Earl Durand

Who was Earl Durand?

Walter Earl Durand was a mountain man who lived off the land in the mountains of Wyoming during the years following the Depression. From an early age he taught himself to live with ease in the wilderness. He was a crack shot and with a variety of weapons could hit almost any target.

One spring morning in 1939 he was arrested and jailed for poaching elk, resisting arrest, and for killing a rancher's calf. He was sentenced to six months in jail for the poaching and awaited sentencing for the theft of the calf. Two days later he escaped the Cody jail by assaulting a deputy with the milk bottle taken from a dinner tray which the deputy was bringing him. He forced the deputy to drive him to his parents' home in nearby Powell. Durand shot and killed a deputy sheriff and a Town Marshal in the driveway of his parents' home. For ten days Durand eluded arrest by fleeing to the mountains. He killed two members {Orville Linaberry and Arthur Argento} of the sheriff's posse tracking him. Montana mobilized its National Guard armed with a mortar and a howitzer as Durand's escape neared the Wyoming/Montana border. The sheriff's posse attempted to drop teargas from a plane on his last known position but failed to flush him out of hiding. He had already escaped by carjacking the posse's radio operator and forcing him to drive him back to Powell.