Return to Milestones Vol. 5, No. 3
BLACK HAWK is one of the villages through which you can pass and not know it. It must have been named Black Hawk in the Eighteen Thirties, when that renowned savage was causing such alarm and distress in Illinois and on the banks of the Wisconsin. You can still find Black Hawk, if you search diligently for it, in the region southwest of Beaver and Beaver Falls. A pleasant rural district it is, too. But, so far as we are concerned, Black Hawk's one bid for fame was the murder of John Ansley, a Black Hawk farmer, by Eli Sheets, and the extraordinary trial.
All this was in the year of grace 1862. They were killing men then by the thousands on the battlefields of Tennessee and Virginia, and it may seem strange at first that the killing of one farmer by another should have occasioned such a stir. It was on this wise.
James Sheets, an aged and respected farmer, residing near Unity, Ohio, was awakened on a windy March night in 1862 by the sight of flames. All he could do was to watch his barn burn and mourn the loss of an unusually fine bay horse. When morning came he went poking among the ruins and presently came upon the charred remains of the hoofs of one of the horses. A second glance disclosed the fact that these hoofs were those of a small and inferior animal, and not those of his powerful bay. That set old Sheets to thinking. Someone, he said to himself, has stolen my horse, put an inferior animal in the stall, and then fired the barn. All this was duly reported in the Pittsburgh Gazette of the next week, together with a description of the stolen horse.
Five days after the burning of the barn, Eli Sheets, a nephew of the older Sheets, whose horse had been stolen, a fine-looking, strapping young man of twenty, living on a farm near Darlington, came riding over to the farm of John Ansley at Black Hawk. He wanted to trade the powerful bay horse he was riding for one of Ansley's colts. John looked the horse over and gladly agreed to the exchange. Eli Sheets then took the colt and went off down the lane to his own farm at Darlington.
Ansley thought he had made a fine bargain. But his joy was somewhat dampened when, a few days later, he read in the Gazette an account of the burning of the barn and the theft of the horse. The description given of the stolen horse seemed to tally with the horse he had got in the trade from Eli Sheets. Uneasy in his mind, Ansley mounted the big bay and set off for the farm of the older Sheets near Unity, over the Ohio line. When he came up the lane to the house, and near to where the barn had stood, he gave the horse free rein. It walked at once over to the ruins of the barn, and where there had been a watering through, showing that it was familiar with the premises. Then he rode over to the house and interviewed old Sheets, telling him how he had come by the horse, and saying that he did not care to possess stolen goods.
The elder Sheets would not say that the horse was his, evidently fearing his nephew's wrath. Perhaps if Eli would burn a barn and steal a horse, he might also kill a man. Better not rouse Eli's wrath. So he told Ansley to ride over to Eli's farm and ask him about it. This Ansley did. And that was the last seen of him alive, riding a big bay horse up the lane to Eli Sheets's farm near Darlington.
Several weeks after, his bullet-riddled corpse was found in a lonely ravine on the Sheets farm, and near it the carcass of a big bay horse. Horse hair on the clothing of Ansley indicated that he had been killed at some distant place and then transported to the ravine on the back of the horse, after which the horse had been slain.
The news of the finding of the body of Ansley was brought to Beaver, and the District Attorney of Beaver County, John B. Young, and other county officers, proceeded to the Sheets farm to make investigations. Sheets met them in a frank manner and offered to assist them in every way in their search. The search quickly disclosed that in a square of woodland directly back of the Sheets farm a horse had been stabled in a lean-to for some time. They found also the trail of a horse through the woods, and one side were the footprints of a man and on the other side what appeared to be the footprints of a woman.
The shrewd District Attorney, John Young, received testimony from persons living on different sides of this wood about the sound of shots they heard on a March day. Guided by the direction of the firing as they remembered it, Young cut stakes and ran them through the wood, on the theory that where the lines of the stakes intersected one another Ansley must have been shot and the body hidden. Sure enough, just where the lines of stakes met, Young found a deep hole where an oak had been uprooted by storms, and plainly visible on the damp leaves was the imprint of a body. Following the trail of the horse and the footprints, Young and his officers discovered that the body must have been transported by night, for instead of crossing the brook at the ford they had gone down over a steep bank a few rods above. Can you not hear the splash of the horse's hoofs in the little brook as the guilty murderer led the animal with its ghastly load through the waters and up the bank on the other side?
The case now seemed as plain as a pikestaff. When John Ansley, it would appear, charged Eli Sheets with having traded him a stolen horse, Sheets had denied the charge. Ansley then started toward Black Hawk, and, as the day was wearing on, took a short cut through the woods back of the Sheets home. Sheets bade him goodbye, stepped into his house, and taking his pistol, hurried into the woods ahead of Ansley, ambushed him and shot him. The body was then cast into the pit where the tree had been uprooted. But loathe to part with the horse, or perhaps not knowing how to dispose of it, Sheets kept it for several weeks in the forest lean-to. Then, getting uneasy, he came in the dead of night, with an accomplice, put the corpse on the back of the horse, and transported it to the lonely and remote ravine, and then slew the horse, on the theory that dead men and dead horses tell no tales.
