The young game warden had known what he was going to find ever since he first spotted the big Lincoln in the forest clearing and saw the machine gun lying across the back seat. After glancing quickly around him, he had moved quietly and carefully through the woods toward the dam, and now, standing on the edge of the riverbank above the rushing water, he could look down and see them. He stood there silently in the shade of the trees, nervously rubbing his hands on his trousers, knowing that only a fool would try to go down there and take them alone.
All I have to do is turn around and get the hell out of here, he told himself, and nobody will ever know. With those guns, they could cut me to pieces before I’d gone two feet. His eyes traveled from the automatic rifle that was leaning up against the sign reading CLOSED AREA. FISHING PROHIBITED to the heavy pistol butts that protruded from the pockets of the three fishermen. Why should I get myself shot over nothing but a few lousy fish, Ernest Swift thought.
But he knew all along that he had made his decision before he had even seen the Lincoln, he had made it back when he first heard that Chicago mobsters were coming up into his territory in Wisconsin. He had realized right then that sooner or later he would have to tangle with them. “Ah, the hell with it,” he muttered impatiently, and stepped out from the protection of the trees and started down the steep bank.
One eye on the guns that stuck out of their back pockets, Swift moved rapidly, counting on the noise of the water to drown out his movements. Just as he was congratulating himself for having successfully taken them by surprise, the three men whirled around—guns gripped in their hands. Swift’s first reaction, before he noticed the empty belly holsters, was to think that they had been fishing with guns in their hands.
“What in hell do you want?” a cold voice demanded. The heavy face behind the voice would have been instantly recognizable to any newspaper reader in those days of 1928; chiefly celebrated as the inventor of the one-way ride, he was known as “Machinegun” Frankie McErlane.
Fighting to keep his voice steady, Swift said, “I’m going to have to arrest you. Let me see your fishing licenses.”
“Jesus, a hayseed cop,” McErlane sneered. “Well, whatta you know.” He grinned at Swift, somehow amused by the picture of this little shrimp taking on three armed men. The second gunman, an ugly, stupid giant named Frank Novak, stood looking at Swift out of contempt-filled eyes. With his attention on McErlane, Swift did not realize that the third man had circled behind him until he heard the soft, emotionless voice: “Goodbye, you son of a bitch. We’re settling this one right now.”
In that instant, Ernie Swift knew for sure that he had been a fool. But he’d done what he said he’d do; what he thought he had to do. At least he had that . . .
Looking back on it, there was no way the script could have been rewritten. The whole pattern of Swift’s brief career had led him, inevitably, to that rendezvous in the woods. Swift had been brought up on the stump-choked farm in a hinterland populated by rock-fisted lumberbacks, where, to measure a man, you simply matched his deeds to his words. If they fit, he was a man. If not, he was either a fool or a coward. In this simple, direct community, where lines were so clearly drawn, there was general agreement that Swift was a man, even though he stood no more than 5 feet 8 in his caulked boots and never weighed more than 135 pounds.
When Swift signed up as a state game warden in 1926, he figured he’d made a man’s solemn promise. His first assignment had been to ride herd on a gaggle of transplanted Kentucky mountaineers who had just run the former warden out of the woods in the northeastern end of the state.
Since 1900 wild-living men had been coming up from the Kentucky hills because of the logging wages, or to gather ginseng, or because they’d shot themselves a man down home and wanted to lay low for awhile. They considered game as something God put into the woods to keep a man alive, and recognized no seasons on anything with hair or feathers. Among other things, they fished the trout streams with dynamite. They were crack woodsmen, fearless and—in their own way—possessed of a rough chivalry. Swift figured they’d respect anyone who could meet their standards; who could prove their equal in woodcraft, physical courage, and straight talk.
