B005S8O7YE EBOK (38 page)

There were also public notices in the weekly paper. By law, it was required that the minutes of the monthly meetings of the county commissioners be published in the
Messenger
. I found the minutes of little interest until one day in the summer of 1981 when Rick called me over to show me what he had just read. The minutes reported that Thurlo French had come to the meeting to ask the commissioners to declare the road that ran through Robinson Bar public. Thurlo went on to say that he hoped that a declaration of public road by the commissioners would force Carole King to open her gates so the public could continue to drive through her property.

Excuse me??

T
he next morning, Rick and I drove downriver along the steeply winding road to the Frenches’ place. When we arrived, the Frenches behaved as if nothing were amiss and warmly invited us in.

Doing his utmost to contain his consternation, Rick stood his ground, looked down at Thurlo, and got straight to the point.

“I was just wondering why you found it necessary to go to the commissioners to get something you already have.”

Thurlo mumbled an answer that was difficult for me to hear, but it sounded as if he was saying he appreciated that I was letting them drive through my property. Then he said, more audibly, that although he had other ways of accessing his property, he liked driving through the ranch.

“Only reason I spoke up at the meeting,” he declared, “is ’cause I wanted to make sure other folks could still come through. Hope there’s no hard feelings.”

No hard feelings? Was he serious??

He hadn’t denied that he said and did what the minutes reported. He and Dorothy continued to offer explanations and
excuses that didn’t make any sense, nor did they answer Rick’s question. Finally, frustrated and bewildered, we left.

Erring on the side of generosity, I continued to allow the Frenches to drive through the ranch. Even after we read that they and their neighbors were persistent in asserting that I had no right to lock my gates, I allowed all of them to drive past our home until the predictable annual occurrence of snow closed the road for the winter. At that point I sent a letter to the Frenches giving them one last opportunity to confirm that I had a legal right to lock the gates to my property. When they declined to do so, I thought, Okay. That’s it.

First I notified the Frenches and their neighbors that they no longer had permission to drive through my property. Then Rick changed the combination. The next time we saw the Frenches was in federal court in Boise the following year.

I’m not sure how much time or thought Custer County’s attorney put into the document she wrote on behalf of the county unilaterally declaring my road public. I had never seen or heard about the declaration of public road until I read about it in the
Messenger
. No one from the county had ever notified Rick or me. They simply declared my private property public and considered it a done deal. It was on the basis of no notice and no hearing that my Boise attorney advised me to file suit in federal court charging Custer County and the Frenches with violating my constitutional rights.

At the trial the Frenches and other witnesses for the defense swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and then they proceeded to say things that left me incredulous. As I watched people take the stand, one after another, and make allegations about the history of the ranch that impugned my name and reputation, I thought, How can they say these things with a straight face? Rick and I had given them the combination in good
faith, and the Frenches initially had responded with appreciation. How did we become their enemy? Why were they doing this??

I had suspicions that there were industrial interests not among the named parties. We were given to understand that the Frenches’ attorney was working for them pro bono. He also happened to represent a large mining company with an interest in access to the mountains above my ranch. And although I don’t recall this being disclosed to me before I bought the property, a Forest Service official had reportedly urged the commissioners to declare the road within the ranch public during my predecessors’ ownership.

Few people in rural Idaho had the financial resources to fight the government. I suspected that those seeking to take my property were counting on my not having the will to fight back, but I had both the will and the resources. Even so, I started out slipping backwards. In the federal case, the county was on trial to defend its purported violations of my constitutional rights, but the opposing lawyer and his witnesses treated me as if I were the one on trial. When the Frenches’ lawyer puffed himself up and said, “We don’t cotton to outsiders coming in from New York and blocking public access to a public road!” I didn’t cotton to being characterized as the outsider in question.

Pausing to gather indignation until it reached the bursting point, he expounded further, “Why, that road’s been public ever since the ohhhhhld stagecoach came through back in eighteen sixty-two!”

With the location and history of the ranch and the roads and trails around it a matter of public record, I believe that the Frenches’ lawyer either knew or should have known that the road within the ranch had not been public since 1939, and that I wasn’t blocking access to so much as one inch of public land. But his claims were duly reported and widely disseminated. Few people outside the courthouse heard the truth. I had already fired my
original Boise lawyer. Now I watched helplessly as a second Boise lawyer let far too many opportunities go by without making what even I as a layman thought were obvious objections to the defense counsel’s tactics.

At last the defense rested. The judge ruled that he couldn’t deliver a decision until I could prove that I had been damaged, and I couldn’t prove that I had been damaged until I had proven that the road was mine to lose in the first place. The federal case was put on hold until such determinations could be made in the proper venue, which was state court. The “action to quiet title” that I would have to file would be decided in Challis, the very town from which the declaration of public road had emanated.

The misinformation repeated most often by the Frenches and others was that the gates had never been locked in all the years prior to my ownership of the ranch. No one disputed that the entire length of Robinson Bar Road used to be the only road, that it used to be public, or that Robinson’s Bar had been a stagecoach stop in the nineteenth century. And everyone agreed that after the highway had been constructed on the north side of the river in 1939, Custer County had legally abandoned the old road on the south side, which by law gave ownership of the road to the adjacent landowners. Outside the ranch, ownership transferred to the United States Forest Service; within the ranch, to the ranch owner. That happened in 1939. With public trails available outside both gates, my assertion of ownership of the private road within the ranch would not deny any member of the public access to the public land around the ranch.