The officers put Sheets under arrest, and searching his house, found in the back of an old-fashioned clock a pistol, the caliber of which seemed to correspond to the bullets that had slain Ansley. As it was too dark to proceed the ten miles to Beaver that night, the officers took their prisoner to Cook's tavern at Darlington, there to wait the coming of the day. At three o'clock in the morning, when all were weary and heavy with sleep, Sheets suddenly got to his feet and leaped through the plate glass window to the street. One of his arms was cut in making the plunge, but with rare presence of mind, he pulled off one of his boots as he ran and slipped it over his bleeding arm, so as not to leave a trail of blood behind him. That was the last seen of Eli Sheets for several months. It afterward came out that he had hid under a country schoolhouse, where he had received rations from those who either feared not to feed him, or who, as is often the case had a sympathy for the fugitive from justice.
When Sheets finally emerged one night from his hiding place, he stole a horse over the line in Ohio and started his ride toward the Ohio River. In the darkness he lost his direction and rode in a circle. When the morning came he rode to Wellsville, and was about to board a ferry when he was apprehended by the officers and lodg ed in the Columbiana County jail at Lisbon. When his identity was known, word was sent to the officers of Beaver County, where he was wanted for murder. So great was his reputation now for prowess and escape that the sheriff of New Lisbon took no chances with Sheets and fastened him to the floor of his cell by two bars of iron across his body. When the district attorney of Beaver County was admitted to the cell and saw how Sheets was secured, he exclaimed to the jailer of New Lisbon, "My God, Sheriff, you've got him! He'll never get out of here unless he takes the jail on his back!"
When the officers with their prisoner reached Rochester that evening on their way to Beaver, they stopped in front of a tavern to refresh themselves at the bar and invited Sheets to drink with them. He refused to go in, saying, "Whiskey in, wits out." In due season the trial came on in the Beaver County Courthouse. The President Judge was David Agnew, afterward Chief Justice of Pennsylvania. The District Attorney was assisted by Thomas Cunningham, and the prisoner was defended by N. P. Fetterman, assisted by S. L. Wadsworth, of Lisbon, and Samuel B. Wilson. It was a clear case of horse stealing, and then murder to cover up the theft of the horse. Although a circumstantial evidence case, nothing was lacking to fix the crime of murder on the athletic young farmer. But at the last moment the counsel for the defense, N. P. Fetterman, put on the stand two highly respected farmers who knew the stolen horse well, and said they had seen the horse on a ferry on the Ohio in the custody of a man Brown, who was then serving with the Army of the Potomac in Virginia. This surprising testimony completely overthrew the case for the Commonwealth, as it established an alibi for Sheets. But the alert District Attorney had the name of this Brown as one who was employed in the cement works at Wampum. He drove that evening to Wampum, found that Brown was still working there, and that he had not been off duty except on a Fourth of July, which did not correspond with the time the two farmers claimed to have seen him with the horse on the Ohio River ferry.
The District Attorney brought Brown and the books of the company back with him to Beaver. When the case was called in the morning, the counsel for the defense were quite jubilant and expected an acquittal. The District Attorney had Brown in the back of the court room; and when witnesses were called, had the court crier shout out the name of Brown as if he were as far off as the army in Virginia, where the two farmers had said he was. When Brown started down the aisle toward the witness box, the two farmers grabbed their hats, left the court room, ran down the steps of the courthouse, jumped into their buggies, and drove off to their farms. It was a clear case of perjury. The jury brought in a verdict of guilty, and Sheets was sentenced to be hanged.
A few days before the date set for the hanging Sheets was missing from his cell. There was a suspicion that the turnkey had connived at his escape. At the advice of an Ohio attorney who assisted the Commonwealth, the turnkey was locked up in Sheets' cell. The next day this attorney, sauntering through the jail stopped before the murderer's cell, and seeing the turnkey there, exclaimed, "What, have they got you in there!" "Yes," said the turnkey, "they think I know something about the escape of Sheets." "Oh, well," said the attorney with nonchalance, "We've got to hang somebody. If we can't hang Sheets, we'll hang you." Terrified at this, the turnkey said, "Let me out of here and give me ten minutes, and I will show you where Sheets is." He took them to a fine home on the river front where a Mrs. R. B. Barker and her sister lived. These two women, who were spiritualists, had become infatuated with the handsome Sheets, who was a perfect specimen of physical manhood, and had bribed the turnkey to let him out of the jail. They had him concealed in one of the rooms of the house, blackened up as a Negro, and planned to ship him into Canada. Sheets was brought back to the jail, where he made another break for freedom, but he was finally hanged for his crime.
An interesting aftermath of this strange case was the deathbed testimony of a man living at Darlington that he was the other man whose woman-like footsteps had been found by the trail of the horses through the woods back of the Sheets home. He said that on that night Sheets had come to his house, got him out of bed, and at the point of the pistol had compelled him to accompany him and transport the body of the murdered Ansley from the pit in the wood, where it had first been thrown by Sheets, to the lonely ravine where the body was discovered.