The Legend of Polly Bartlett, the Murderess of Slaughterhouse Gulch

The Wild West was a lawless land. As the US settlers pushed west from the original territories of the United States towards the Pacific coast they encountered many dangers.

The countryside was a dangerous place, the terrain often broken especially in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Outside of the safety of the towns there were bandit outlaws and raiding parties, aside from all the natural hazards. Travel between settlements could be extremely risky.

In these times a saloon or inn would be a welcome sight indeed to a traveler seeking shelter and a hot meal. Such houses would have seemed so much safer than sleeping by the roadside, and in truth they almost always were.

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But they could also have their own dangers. Sometimes the owners of said establishment could be downright murderous. One such was Polly Bartlett, a Wyoming murderess from before Wyoming was even a state.

Who was this lady, whose story survives only from anecdote and rumor? Did she ever truly exist? And what happened to Wyoming’s first serial killer in the end?

A Poisonous Trap

South Pass City in 1868 was a boom town. Located in Fremont County, Wyoming, it saw a huge amount of out-of-town visitors drawn to the area by the Gold Rush. And as with all such places the rapid growth attracted its fair share of criminals looking for their gold too.

In August of that year a young man named Theodore Fountain came to town. He was not a stranger, but the son of a mine owner. That meant that, when he walked into town one evening and was never seen again, there were people who would likely come asking questions.

One of those people was his father Bernard Fountain, who went so far as to hire Pinkerton investigators to find his son. Theodore was tracked to a guest house to the east of South Pass City and its two owners: Polly Bartlett and her father Jim.

Polly and Jim told the investigators that they knew nothing of Theodore Fountain’s whereabouts, but they must have known the game was up. The pair disappeared shortly thereafter, all but confirming their guilt.

The Investigators and local law enforcement returned and searched the property. The stories tell of some 22 bodies found in shallow graves all around the inn, all customers of the pair and all murdered by them.

The press seized on the story and its lurid details. Polly in particular was selected for notoriety, a female serial killer being a rare thing both then and now. The papers took to calling her the Murderess of Slaughterhouse Gulch, a suitably macabre title. 

The police put a price on the head of the two fugitives. This attracted the attention of one Ed Ford, a local who had a personal interest in tracking down the murderers. Ford had himself narrowly avoided becoming a victim of Polly, and his brother Sam was one of the bodies found on the property.

Ed Ford tracked them down and on October 7, after two months on the run, he confronted them. Ed shot Jim dead and arrested Polly, turning her in to the authorities. It is from Polly that we get the rest of the story.

Jim and Polly had started out running a saloon in Ohio. Polly would target men and lure them to have sex with her, and while they were so occupied Jim would rob them. 

This turned out to be a highly lucrative business. Polly and Jim’s first victim, a man named Lewis Nichols, coughed up some $4,000, a fortune at the time. It was this money that led to the pair travelling to South Pass City, and this was the money that financed their lodge, built by Jim specifically to trap travelers.

Visitors to their inn were often carrying valuable gold, as only the affluent could really afford to stay in a public house such as this one. While they were there Polly would serve a hot meal and whisky to the grateful visitor, both laced with arsenic and either deadly on its own.

Once captured Polly was held in jail awaiting trial: if found guilty the sentence would almost certainly be hanging. However this was not to be the ultimate fate of the Murderess of Slaughterhouse Gulch. Instead Polly was to die in an entirely different fashion.

The evening of her arrest she was shot through the window of her cell by Otto Kalkhorst, one of the miners who worked in Bernard Fountain’s mine. The local justice of the peace declined to charge Kalkhorst for this and the story ends there.

Just another cautionary tale about the dangers of Gold Rush towns? Or was Polly Bartlett ever truly real? Sadly we cannot say for sure.

Her lodge surrounded by graves is unknown today. Slaughterhouse Gulch is not just a lurid title but a real place in Colorado, not Wyoming. Other stories have her murderous inn situated in Vermont, and her father’s name keeps changing, from Jim to John, or Stephen.

All that really seems to remain consistent through the stories is that there was a innkeeper called Polly Bartlett who, along with her father, poisoned visitors for their riches. Only the tales survive, and there is nothing contemporary to confirm she ever existed.

Not much remains of South Pass City today. The former boom town is now ghost town, half frozen in time by the petrifying weather. What locals remain know of the story of Polly Bartlett, but here she is remembered as a folk hero, a legend rather than a real person.

It would seem that the extent of the truth of her story, if indeed any of it is true, will remain a mystery forever.

Header Image: Polly Bartlett is said to have killed 22 people, Wyoming’s first serial killer. That is, if she ever existed. Source: soliozuz / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

Written by Allthathistory