Benjamin Lowe (center)
The man to the right of Ben (left side of Photo) is Jeff Dillard. His son is the nephew of Cash Sampson who married Ben's daughter. I am thinking that means Jeff Dillard married Cash Sampson's sister.
The other man is Charlie Sewell.
Since Ben was born in 1867, I am guessing this photo was taken before 1900.
Photo and description contributed by descendant
Doug Lowe of UTclick photo for VERY enlarged one.
The Escalante Canyon Killings
by Wilson Rockwell
Published in the Denver Post
Empire Section
(this was not dated in the copy I had)
It was a quiet day bright with Colorado sun and cooled with vagrant breezes which roamed the Escalante Canyon road beyond the sleepy town of Delta. Under the long sky, the men who raised beef and the men who raised sheep kept wide intervals, did their work leisurely, in tempo with their thoughts.
You wouldn't have said it was a day for dying.
Ben Lowe and his two youngsters wouldn't have said so.
That fine morning before sunup, June 9. 1917, the big, ready cattleman had routed out his sons, Bob, 11, and Bill, 9, and told them in his bluff, carrying way to saddle up. Ben Lowe was proud of his boys and liked to take them on the range with him.
He was teaching them what he knew of his rough, royal profession. They, too, would be cowpunchers and ranchers. They would be rope-and-horse-and-gun-wise; lords of the open graze; dedicated enemies of sheep and sheepherders as was their outspoken father.
Meanwhile, Cassius Sampson, that small, self effacing man whose courage was told in praise by many a Delta county gossip--Sampson as he rode down the Canyon road headed for Flat Mesa to look for strays, held no notions that death also was riding the morning horizon. He rocked along with his mind on other things. As deputy U.S. marshall his was a lonely work in country where men were divided, sheep or cattle, no room for both. Peacemaker was his role, and he thought about this as the sun climbed.
The Night Riders, impatient headstrong, wanted no law in the way.
They had been out after dark hallooing woolies over the tall bluffs. Herders, fear stiff, had seen their mules gunned down, and listened to the hard promise that they themselves would be next-time targets.
Cash Sampson had lived these forty six years as a cattleman among cattlemen. Their interests, right on down to Sunday small talk, had been his. They voted him sheriff, had seen that he had served as brand inspector, had backed him each time because he'd proved himself all along.
Now here was his lonliness because he couldn't calm the hot-heads to whom each sheep was an outsize locust, leveling the free grass to the dust. Now whenever Cash Sampson stepped down among his friends a silence crowded there in front of him.
He thought it will be like that here, too, as he was waved in from the Escalante road by Kelso Musser. Musser, he knew, was offering the traditional western courtesy of dinner at his ranch. Any passing stranger would have been as welcome.
The little marshal accepted, and pitched in to help his host, and a hand Shorty Gibson, fix the noon meal.
An hour passed and, just as the three men went to table, there was a sound of horses in the yard. Musser might have hoped for different guests but, mindful of custom, he asked the newcomers-Ben Lowe and his two sprouts--to light and grab plates.
Not that Lowe was unpopular here. The big follow was widely liked and his abilities known. His time at calf-roping in the county rodeos was always hard to beat. He rode good horses and liked them when they matched his own fire.
He had a kind of reckless sweep to him that excited less colorful men, and this, as much as anything else, had made him a leader among the cattlemen.
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Kelso Musser, a little stampeded perhaps, found himself more talkative than usual. He had noticed Lowe's gun in its shoulder holster when the big rancher shucked off his jumper, and Cash Sampson's weapon was at his thigh as always.
But the slow-paced conversation survived as the men ate, and Musser decided he'd worried without need. Sampson spoke casually and Lowe seemed at ease in his turn at the words. The kids, Bob and Bill, chattered along between ambitious mouthfuls. Shorty Gibson,loafing over his coffee offered a sentence first to one man and then the next.
There was no trouble, even though Sampson and Lowe were, in Musser's eyes, a shade too polite, a notch too careful not to exchange comment with each other.
Kelso Musser shook his head over the things he was thinking.
