Battle of Cameron Dam

The Battle of Cameron Dam was a prolonged property and logging dispute in Sawyer County, Wisconsin, between farmer John F. Dietz—whose surname was also frequently spelled Deitz—and the Chippewa Lumber and Boom Company. After the Dietz family settled beside Cameron Dam on the Thornapple River in 1904, Dietz prevented the company from sluicing logs through it, maintaining that the dam lay partly on his property and that he was entitled to compensation. The company obtained injunctions against him, but repeated attempts to serve legal process or arrest him were unsuccessful.

The dispute developed into a series of confrontations rather than a continuous armed engagement. The most serious occurred on July 25, 1906, when a sheriff's posse exchanged gunfire with members of the Dietz family, and on October 8, 1910, when another posse surrounded the family home. Deputy Oscar Harp was killed during the final siege, and John and his son Leslie were wounded before the family surrendered. Dietz was convicted of Harp's murder in 1911 and sentenced to life imprisonment. His resistance to the lumber company nevertheless attracted a national following, and supporters portrayed him as a defender of private property against corporate power. His sentence was commuted in 1914, and he was pardoned in 1921.

Background

John F. Dietz was born near Winneconne, Wisconsin, in 1861 and grew up in Barron County. In October 1900, his wife, Hattie, purchased 160 acres (65 ha) along the Thornapple River in Sawyer County. The family did not occupy the property until February 1904, having spent most of the intervening period at Price Dam on the Brunet River, where Dietz performed work for the Chippewa Lumber and Boom Company. He later claimed that the company had failed to pay him fully for watching that dam, an allegation the company denied.

Cameron Dam crossed the Thornapple near the Dietz property. It had previously been known as Leavitt Dam and formed part of a system used to store water and drive logs toward the Chippewa River and the sawmills at Chippewa Falls and Eau Claire. Legislation enacted in 1874 had authorized improvements to the river, including dams and associated flowage rights. Those rights had been mentioned in earlier conveyances of the land, but the reservation was omitted when the property was transferred to Hattie Dietz in 1900.

Dietz maintained that the omission gave him an interest in the dam and the right to charge for its use. The lumber company contended that the previously established rights remained in effect and had not been conveyed with the land. The legal position was therefore more complicated than later accounts depicting Dietz as the sole owner of the dam. His unresolved wage claim arising from Price Dam also contributed to his distrust of the company.

Logging dispute

In April 1904, the Chippewa Lumber and Boom Company was preparing to move approximately of pine down the Thornapple. Dietz posted a notice forbidding trespass and prevented the company crew from opening the dam. He demanded ten cents for every thousand board feet sluiced through it, including logs driven since his purchase of the property. Company representatives met with him during the summer and autumn but did not reach a settlement.

At the company's request, a Sawyer County judge issued an injunction restraining Dietz from interfering with the drive and later issued a warrant for contempt. Sheriff Charles Peterson and several deputies attempted to serve warrants at the farm, but Dietz refused to submit to arrest and threatened officers who approached the house. A federal injunction followed in February 1905. Enforcement efforts involved county officers, United States marshals and, at one stage, detectives employed through a Chicago agency, but none succeeded in taking Dietz into custody.

Part of Cameron Dam washed out during the spring of 1906. Although the structure was no longer useful for controlling a log drive, the outstanding warrants and litigation allowed the confrontation between Dietz and the authorities to continue.

1906 confrontation

In July 1906, Sawyer County sheriff James Gylland traveled to Milwaukee to recruit a posse. Its members included several Milwaukee residents, some of whom were provided with uniforms resembling those of the Wisconsin National Guard. The party traveled by train to Winter and approached the Dietz farm from the former flowage behind the dam.

On July 25, members of the Dietz family were bringing hay into their barn when they discovered armed men advancing through the brush. Gunfire began shortly afterward. Deputy John Rogich was struck in the neck and was later wounded in the hip and heel. Clarence Dietz received a grazing wound to the head. Several members of the posse retreated, while Rogich was temporarily left wounded in the woods before being found and taken for medical treatment. Accounts differed over who fired first and which members of the family participated.

The confrontation brought the dispute much wider attention. Newspapers outside northern Wisconsin began portraying Dietz either as an outlaw who had defied lawful authority or as an isolated farmer resisting a powerful lumber interest. Supporters supplied the family with food and money, and the term “Dietz sympathizer” came into use for those who publicly defended him. His following was particularly strong in the logging districts of Wisconsin and Minnesota, where the conflict was commonly interpreted as one between an individual property owner and the Weyerhaeuser interests associated with the lumber company.

