Can I explain Dean Burley’s life and death? I’ll tell you right now I can’t, especially since I don’t know where he came from. Also, I’m not sure he’s dead, even though I lost track of him fifty-four years ago and he was a sick and broken-down cowboy even then.

He did have a talent for resurrection. When I first saw him, he was building fence west of Stanley for the Custer County Cattleman’s Association. I was thirteen years old, and with my father, and he stopped by the fence job to see Dean. My father had just contracted with the Forest Service to build log-worm fence along the new Highway 21 at Thatcher Creek, and he wanted to talk with Dean about fencing. He might have been planning to ask Dean if he wanted a job.

Dean had hired a couple of high-school kids. They continued digging postholes while he talked to my father. I sat in the cab of our Jeep and watched. After a little while my father came back, shaking his head. “That guy is one phony son of a bitch,” he said.

 

The next time I saw Dean was two years later. He was building post-and-rail fence for Bill Harrah, the Nevada casino magnate, who had property in Stanley. I was once again with my father, and we stopped to watch Dean and two new high-school kids putting the fence together. They were shaping the ends of poles to fit two-inch holes drilled in the sides of the posts. We called them Tinker Toy fences.

To do the shaping, they had attached a hollow bit directly to the horizontal shaft of a Briggs and Stratton five-horse motor mounted on a four-by-twelve. They’d shove a pole into the bit, shavings would fly, and the end of the pole would emerge as a two-inch dowel.

By this time, our interest in Dean was professional. We had finished our own fence. I had spent most of two summers helping build two-and-a-half miles of it. It was made of sixteen-foot green logs six inches across at the small ends, stacked four-high, and resting on base logs four feet long and a foot across. I had cut logs, hauled logs, placed base logs along the survey stakes at the side of Highway 21, and helped lift logs into place atop the fence.

I was thirty pounds heavier than I had been when I was thirteen, all of it bone and muscle, none of it brains.

That summer we were building trail in the Sawtooths on a new Forest Service contract, but the snow hadn’t left the high peaks yet. Other wealthy people were beginning to buy up the old ranches in Sawtooth Valley. We thought there might be a market for Tinker Toy fences once the new owners spent a few summers repairing barbed wire.

Watching Dean and his crew shape poles put an end to that idea. My father watched them for a while, and said, “That’s a bust-ass outfit if I ever saw one.”

Later that summer, we learned that one of Dean’s helpers had jammed a bent pole into the bit attached to the Briggs and Stratton. Dean had been holding the far end of the pole and it had whirled out of his hands and smacked him in the temple. It was an hour before he woke up, and a month before he healed up so you could look at him.

 

I was seventeen. We had finished the trail in the Sawtooths. I had a bunch of chainsaw and fence-building skills. I was feeling like I could make my way in the world. I moved out of my parents’ house and rented a small cabin in Stanley from a family friend. Rent was thirty dollars a month. Hamburger was three pounds for a dollar. Gas was thirty-five cents a gallon. I needed a job. Dean showed up at my cabin in early June and offered me one.

My salary was three hundred dollars a month and lunch. My job was to cut posts and poles. Dean was still working for Harrah, who had a ranch on the Middle Fork of the Salmon that needed a few miles of fence around it. The Forest Service refused Harrah permission to cut timber in the Middle Fork, so Dean had purchased a timber sale on Potato Mountain, north of Stanley. That was where I began work.

The plan was to trailer posts and poles from the sale to the Challis Airport, peel and treat them there, load them onto Harrah’s de Havilland Twin Otter, fly them into the Middle Fork ranch, and set up fence. Dean had hired an undocumented Mexican and his pregnant wife for that end of the operation. Dean said they were running from the law and had welcomed a chance to hide out on the Middle Fork for the summer.

For most of a month, I worked the timber sale. Dean took me out there the first day and left me there with a baloney sandwich and the log trailer and a chainsaw, telling me to cut eight-foot posts and twelve-foot poles. He showed up nine hours later and took me back to Stanley. I had a cord of wood stacked in the trailer, which was a decent day’s work.

Dean was sick. He had something wrong with his liver, and his sweat smelled like bile. I hung my head out the pickup window to bear the stink of it. Some days he could hardly walk, and he’d sit in the truck while I worked. He’d try to help me load the trailer, but like a lot of jobs in the woods, it was easier and safer to do it alone.

By the end of the month, Dean had trailered most of the posts and poles to Challis. I rode with him to the airport and helped a Challis high-school kid load the Otter. Then I got in, flew over the mountains to the Thomas Creek Landing Strip, and unloaded the plane with the Mexican.

The Mexican asked me if I had been paid, and when I said no, he said he hadn’t either. Then he asked if I had brought food. I hadn’t, and he said he and his wife had been begging food from the ranch kitchen. I got back in the plane for another load, and two more the next day. I spent two nights in the ranch tack room, sleeping under horse blankets, and then went back to Challis. Dean took me back to Stanley to cut more posts and poles.