It went as he figured. On many occasions in the next two years he found himself alone in a woods full of slouch-hatted, spindly, be-whiskered mountaineers, every man-Jack of them armed. If they met casually, Swift and the mountaineers would nod with mutual respect. If it was a business meeting, Swift would walk boldly up and tell them to consider themselves under arrest—he’d expect them in court next day. It was a unique game of tag they played, Swift and the hill men, and they played it straight with each other. The Kentuckians admired this skinny little blue-eyed, red-haired lawman, who would walk right up to a band of armed clansmen and tell them where to go, and then have the guts to turn his back and saunter away.
Swift turned in such a brilliant arrest record, and earned himself such a reputation that in 1928 he was assigned to Sawyer County to take on the toughest chore any game warden in this nation was ever called to face. High-riding Chicago gangsters had chosen the woods around Swift’s hometown, Hayward, as a place to get cool when Chi got a little hot. It was certainly remote—the villagers had a word for it. The roads thereabouts, they said, ran to “Hayward, Hurley, and Hell.”
Al Capone had a resort for his boys on the east fork of the Chippewa River. Bugs Moran and the Barker-Karpis gang showed up, along with Potatoes Koffman, Lefty Counsel, and Gus Winkler. The incredible Joe Soltis, a huge slob of a beer baron whose Lincoln touring car sported a mounted machinegun and flew a red bandana from the left headlight, just like a general’s flag on a staff car, had a resort and a golf course on Barker Lake on the Chippewa’s east fork.
The Chicagoans gaily machine-gunned deer at night with the aid of auto headlights; fished illegally for muskellunge in the dam across the Chippewa where the big fish were held in a huge trap until the wardens could net them out and lift them across. Rules? Laws? Those were for suckers, the Chicagoans said. Trifle with us, they snarled, and you’ll wind up at the bottom of a lake wearing a concrete kimono.
Before starting out after the gunmen, Swift tried to figure up a plan of attack, just as he’d tried to figure a method of dealing with the clannish Kentuckians. But there was no common ground. The Chicagoans weren’t woodsmen; they were openly derisive and defiant, and had not the vaguest spark of manhood about them. They were merely deadly.
Therefore, Swift figured he’d have to play the game his way for it was the only way he could imagine at the time. So, on the first morning out on his new beat he walked up to the first three Chicagoans he saw breaking the rules—and now he had a gun at the back of his head.
The man behind Swift, a chunky Italian named Joe Milaga, was about to fire when McErlane suddenly snapped, “Shove it, Joe.”
Then, as the warden stood tense and sweating, the three gunmen began arguing about whether or not to kill him. Figuring his best bet was to take the initiative, Swift turned to McErlane and said, as calmly as possible, “Let’s see your license.”
The effrontery of it dazed the hoods. McErlane fumbled in his pockets and produced the last thing Swift expected to see—a fishing license. Silently, McErlane handed it over.
Swift’s clammy fingers dropped the paper and it fluttered to the ground. As Swift bent to retrieve it, Milaga snatched at the Colt that swung on Swift’s hip. Swift, not daring to turn around, brushed the Italian’s hand away. Then he asked Novak for his license. Again, Milaga reached for Swift’s Colt, and this time Swift slapped the gunman’s hand. Then he turned and collected Milaga’s license. Still on the offensive, Swift stepped past the befuddled gunmen and slid the big muskellunge they’d caught into a gunny sack. He picked up the sack, collected the fishing tackle, and acidly advised the trio that fish and tackle were confiscated, and that he expected to see them in court at Hayward at 10 in the morning.
“Goddam, Frankie, I kill him now!” Milaga howled, dragging his gun out again, but McErlane was doing the thinking for the mob that morning.
“Leave him go,” he said. “He’s just a hayseed.”
Swift knew it would be silly to go up against such odds again, or to think simple candor would have any appeal to McErlane’s kind of animal. He decided to chuck his woodsman’s skill into the game to even things up. Specifically, he slipped into ambush beside the forest road that led to the dam, and, two days later nabbed Joe Soltis himself.
The 260-pound beer baron was puffing up the hill from the dam carrying half a dozen big muskies when Swift stepped out of the brush, gun in hand.
