James Cunningham Shepley

James Shepley's great grandson Roger Angell wrote in The New Yorker magazine, June 7, 2004:

One of my great-grandfathers, James Shepley, was born in Saco, Maine, in 1826, went to Bowdoin College, and set up a law practice in the frontier town of Red Cloud, Minnesota, where he had a hand in the writing of the state constitution. In his mid-thirties, he won a Civil War commission as an aide to a cousin of his, General George Shepley, but he contracted malaria and was confined for months to a hospital in New Orleans. Back home at last and eager to recover his health, he became a farm manager in Naples, Maine. He was married by this time, with three children, and in 1873, hoping to improve the Shepley fortunes, he bought into a sheep ranch near Fresno, California, and went west with a friend. He planned to bring his family out to join him, once he got settled. One spring night in 1874, while sleeping at a camp at Little Dry Creek, he was murdered—garroted with a piece of wire. Two Portuguese sheepherders were tried for the crime but acquitted; there was no evidence of a robbery or suggestion of some other motive, and the case was dropped. The mystery was never cleared up.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/06/07/040607fa_fact#ixzz0r5EF...