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Until the winter of 1938-39, we had no car bridge across Elk River. In summer, we could go out through the hills with a car, but that route was closed in winter. If we went to town in winter, it was with a team and sled (or, of course, we could catch the stage, which was also sometimes a sled but usually a Model A pickup).

After the "high water" passed each summer, Dad put a "foot log" across the river so we could get across to our mailbox. During the nine months of the year that we could use the foot log, Mom seldom went to town. She would call Clay Shaw at the Center Grocery and give him her grocery order. Clay would put the order on the stage and the driver (Berky Byers) would deliver our groceries to our mailbox for 10 cents (and he was very grateful for this extra income).

The foot log went out with the high water each spring. The only way out of the ranch was on our trail through the hills, which was the same trail on which we rode horseback to summer school at Fly Gulch. The school, naturally, would have been inaccessible to us in winter.

During high water we couldn't cross the river to our mailbox, but since we were riding to school at Fly Gulch anyway, we just had our mail delivered to the schoolhouse. The mail carrier on the route (not Berky Byers, who had the Clark route; Fly Gulch was on the Mystic Route) was sort of a crazy guy. Well, actually I don't remember that he was so crazy then, but he was pretty bad later on.

Anyway, you can imagine how excited the school kids were when the stage driver stopped with the mail and told about Charlie Reister having found an unidentified corpse at his ranch (which was later the Clarence Wheeler place just north of Steamboat's Stolport on Slate Creek). Reister was fixing his pasture fences as they came out from under the snow when he found this body that had obviously been there most, if not all, of the winter, and which the coyotes had worked over pretty bad. No one at the time could identify the corpse or turn up any sort of clue to the mystery.

As I said, this former stage driver was (later on, at least) sort of crazy. He had a wife and three children, all of whom he beat and abused. When I was in high school, this fellow's wife came to the authorities with the story that the corpse Reister had found was that of her former husband, whom her present husband had murdered. She said that between thinking about the murder for all those years and suffering from constant beatings, she had lost her mind. When her husband was questioned, he denied knowledge about the murder but assured all that his wife was insane and that her story was entirely a matter of her imagination. The woman was examined, found insane, committed to the state mental hospital and, of course, her testimony was discarded.

If this old boy had any knowledge of the facts in this mystery, that knowledge went to the grave with him. The mystery is still unsolved to this day.

In discussing this strange story with my old neighbor Gus Sandelin, Gus told me that he felt sure the mail carrier was not guilty. Then he told me why.

The fall before the corpse was found, Gus was returning on horseback from his sheep camp on Buffalo Pass to his home in Fly Gulch. Gus took the Crawford Hill Road (which turns west just a few rods south of where the corpse was found in a little gulch east of the main road). It was getting pretty dark, but Gus could see a strange car parked between the road junction and where the body was later found, and he thought it rather odd that there was no one around the car - which he was sure was one he'd never seen before (and he would most certainly have known that mail carrier's car or the car of most any other local resident as there weren't that many cars around at that time).

Gus had no reason to give the matter any amount of thought until the corpse was found the next spring. And then he could offer no information that would have helped solve the mystery, only that the year before, he had seen a car he wasn't familiar with and hadn't been close enough to see its license plate.