“G’wan punk, put it away,” Soltis muttered. He summoned up a false little laugh. “I ain’t gonna hurt ya,” he added.
Swift did not change expression, and Soltis’s smile faded.
“Okay,” he rasped, “if you think you can pin a rap on me, let’s go. But you’d better wise up punk. Nobody arrests Joe Soltis.”
“I just did,” Swift said softly.
He took Joe to court and after half an hour of profane pleading and threatening, Joe Soltis contemptuously peeled $50 from a roll that was at least twice as large as the judge’s and Swift’s annual income put together.
“You was lucky” Soltis jeered as he and Swift walked out of court. “I been tried twice for murder in Chi and beat the rap both times. The two of them together wasn’t half the grief as this stinkin’ little fish business. I hope you enjoyed it this time, because you ain’t gonna do it again.”
“Go shoot somebody,” Swift said, tired of it all. “But break a game law, and I’ll see you again.”
“I don’t think you’re right bright,” the beer lord muttered. With that, he climbed into his bulletproof Lincoln and roared out of town, the bright bandana fluttering from the headlamp bracket.
Swift kept playing it that way, choosing his own ground and taking the offensive, but two weeks later he ran into a situation he couldn’t handle on his own terms. He’d arrested three of Soltis’ men, but couldn’t herd all three of them to court. He told them to report, and when they didn’t come to town to give themselves up, Swift knew he’d have to go after them—out on Soltis’ camp on Barker Lake.
When Swift drove up, he saw four thick-bodied, mean-eyed, pasty-faced city types squatting on the front porch. They didn’t say anything. “I want to see Joe,” Swift told them.
Just as in the movies, one of them nodded slightly, heavy with menace, and glanced at the door. It was an invitation. Swift walked past them, through the door, and the four men followed, pistols drawn, and took up various vantage points around the room behind him. Soltis waddled into the living room through another door, carrying a pint of whisky. It looked no bigger than a pill bottle in Joe’s hand.
“Why, Oinie,” the beer baron rumbled genially, “What’s matta, Oinie?”
Joe let his vast bulk down into a chair behind a wooden table. He waved one of the boys to pull up a chair for Swift. The warden ignored the hospitality. Then, feeling trapped and tense, Swift told Joe how it was.
“Aw, Oinie,” Joe protested, smiling greasily. “Don’t get hard about it. Sit down. Let’s have a drink.”
He emptied the whisky bottle into two tumblers and pushed one across the table. Swift, still standing, shook his head. Joe downed one tumbler at a gulp and reached for the second glass.
For the next half hour Soltis tried to tell Swift in a hundred different ways to stop being a Boy Scout. Swift didn’t seem to be getting it. At last, Soltis seemed to think he realized the basic problem and hauled out his enormous bankroll, the sight of which had sent so many Sawyer County natives slavering. He spread the bills on the table.
“It’s yours Oinie,” Soltis said expansively. “Take any or all of it. Here, take a grand, whadda I care? Only lay off me and my boys.”
“The state pays men,” Swift said flatly, feeling idiotically heroic. The state was paying him $140 a month. He knew his words sounded childish, but he was determined to finish what he had started. “I have to take three of your boys back to town with me,” Swift added.
“You stupid bastard!” Soltis exploded, lunging to his full 6 feet 3, his big face red with whisky and anger. “Do you know how easy it would be for me to kill you?”
Soltis brushed the table aside, lurched out the front door and down the porch steps. There was a flock of chickens scratching around in the dirt a few yards from one of the cabins. Soltis kept chickens for a purpose, and not the eggs. He drew his .45 Caliber Army Colt and blasted away.
The big man wasn’t all reputation. He had gigantic shoulders and arms bigger than your legs, and he was a good fisherman and a good shot. Firing rapidly, he clipped the heads off three moving chickens. Then he turned back to Swift. “Catch on?” he grated.
“Yeah, I know,” Swift said. “But all I came here for was to tell you your boys have to come to court today.”