What was it in some men that made them play with gunpowder? Gossips! He uttered the word distastefully in his mind. Cash Sampson and Ben Lowe had been friends once, and this the gossips know. Yet so in love with trouble were some, that they delighted in having a gully open between Sampson and Lowe and, seeing it open, hastened to erode it farther with malicious tongues.
Lowe, generous and loyal to his friends as long as he believed them friends, was notoriously bitter toward his enemies.
Sampson and Lowe both fattened their herds on the Escalante Canyon range, and reason would say there was no reason for them to fall out.
But it had been told to Ben Lowe that Sampson had taken sides with the sheepmen, and that he would arrest Ben as the key man of the cattle interests. And the voices in turn had said to Sampson that Lowe sounded loud behind the lawman's back, calling him sheep-lover and turn coat.
For all his seeming calm, Ben Lowe felt an urgency to be gone out of Mussers spread, and when they'd eaten, he and his tads said adios and headed their mounts homeward down the canyon road.
Musser and Gibson and Sampson watched them go, the high voices of the boys carrying back over the thin air. In the sound there was the innocence and the happy lilt of birdsong.
Cash Sampson squinted after them for a long time.
This was a dark and painful moment. The lawman had been ordered to testify against Ben Lowe at the grand jury investigation scheduled for the near future. The wildness of the Night Riders had brought this apace and Sampson regretted that Lowe would never believe that his neighbor did not want to appear as an accuser.
In the big ranchers' impatient eyes, Cash Sampson was Judas Iscariot, taken to coward's methods.
Covertly, in discomfort, Kelso Musser and Shorty Gibson watched the small, hard marshal as they scraped plates and stowed grub. Fifteen minutes had drifted by since the Lowe's departure.
And now, suddenly Cash Sampson reached a decision. Abruptly he spoke his thanks and farewell and swung up into his saddle.
The two cowmen saw horse and rider strike off at a running walk in the direction Ben Lowe had taken.
Gibson said, seeing Sampson disappear, raising dust among the far cedars, "Cash might catch up with Ben before he reaches his turn-off for Flat Mesa."
"I hope not," Kelso MuEser said. "Words won't mend things."
It was just on 2 o'clock.
The Lowes were moving along the trail when they hear the hood-drumming of a horse behind them.
Ben Lowe reined in, twisted in his saddle to look back. As he recognized the rider, he said still gazing, "You ride on boys, It's Cash Samp-
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son and I'll talk with him alone."
Under their Stetsons, so carefully shaped like their Daddy's, Bob and Bill showed their frightened faces to each other at the grim urgence in his voice. They thumped their horses' ribs and moved on till they were around the next bend. There they paused in wordless dread.
There the voices came to them, and in the voices a temper running. And then gun sound, three echoing shots to stop all talk and bring a whimper to young Bill's lips.
Ben Lowe called to them faintly and they raced back to find him.
There he was, their father, the big rock of a man, leaning against a cedar. The light was waning in his eyes and he concentrated it on Cash Sampson who lay dead 50 feet beyond. Ben Lowe compressed his wide lips and raised his .45. As he sank his body rasping against the tree, he triggered one more bullet into the deputy's body.
Bob and Bill came weeping to his side, but he could not speak to them. In a moment he was gone, his weapon in the weeds.
Sampson's horse stood by grazing. For no reason, the presence of the quiet animal steadied young Bob. "Go get Mr. Musser," he told little Bill. "I'll stay here."
Musser and a neighbor, Arthur Ward, were led to the place and read such sign as they could.
Three shots had been fired by Lowe. One had struck Sampson above the left ear and came out the back of his head. A second slug pierced his groin.
A single cartridge had been spent by Sampson's 32-20. It had caught Lowe near the small of his back, and made its searing exit through his left breast.
No one ever was able to reconstruct the order of the dual. Though the gossips had their endless theories. They savored the tragedy which they'd done so much to stage.
Sampson, the quiet man, left no immediate family. The 49-year old Lowe was survived by his widow and five children.
Ward and Musser took the bodies into Delta around 11 that night.
It had been a long summers' day in a fair time of year.
Not the sort of day for dying.
Collected from the notes of Mary Sondburg, KS
