In this time of Defund the Police vs Blue Lives Matter, it mattered to me to tell the story of a beloved young police offer killed by bootleggers in 1893 North Dakota. Locals called it “the most atrocious crime in Traill County history” and waged a 20-year battle for justice, fighting back ferociously when political and fraternal cronies tried to free to convicted murderers. Officer Even Paulson’s death at age 29 will always be a tragedy. In many ways, the story feels like it could still happen—does happen?—today. We have to keep telling these stories. We have to know where we came from to know where we want to go.

Many thanks to Wild West magazine for helping me keep Officer’s Paulson’s memory alive.

[Link to full article on HistoryNet.com below]

EXCERPT

There is truth to the old adage “every tombstone tells a story.” Few do so as provocatively as Mayville, N.D., police officer Even Paulson’s headstone. For 129 years snow, ice, wind and moss have done their best to sully his grave marker in the town’s tidy cemetery, but not enough to obscure the gripping inscription:

EVEN PAULSON
Born Dec. 29, 1862
Killed while on duty
As Nightwatchman at
MAYVILLE, N.D.
Sept. 3, 1893
1 o’clock a.m.

To lay eyes on the chiseled epitaph is to feel the piercing depth of loss dealt to a close-knit community. It’s uncommon to find the cause of death on a tombstone. In this case those few words held the genesis of their aftermath: a community’s anger, the spectacle of a sensational trial played out in the media across five states and the repercussions that would reverberate for two decades.

Paulson was 4,000 miles from his birthplace and just 30 years old when his life came to an abrupt and horrific end down a dark alley in small-town North Dakota. Born in Seljord, a village in Telemark, Norway, he was 21 years old when he took what was likely his last look at his homeland and his parents. Arriving in Quebec in 1884, he headed for Granite Falls, Minn., and within two years filed declaration of intention papers (a precursor to becoming an American citizen) in Yellow Medicine County. By 1892 he had made his way to Traill County, N.D., where on May 13 District Judge William B. McConnell granted him citizenship.

North Dakota’s 1889 entry into the Union as a prohibition state ensured there would be wild confrontations between bootleggers, speakeasy proprietors (aka “blind piggers”), the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and lawmen sworn to uphold the state constitution, regardless of their own attitudes about alcohol. But Officer Paulson was universally trusted and immensely liked in Mayville, even by those he arrested. “His personality was so engaging,” writes Harold Wenaas in his 1996 book Stener: The Sheriff From Telemark, “he could talk unruly toughs and drunks into voluntarily accompanying him to the city jail.” Paulson believed policemen should be visible in their communities, thus he became a fixture on the streets of Mayville, talking to children, parents and business owners.

But a crime to which there were no eyewitnesses except the victim’s dog can only be retold second- or thirdhand, so the story of Paulson’s murder must be pieced together through the public record and from numerous newspaper accounts, splashed across front pages from Iowa to Minnesota, including at least two Norwegian-language papers.