Then he turned his back and walked past the quivering headless chickens and the silent gunmen and the fuming Soltis and climbed into his car. It was a cool day, but Swift’s shirt was soaked with sweat.
At 5 p.m., just as court was about to close, Soltis and a dozen hoods walked in. Three of the gunmen admitted they’d hunted out of season and Soltis, without a word, threw a roll of bills on the desk before the bench. As the big man turned to leave, he spotted Swift near the courtroom door. “Now lemme tell you something,” Soltis sneered, towering over the slender warden. “Up to now I been easy on you. I thought maybe we could be friends. But the hell with that. Next time you think you gotta take me, you better come shooting.”
“All right,” Swift said. “I will.”
Swift reported this conservation to the home office in Madison, and the effect was immediate—bringing Swift face to face with Gov. Walter Kohler Sr., father of the present governor. After the warden had told his story, the governor asked, “What do you intend to do about it?”
“Kill Soltis, if I have to,” Swift said.
“I think you are absolutely right,” Kohler said. “Stay with it, but use good judgment. Take all the men you need to get the job done. If necessary, I’ll declare martial law in Sawyer County and call out the National Guard to back you up. These men may be the law in Chicago, but they’re still a bunch of small-time hoodlums in Wisconsin, and we won’t permit them to ignore our laws.”
It’s idle to speculate how much grief this nation would have been spared had all governors thought the same way. As it was, such was the nature of the times that Governor Kohler’s statement was banner news not only in state papers but throughout the Midwest.
Characteristically, Swift moved first. He called in four other wardens, and this time, in addition to their issue Colts, they carried rifles. Instead of driving through the forest road that led to the dam, the law men entered the woods at dusk, worked their way around, and spent the night in a tent deep in the woods about three miles upstream.
It rained through the night, and it was raining in the morning as the wardens hiked through the wet woods to stop, at 5 a.m., at the edge of a gravel pit near the dam. They put their glasses on the dam, and there was Joe, fishing.
The wardens arranged an ambush, and Soltis and his two fishing companions eventually walked smack into the leveled rifles.
“Hey,” the racket lord complained, his big face pale. “What the hell is this? How come all the goddam hardware?”
“You told me the next time I had to take you to come shooting,” Swift explained. “Go on. Move.”
“Aw, Oinie, you’re always getting hard about it,” Soltis wheedled. His black eyes kept darting from side to side, his tongue licked his thick lips. He glanced uneasily over his shoulder at the road which Swift had used before in his normal patrol of the dam area.
“I can’t unnerstan’ how you guys could get in here,” Soltis muttered.
The wardens caught on right away. While two of them disarmed Soltis and his minions, two others slipped into the woods and, one by one, discovered and disarmed the five guards Soltis had staked out below the dam.
The next day Soltis was gone from Wisconsin forever. Told of this, Swift’s only comment was, “I don’t think Joe ever understood me.”
But the remaining Chicagoans understood Swift only too well. He was a menace to their liberty and pursuit of happiness, and they marked him for death. The Federal Bureau of Investigation got wind of this and Swift was yanked into hiding, despite his bitter protests. “People will think I’m yellow,” he said. “I’m damned if I’m going to run.”
“We’re getting you out of there before you get killed” the chief warden told him.
The state hid Swift and his wife in the Soldier’s Home at Mendota while FBI and state police began to comb the Chicago element out of Hayward’s hair. Swift fumed and fussed, but he stayed put, and it’s just as well he did, for the gang’s threat was no joke.
Swift hadn’t been out of Hayward long before a black Packard purred into town and stopped at the pool hall. Out stepped a good-looking, clean-featured youth, dressed with quiet taste in expensive city clothes. “Does anybody know where I can find Ernie Swift?” he asked.
George Taylor, an aged Indian wolf hunter, said sure, he knew. “I take you to him.”
“That’s awfully nice of you,” the young man replied.
