berry Ketchum was one of the signatories to a letter from local cattlemen offering Powers the choice of leaving the neighborhood or being killed. Powers stayed put and died. Wright, Loomis continued, was one of those who found the body and was later blamed for the murder by Tom Ketchum’s friends, although “everyone suspected” that Tom and one of his followers “had executed the man.” Loomis believed that Wright was in no way connected with the crime. We cannot be so certain. Loomis did not explain, or even mention, Wright’s move from Berry Ketchum’s ranch to become Powers’s foreman. He did not say what had become of Wright’s wife Wincie. Large, strong of muscle , and fierce of aspect, she dipped snuff, chewed tobacco, stood no nonsense from liberty-takers, and was “quite a character herself.” He made no reference to any liaison between John Wright and Mrs. Powers, or to rumors of one. Whether through forgetfulness, or out of discretion, he omitted Powers’s name from his recollections, and did not so much as mention that the man had a wife.3 + 5 ∂ THREE MURDERS AND A DEAD RINGER Three Murders and A Dead Ringer 57 Loomis likened Wright to Daniel Boone. He saw him as a “throwback to the frontiersmen of the eastern forest country . . . quiet and kind, with an intense love of nature in the raw, a courageous fighter when necessity compelled.” Though “entirely without book learning,”Wright had“a natural refinement which must have been inherited.”He would put his hand to whatever kind of labor was set before him, and, at relaxation in camp, could listen with enjoyment to the Loomises’ readings from Trollope.4 Loomis seems to have idolized and idealized his employee and hunting companion . Either he knew that Wright was incapable of involving himself in anything so low as the assassination of a defenseless and unsuspecting neighbor, or he refused to consider the possibility that he might have been. It is on the record that Powers was believed to be a stock thief. Case No. 1064, State of Texas vs. J.N. Powers, theft of cattle, appeared in the District Court Docket for the December term of 1893. When court reconvened after Christmas that year a jury heard the case against him and returned a verdict of not guilty. The owner or owners of the allegedly stolen livestock cannot be identified. Nor is anything known of the nature of the evidence.5 The following summer Jasper Powers was summoned to County Court to answer a charge on some unspecified misdemeanor. All that is known about these proceedings is that the case was continued.6 Certainly rumor was current that Powers was badly crosswise with his neighbors . Another—which might be part of the same one—was that he had dishonored a gambling debt to Sam Ketchum and Will Carver. These tales are of local origin, which in itself offers no security for their authority.7 Powers was shot down in his pasture, ten or eleven miles southwest of Knickerbocker, Wednesday, December 11, 1895. At nine o’clock that morning, he left the house, as usual, to fetch his saddle horses from the pasture. He had walked...

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