Renewed conflict in 1910

The uneasy standoff continued for several years. On September 6, 1910, Dietz and his sons became involved in an altercation in Winter after Clarence Dietz questioned school-board member Charles O'Hare about schooling for the younger Dietz children. Albert C. “Bert” Horel, a former lumber-company foreman and member of the Winter town board, intervened and was shot in the shoulder by John Dietz. Dietz maintained that he had fired in self-defense, while witnesses gave conflicting accounts of the confrontation. The shooting renewed efforts to arrest him.

On October 1, Sheriff Mike Madden and a group of deputies attempted to intercept the Dietz children on the road to Winter. Gunfire was exchanged, and Myra Dietz was seriously wounded. Her brothers Clarence and Leslie were also injured. Myra was permitted to receive treatment, while law-enforcement officers began assembling around the family home. Governor James O. Davidson declined requests to send the National Guard but dispatched state officials in an attempt to negotiate a surrender.

Siege and surrender

By the morning of October 8, a force of deputies under Madden and chief deputy Fred Thorbahn had taken positions around the Dietz buildings. Approximately 22 deputies appear to have been placed on the firing line, although contemporary accounts gave larger figures for the total number of officers and others gathered in the vicinity. Reporters, photographers and spectators also traveled to Winter, and the siege received national press coverage.

Shooting began after deputies saw Leslie outside the house and ordered him to surrender. When he ran toward the buildings, officers fired at him, and John Dietz returned fire. Dietz later moved to the barn, while deputies fired toward the house, barn and nearby lumber piles. During the exchange, deputy Oscar Harp was shot and killed. John Dietz was wounded in the hand, and Leslie was also wounded. Dietz returned to the house during the afternoon and surrendered with his family at approximately 3:30 p.m.

Responsibility for Harp's death was disputed. The prosecution maintained that he had been killed by fire from the Dietz position, but testimony differed about the location and direction of the fatal shot. Dietz denied killing him. Later petitions for clemency cited inconsistencies in the evidence, including a subsequent affidavit by deputy John Britton qualifying parts of his trial testimony.

Trial and imprisonment

John and Hattie Dietz and their son Leslie were tried at Hayward in May 1911 for Harp's murder. John Dietz was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment at the state prison in Waupun; Hattie and Leslie were acquitted. Charges against Clarence and Myra Dietz were subsequently dismissed. The Wisconsin Supreme Court affirmed the judgment on May 14, 1912.

Members of the family and other supporters continued to campaign for his release. They presented illustrated lectures using photographs of the family and the Cameron Dam property, appearing in theaters, churches, halls and tent shows in Wisconsin and neighboring states. Leslie and Myra Dietz were among the principal lecturers.

Governor Francis E. McGovern commuted Dietz's sentence from life imprisonment to 20 years on December 30, 1914. A second application was submitted in 1916, supported by a petition from a majority of the jurors who had convicted him and by Britton's affidavit, but Governor Emanuel L. Philipp declined to grant a pardon. On May 12, 1921, Governor John J. Blaine granted Dietz an absolute pardon. Blaine cited Dietz's prison record and noted that, with statutory credit for good behavior, his commuted sentence would otherwise have expired in 1922.

Dietz returned briefly to public lecturing after his release. He visited the former Cameron Dam property in 1923 and died in Milwaukee on May 8, 1924.

Stage adaptation

The dispute was dramatized for the stage soon after the 1910 confrontation. Wisconsin journalist and theatrical writer Harlowe R. Hoyt wrote The Defender of Cameron Dam, described as an "old-fashioned melodrama". The play was touring by early 1911; the January 14 issue of The Billboard listed Defender of Cameron Dam (No. 2) among theatrical attractions.

Film adaptation

In August 1913, Motography reported that Maibelle Heikes Justice had completed a three-reel scenario for the Advance Motion Picture Company of Chicago and that the company's general manager, George L. Cox, planned to film the story at the actual location with members of the Dietz family participating. Advance subsequently produced the film as The Battle of Cameron Dam, using the Cameron Dam area as a location and drawing on professional performers and local residents.

The film received its first Milwaukee exhibition at the Alhambra Theatre in September 1913. It was subsequently presented in Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, the Dakotas and the Pacific Northwest as part of the family's campaign for Dietz's release.

Legacy

Cameron Dam no longer survives. A Wisconsin historical marker near the site recounts the dispute, the 1910 siege and Dietz's eventual pardon. Photographs of the dam, the family and the property are held by the Wisconsin Historical Society and other Wisconsin repositories.

The dispute has continued to be interpreted both as a law-enforcement confrontation and as an episode in the conflict between rural property holders and the large lumber companies that dominated northern Wisconsin. Dietz's prominence during the controversy, the support campaign conducted during his imprisonment and the dramatization of the events in the 1913 film helped preserve his reputation as the “Defender of Cameron Dam.”

References