There were two sinister customers sitting in the back seat of the big Packard, surrounded by machine guns, rifles, pistols, saw-off shotguns, and boxes of ammunition. All at once, the Indian knew he didn’t want to go anywhere.
“Get in there, you half-breed son of a bitch,” the young man said, and shoved the Indian into the car.
In front of Swift’s house, Taylor received his instructions. “When he comes to the door,” the young man snapped, “get the hell out of the way and maybe you won’t get killed.”
Taylor knocked several times. The little, hollow sounds echoed through an appalling silence. The Swifts were still in Mendota.
The gunmen retrieved their decoy and held him hostage until they got to Brice, a tiny village, where they turned him out of the car with a parting word of advice. “Tell anyone about this,” they said, “and they’d make a good Indian out of him.”
Swift might have resented being yanked to one side while the cleanup went on, but the move proved a turning point in his life. He soon found himself riding a desk in Madison, learned the intricacies of top-level administration while advancing steadily through the ranks, and in 1947 he was made director of Wisconsin’s Conservation Department.
There were two red-hot issues when Swift took office: One was the invasion of the lamprey eel, which had scuttled the lake-trout fishery, and the fishermen were lobbying for a law permitting them to use fine-mesh nets and claim anything caught in such nets to be a legal fish. Second, North Country hunting-camp proprietors bitterly resented the conservation department’s plan to kill off a percentage of Wisconsin’s deer herd in order to save it.
This was necessary because there wasn’t enough natural food for all Wisconsin’s deer, so all deer were threatened with starvation. The department figured the only way to save the herd was to thin it, but thinning it, in the minds of the hunting camp proprietors, meant fewer targets. And fewer targets meant less customers. One of the most influential resort owners in the North Country came storming into Madison.
“Our deer are more important to us than you are, Swift,” he said. “I’m warning you. If you insist on ramming a deer-killing program down our throats, I’m going to get you if it takes every penny I own and every dollar I can borrow.”
“Look,” Swift said reasonably. “You’ve been running a resort for maybe thirty years. Right here in my office there’s a fellow been studying deer, scientifically, for as long as you’ve been in the resort business. Now, if he told you how to run your resort, you’d laugh in his face. But when you come here, you’re trying to tell him you know more about deer than he does.”
“Maybe I do,” the resort man said, unmoved. “I’m warning you. You prune that herd, and we won’t rest till we get you fired.”
The man left and Swift sighed. It was Soltis all over again; this time with political complications. The legislators committed to the fishermen, and those committed to the resort men were all set to do a little logrolling at the expense of the State Conservation Department. They’d voted for each other’s bills and, meanwhile, try to cut the department down to size. Already they were reportedly cooking up a bill to support the public parks out of funds received through the sale of hunting and fishing licenses—funds which Swift’s department then received and which it desperately needed. Further, the bill would reduce the department’s cut of the state’s general fund.
Accordingly, Swift found a friend in the legislature and got him to offer a bill that would support the public parks through an increase in real estate taxes. This thought so horrified the legislature that a hasty truce was arranged. They promised that hunting and fishing license funds would remain in Swift’s department, and the department’s cut of the general funds would be increased, if only that real estate tax bill would be quietly forgotten.
All this was very well, but Swift had no intention of fighting one battle and calling it a war. He had the department prepare 24 conservation bills, and Sprecher went to the floor to fight them through. It went as planned. The legislators were kept so busy considering Swift’s bills they never got around to those favored by the would-be fish thieves and deer-starvers. Instead, the legislature was maneuvered into passing 19 of the 24 bills Swift proposed.
In the three legislative sessions held during Swift’s directorship, he and Sprecher got 79 out of 100 bills made into law—by far the best record of any government department with any legislature. The bills succeeded not only because they were as honest as Swift himself, but also because they were presented by a man who walked boldly in where few dared to tread; by a man who called his shots and never gave a political damn. The laws, incidentally, added $5 million in revenue to Swift’s department.