The declaration purported to reclaim the road through a state law that held that a road, having been open to the public for five years and maintained at public expense for five years, could be declared public. My claim was that there was a constitutional defect in that law (and consequently in the declaration) because the law failed to provide for notice or a hearing.

Before the dispute, local lore was consistent with what the seller had told me, that previous owners had locked the gates at least once a year to affirm their private ownership. But we couldn’t prove it because no one would come forward to testify to that on the witness stand. With the federal trial on hold pending a state court ruling, it seemed like a good time to look for another lawyer. It was a good thing Steve Millemann agreed to represent us when he did. Custer County was about to escalate the dispute.

I
t was a beautiful Indian summer day in October 1981 when three deputies drove up the river and parked outside the locked gate on the west side of my ranch. In full uniform, with hats, badges, and sidearms, they entered my property on foot. They continued on to the residential area and headed for the lodge. Having already seen them approaching, Rick and I stepped out to greet them before they could knock.

“Hi there!” I said brightly. “Pretty day, isn’t it?”

“Yep,” one of them said, looking around as if to verify that this was indeed true. “Sure is.”

“Been a dry summer,” Rick said.

“Yep. Sure has.”

“Creek’s gonna get lower before the snow flies.”

“Prob-lee.”

There were several more exchanges between the men about natural phenomena, during which I silently noted the incredible beauty of the blue sky and the sun shining through the golden aspen leaves quivering among the lodgepole pines. At last one of the deputies—I’ll call him Larry—broached the subject they had
come to discuss. Almost apologetically, he volunteered that they had been dispatched by the sheriff and instructed by the county attorney to order me to unlock my gates and to arrest me if I didn’t comply.

“Arrest me? On what grounds?”

“On the grounds that you’re blocking a public road.”

“On what does the county base its claim that the road is public?”

The two deputies who weren’t doing the talking shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. None of the three men seemed to know exactly how to answer that question. However, they had been sent on a mission, and they didn’t want to go back to Challis with the gates still locked and me not in custody. They looked at each other.

“Uh… I don’t know,” one of the other deputies hazarded. “You, Larry?”

Larry didn’t. Nor did the third deputy.

When they left, the gates were still locked, and I wasn’t in custody.

The next day Larry came back alone. He was still in uniform but minus his hat, sidearm, and sidekicks. He had returned with the county attorney’s answer to my question about grounds for my arrest. It was the declaration of public road, which he handed to me along with a summons requesting my appearance in the criminal case of
Custer County v. Carole King Evers
.

With the federal judge waiting for a legal determination of whose road it was, and now with a criminal case against me, I had no choice but to file an action to quiet title in Challis, where a state judge would preside. It was my call whether to have the matter decided by a judge or a jury. There was some risk in leaving the decision in the hands of a single judge who might or might not be sympathetic, but I believed that was less risky than leaving it up to twelve people in a community whipped to a frenzy over my
supposedly having denied them the right to drive on a road that had been used by the public ever since the ohhhhhld stagecoach stopped there.

This now made three cases in which I was involved.

Prior to being litigants, neither Rick nor I had felt the need to change our common-law cohabitation status, but now we felt the time had come. We became husband and wife on May 3, 1982.

I probably could have earned a degree as a paralegal with all the hours I spent working with Rick and Steve to understand the ramifications of every “whereas” and “herewith” in the documents pertaining to our case. In addition, I was still homeschooling the boys, milking goats, and doing all the other activities that made up the fabric of my daily life. I was also working on several music projects and visiting my other three children in New York and Los Angeles. Something had to give. It was with a heavy heart that I brought my son to live with his father and sister and attend public school in California.

Rick took on the job of detective, a role he clearly relished. Though he hadn’t been formally educated beyond high school, he had a high native intelligence. He enjoyed strategizing, and he was good at it. One day he sent Richard to Challis to make copies of the cassette tapes of the commissioner meetings at which my road had been discussed. Those tapes were supposed to be available to the public. I didn’t actually expect the commissioners to allow Richard access, but he came back with twenty-two tapes on which he had copied all the original tapes. On one we heard the commissioners debating whether they should ask their attorney to write up a declaration of public road. On another we heard one of the commissioners asking, with an unmistakable contextual reference to me, “What if she sues us?” That question and the discussion around it clearly established the commissioners’ awareness that they might have been doing something actionable.

Having obtained a smoking tape, we now turned our attention to getting information from the Forest Service. It took some doing, but their files supported my position that the road within the ranch was private, that I had every right to lock my gates, and that I wasn’t blocking public access to any public land.

I had purchased a 1982 Franklin computer with primitive software that allowed me to catalog each document, type in fields of information, and search for that information later. Each search took several minutes for the computer to cycle through the data, but I didn’t mind. It was a lot more efficient than searching through physical notes, documents, and our collective memory. After analyzing the documents in this way for a couple of weeks, we were able to pinpoint information about the Forest Service’s deficiency of maintenance and other things that were useful to Steve. We now had more than enough documentation to get the criminal case dismissed. But first we had to prevail in the quiet title action.

During that trial in 1985 the claim that the gates had never been locked prior to my ownership was repeated over and over by the Frenches and others. An elderly lady who had lived on the ranch for many years during the first half of the twentieth century made a compelling witness when she said in her slightly cracked elderly-lady voice, “I lived at the Robinson Bar Ranch for over thirty years, and we never,
ever
locked those gates!”