By Pat Bagely of the Salt Lake Tribune. Published in November 2006
Thomas E. Ricks, an intimate of Brigham Young, led wagon trains to Utah, founded several Mormon pioneer communities and established the school that would one day bear his name: Ricks College, now BYU/Idaho.
Thomas E. Ricks also wrote a recent best-selling book on the mess that the Bush administration made of Iraq.
Obviously we're talking two different people here. I met the younger Ricks last week in Washington, D.C. We were both signing books that examine the missteps of the Bush administration in its war in Iraq. His book, Fiasco, is at the top of the New York Times best-seller list. My book, Clueless George Goes to War, is not.
We hit it off despite his obvious chagrin at not being able to draw. When I mentioned my Utah roots, Tom lit up. "I had a great uncle from Utah," he said. "He was supposed to have been a hit man for Brigham Young."
He went on to tell me that his Ricks ancestor was once brought up on murder charges, but the defense impaneled a jury to their liking by asking prospective jurors if they read The Salt Lake Tribune. If they read the Mormon-baiting Trib, they were dismissed.
Family legends tend to be more colorful than accurate. Still, it was worth going back through old Tribunes from the era to see what was there.
Tom doesn't know the half of it.
Thomas E. Ricks was a high church official with sterling connections. An early convert, he accompanied Heber Kimball's company to Utah in 1848. On the trail, Indians attacked and Ricks was wounded three times. He carried the musket balls in him for the rest of his life. He pioneered several communities and helped found Logan in 1859.
In 1860, the burly Ricks was the acknowledged sheriff in Cache Valley. That was the year he apprehended Edward Skeen, who was thrown in the log schoolhouse, which doubled as a jail, for allegedly stealing horses. Six or seven men traded off guard duties. About 1 in the morning people heard shots. The consensus was Skeen had been shot while escaping.
Fourteen years later, resentment at Brigham Young's autocratic ways, a federal crackdown on polygamy and the revelation of the Mountain Meadows cover-up combined to rip the lid off events that seem to have been long since dead and buried.
It was then that witnesses came forward claiming to have seen Ricks kill Skeen in his sleep.
Ricks was serving on a grand jury at the time, which was a little embarrassing. The question of whether a grand jury could indict one of its members for murder was solved when Ricks was kicked off for fibbing about his five wives.
The trial was a spellbinder. The prosecution witnesses told of Ricks and another unidentified man creeping up and simultaneously firing on the sleeping Skeen. Skeen leapt up and tried to speak but managed only a strangled croak. More shots were fired and Skeen fell. Still more bullets were put into him point blank as his shirt caught fire.
The defense told a very different story. Ricks admitted to shooting a fleeing prisoner. Other men present at the time could only remember seeing Ricks' accusers when they wandered up after the shooting. Some testified to seeing only a single bullet hole in the corpse. None remembered a burning shirt.
Ricks' defenders reminded the jury that Skeen was in jail for horse theft. And besides, there was that talk about him getting a girl from Utah Valley pregnant.
The day after the jury acquitted Ricks, The Tribune, which had been following the weeklong trial in great detail, wrote, "Ricks was not the real criminal. He only obeyed orders." The implication, of course, was that the invisible hand of Young pulled the levers.
Ricks' trial did nothing to sully his reputation among the faithful. The new church president, John Taylor, entrusted him with the settlement of the Snake River Valley in Idaho. In January 1883, he founded what would be called Rexburg (the name was adopted as a germanization of Ricks). In 1887 he was president of the school board that established Bannock Stake Academy.
Ricks died wealthy and revered in 1901. Bannock Stake Academy changed its name in 1903 to Ricks Academy to honor him, and later became Ricks College.