Among other things, Swift’s audits disclosed that the department operated several trout hatcheries so inefficiently that fingerlings were costing the state $4 each. These inefficient hatcheries were closed. Now you can rob a trout fisherman’s house, kill his kids, rape his wife, and burn his aged mother at the stake with impunity, but you dare not close a trout fisherman’s hatchery. A short time later, a burly gent in a Mackinaw was tramping into Swift’s office. “I want to punch his nose,” he explained to Swift’s receptionist.
The trout man never had a chance; Swift was already attacking as the man came in. Half an hour later, burdened with a stack of pamphlets, reports, and icthyological papers, the trout fisherman left Swift’s office mulling over what Swift had said about new wonder drugs eliminating hatchery diseases, and about how closing inefficient hatcheries had actually resulted in a four-fold increase in fingerling production.
The federal government had been dickering for Swift’s services for years before 1954, when President Eisenhower’s men asked Swift to quit the minors and join the big league in Washington. There was a newly created job tailored specifically for Swift in the Fish & Wildlife Service—that of assistant director. Under it, Swift would not only help form policy but see it carried it out, and act as liaison between the federal government and the states. His job was simply the conservation of timber and wildlife in all the states.
In the 18 months Swift held this job, he set new Washington records for plain speaking, stepping on important toes, and red-tape snipping.
As the months wore on, it became apparent to Swift that he and John L. Farley, director of the Fish & Wildlife Service, held different philosophies.
Swift couldn’t stomach the granting of oil leases in public wildlife refuges, and he said so. He told it to his superiors, and to anybody else in earshot.
Most important, he flatly refused, when ordered to do so, to compose a memorandum that would nullify all the federal rules which make it illegal to bait ducks.
The story is interesting and ugly. The fact is, our duck population is so small that shooting over baited grounds would seriously deplete it. Hence, it’s against federal (and Canadian) law to bait duck. Rich men’s gun clubs in Ohio, Maryland, and California want that law changed. In plain words, their politically potent members want a better chance for a bird than the chance granted any plain Joe.
One day Farley made a speech to conservation groups pledging the federal duck-baiting regulations would be upheld. Two days later he called Swift into the office and told him to draw up a memorandum for Farley to sign—a memorandum so worded as to make enforcement of the regulations practically impossible. Swift point-blank refused to have anything to do with it, and the memorandum was prepared by someone else in the office.
“If you sign this after what you promised those people,” Swift told Farley with unconcealed anger, “you better buy a one-way ticket to China, because they’re going to come shooting.”
It is to Farley’s credit that the memorandum remained unsigned, for the political pressure on him was, and is, immense.
At this point Swift, who’d been feeling that he was in the position of a quarterback who had been ordered by the coach to throw the game, resigned his federal job. He was immediately offered another, also especially created for him, as executive director of the National Wildlife Federation. Swift accepted eagerly, feeling certain that he could do more good as spokesman for three million sportsmen and conservationists, than he could do in any of the top federal jobs.
He’s had the job less than two years now, and already it’s borne fruit. As all sportsmen know, the military has always acted as if game laws didn’t apply to military reservations, much as the mobsters of Swift’s youth didn’t think game laws applied to them. Swift, as federation director, kept sniping mercilessly at the Pentagon and a year ago last March the Pentagon ran up the white flag. Henceforth, the brass told Swift, the military will obey conservation laws and practices on its reservations.
The oil-lease giveaway battle isn’t over by a long shot, as far as Swift is concerned. And he’s still watchful for a return of the baiting issue, which will come back as surely as the ducks themselves. But Ernie Swift feels that he’s now in the best possible position to carry out his lifelong aim—the protection of America’s wild life. – Ken Smith and John Keats. n
Note: “Gang-Bustin’ Game Warden” originally appeared in the April 1957 issue of True magazine. True, also known as True, The Man’s Magazine, was published by Fawcett Publications from 1937 until 1974. All efforts have been attempted to research and locate copyright information.