George McClain was born in Illinois in 1877, but moved with his family to Nebraska in 1884, when his father, Samuel McClain took out a homestead claim on land one mile west and six miles north of McCook. It was a difficult adjustment for the family, who were used to the wooded landscapes in Illinois. And Red Willow County was -- "a broad expanse of prairie, without a sign of a house, or a tree, or a furrow".

Sam McClain was a man of many talents. At first he supplemented the family's income by doing carpenter work for the neighbors, and though the family met the living and improvement requirements for keeping the homestead, he much preferred life among more people, and after 1899 the family took up permanent residence in McCook.

Sam also "fiddled" at neighborhood dances to make a bit of extra money. He often said that he did not know what they would have done in those early days if it were not for his "old fiddle." Sam became a leading well driller in the area, bringing in many wells that were 250'-300' deep. Later on Sam "cried" auctions throughout Southwest Nebraska, and was McCook's first Standard Oil agent, offering a tank wagon service, selling kerosene and gasoline throughout the area.

Sam's second son, George was also an entrepreneur. Early on he established a lunch wagon on West B St. -- a business which he expanded to include lunch wagons in nearby towns. After World War I he bought the old ice pond south of McCook, which he expanded into the Pastime Park, with its large dance pavilion, swimming pool, small lake on which couples could take romantic rides in a rented rowboat, picnic grounds and other recreational features. But these were merely sidelines for the enterprising George.

In 1915 George McClain accepted the job of deputy sheriff, under Red Willow County Sheriff, Ed Flitcraft. When Flitcraft resigned McClain filled out his term, then ran for the office on his own, a position he filled until his death in 1934. Sheriff McClain largely turned over the operation of his various businesses to his three daughters and his son, Claude, while he attended to the business of protecting Red Willow County.

Sheriff McClain was a competent and popular lawman, but one case, in 1925, McClain would have soon forgotten, and took a good bit of ribbing about the outcome.

Two men, Adolph Krause and Hallie Bartlow, who later were identified as professional, hard core criminals, hit the old Temple Theater, on Norris Ave., cracked the safe and made off with some $700 in cash and a large number of endorsed checks.

McClain and his Deputy, Pete Karthauser, immediately formed a posse and began to pursue leads which began to come into the office almost immediately. But instead of being a routine, straight forward case, things began to go wrong right from the start.

Ray Search, who was a friend of the Sheriff's and a frequent passenger in the Sheriff's car during late hour patrols, was just leaving his job at the theater when he received a telephone call from McClain, asking him to drive to Indianola to pick up three armed men and begin a house to house search of the farms along the road to Stockville. The fugitives had stolen a car from the McCook Auto Co. and had made their escape, only to crash their vehicle into an embankment just out of Indianola and were believed to be headed north. One man had been thrown through the windshield in the crash and had been bleeding badly.

Ray and his little posse had made their search of the houses, which had taken most of the night. Arriving in Stockville they received a call, instructing them to join the main posse in Curtis, where the fugitives had been found, now holed up in a hotel on the edge of town.

The lawmen surrounded the hotel and called for the burglars to come out with their hands up. The wanted men did come out, but were reluctant to put up their hands. Sheriff McClain sternly commanded the two to follow his orders, and to emphasize his command he fired his shotgun, which he thought was loaded with birdshot, into the ground. The action did indeed have the desired result, and the men were quick to put their hands high up on the hotel's outer wall. However, instead of being loaded with birdshot, as the Sheriff had believed, the shot was loaded with iron balls, which glanced off the pavement and shot a horse, which was grazing in a field across the street from the hotel.

The horse belonged to the State Agricultural College, and was considered quite a special horse when it was bought a few years before for $1,100 -- a princely sum in 1925. The shot had broken the poor animal's leg and it had to be destroyed, much to the chagrin of Sheriff McClain.

The wanted men were duly handcuffed and returned to McCook to await trial. When the two were safely in jail it was discovered that the keys to the handcuffs had been left in Curtis, and a blacksmith had to be summoned to remove the handcuffs.

Two days after their arraignment in McCook, as Deputy Karthauser was locking up for the night, he was summoned to the prisoners' cell. One of the men said he was cold and asked for a sweater, which Karthauser supplied. But when he opened the cell door the two prisoners somehow overpowered him, beating him about the head with the heavy ring of jail keys, which they managed to wrest from him in their attack. (Fortunately, Deputy Karthauser was not severely injured and was soon back on duty.)

Again a posse was formed, which overtook the pair at the Republican River, near the Narrows area, east of McCook. The posse members were about to capture their quarry, as they waded across the shallow river, when one of the deputized posse members, following closely after the fugitives, stepped into a deep hole in the river and had to be rescued by the other lawmen, while the two men they were pursuing escaped -- gone, vanished without a trace. Though the posse searched the rest of the night, and there were continuing rumors from people who claimed to have spotted the jail breakers, Sheriff McClain never saw the two men again.

Sometime later word came to the Sheriff's office that Krause and Bartlow had been captured in New Mexico and were being held for trial in Santa Fe. For the first time since the incident in McCook Sheriff McClain was in a good mood, as he prepared charges against the two -- robbery, of course, attack on an officer of the law, escape from jail (and acute embarrassment of an elected official). He immediately requested that the two be returned to Red Willow County for trial. But again McClain was disappointed. The two were kept in New Mexico, where they were tried and convicted of "more serious" charges. Presumably, by the time they served their time in New Mexico Sheriff McClain and the Red Willow County Judicial System had forgotten about them.

But the incident was not forgotten in McCook. 75 years after the fact, Ray Search went into gales of laughter as he recalled Sheriff McClain's "Case of the Burglars, Krause and Bartlow."

Source:

Trails West, by Ray & Rutledge, Gazette Centennial 1882-1982,

Personal Interview with Ray Search