It was the end of the month. I asked Dean for my wages and he said he couldn’t pay me because he hadn’t been paid by Harrah.

 

That was the end of my time as an employee of Dean Burley. When he came to pick me up the next day, I told him I was going fishing. He said he needed me to work so Harrah would pay him, and that he was dying, and going into the hospital, and that his girlfriend was talking about leaving him. I stopped him before he got to having to shoot his dog, and I said I wouldn’t work for nothing. Dean said he didn’t deserve to be treated this way, especially by someone he had given a job.

The years of building fence and trail had taught me to value hard labor, especially if it was my own. I drove down to Challis to see the county attorney. He was familiar with Dean, because word had gotten around about a fence contractor who didn’t believe in paydays.

The county attorney asked me if I would press charges. I said I would.

Then I found out that Harrah was at his house in Stanley. I found him standing in his yard with his bodyguard. I walked up to him and asked him if he was Bill Harrah. When he said he was, I told him his contractor wasn’t paying me because he wasn’t paying his contractor.

Things happened quickly after that. Harrah stopped payment on the fencing, flew the Mexican out of the Middle Fork, and terminated Dean’s fence contract. I received a copy of a letter from the county attorney to Dean, threatening fraud charges if I wasn’t paid. Dean showed up at my door, saying he had no more money and no more girlfriend, and she had taken the dog. 

I knew he had four horses, pastured at a local ranch, and I told him he could sign them over to me until he got the three hundred dollars.

In this way I ended up as a seventeen-year-old with four horses, one of them a Shetland pony, and I was about to go get them and trailer them to my father’s place when Dean showed up with the cash. I gave him back his bill of sale and that was the last I ever saw him. The horses stayed where they were until one dark August day when lightning hit the tree they were sheltering under and killed them all.

 

I could have died. That’s what I think when I think about that part of my life now. Dean had hired high-school kids for years. He worked them for as long as he could talk them into working. When they quit, he hired someone else. It was a first job for almost all of them. When you’re starting out, it’s easy to let someone else set a value on your labor, and easy to believe them when they say it’s worth nothing. By itself, that won’t kill you.

But there’s the undocumented Mexican, and his pregnant wife, the law they were fleeing, and their food that didn’t show and the begging from the ranch kitchen. There’s the log-loaded flight into the Middle Fork, when I watched thousands of pounds of wood float upward when the plane hit air pockets, and the narrow canyon we dove into, looking for the airstrip. There’s Harrah’s enormous pile of money, at least some of it taken from the rent money of desperate gamblers and their desperate children, and there’s Harrah’s bodyguard, on high alert as I climbed through the Tinker Toy fence onto his boss’s Stanley property. There’s the rumor that Dean was paying on a ranch in Montana, and that the wages he stole from high-school kids went to keeping that dream alive. There’s the county attorney, asking me if I was sure I wanted to press charges, giving me the feeling that maybe I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.

Finally, there’s my sense that Dean could justify anything he did to anybody, simply by seeing himself as a victim. He had told me stories about women he had beaten up because they had rejected him, about men he had put in the hospital because they had cheated him, and the people he was going to kill but hadn’t yet gotten around to it. He was dangerous to the extent he believed his own story. I knew he knew he was lying to other people. I never knew if he knew he was lying to himself.

I don’t think he had any feeling that other people existed, except to be taken advantage of. I had violated that scheme of things. I think he would have killed me if he had thought he could have gotten away with it.

This sounds paranoid, I know, but in the ensuing fifty-four years I’ve learned we live in a world where the only way some people know how to live is to feed off other people’s lives.

 

The last I heard of Dean was that he had stalled halfway up the south side of Galena Summit. He was driving a car that didn’t have enough compression to make it to the top. He had flagged down a tourist in a new diesel pickup and asked for a tow. The tourist was glad to oblige, but when they got to the top Dean told him his car didn’t have brakes. They put the tow strap on the front of the pickup, attached it to the rear bumper of Dean’s car, and eased him down the north side to the valley floor. He was trying to get to Salmon. He had friends in Salmon, he said, and the road was all downhill and he thought he could make it. I never heard that he didn’t.

It made a good story, and after Dean’s rescuer told it in a bar in Stanley, it went around town and allowed us to stop worrying that Dean was going to show up with a new crew and a new contract to build fence, and he’d be part of our lives again. It was nice to think he had borrowed a car in Salmon and made it to Montana for good.

By that time, Bill Harrah had died on the operating table during a heart operation, and the fences around his property had begun to fall apart. Tinker Toy fences looked good for a few years, but they didn’t last once the poles began to sag and pull out of the posts.

Forest Service contracts dwindled and then stopped. It was hard to find a place to live in the valley and hard to make a living if you didn’t bring your job and money with you. It had never been easy anyway, even when your checks were good, your jobs got finished, and you looked a bit like the person you said you were.