The Judge Who Fired the Barn:

Everton Conger’s Long Road from Ford’s Theatre to the Beaverhead Valley

A Dentist Turned Soldier

Long before he became a footnote to one of the most searched-for men in American history, Everton Judson Conger practiced dentistry in a small Ohio river town. Born in 1834, the son of a Presbyterian minister, Conger had by 1856 set up a dental practice in Fremont, Ohio, where he crossed paths with a locally prominent lawyer named Rutherford B. Hayes, a connection that would shape the rest of his life. Conger enlisted in the Union army during the Civil War, initially as a private in the three-months 8th Ohio Infantry, then returned to Fremont when that term expired. He soon raised a company for the 3rd West Virginia Cavalry, bringing his older brother Seymour along as a fellow officer.

On October 24, 1862, the Conger brothers and about twenty-six troopers patrolled the area between Catlett’s and Bristow Stations in Virginia when they ran into a much larger force of Confederate cavalry, roughly one hundred and twenty strong. Ordering his men to disengage, Everton took a bullet in the side that lodged near his spine, then fell from his horse and was slashed across the face by a rebel cavalryman as he lay on the ground. Left for dead through a frigid October night, he was found alive the next day by a rescue party dispatched from Union headquarters. He carried the bullet near his spine for the remainder of his life, a wound that would resurface, in more ways than one, on the Montana bench two decades later.

Into the Manhunt

By 1864 Conger had risen to lieutenant colonel of the 1st District of Columbia Cavalry, a regiment organized under Colonel Lafayette C. Baker to counter Confederate partisan raiders in Northern Virginia. A second combat wound, suffered at the Staunton River Bridge that June, ended his field service, and that autumn he followed Baker into the shadowy world of the National Detective Police, the War Department’s wartime intelligence arm. On February 8, 1865, Conger formally resigned his cavalry commission to join Baker’s detective service full time.

Two months later, John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ordered Baker to join the manhunt, and Baker in turn summoned two of his most trusted men: his cousin, First Lieutenant Luther Byron Baker, and Everton Conger. Conger, Lieutenant Baker, and a detachment of the 16th New York Cavalry under Lieutenant Edward P. Doherty crossed into Virginia by steamboat and combed the countryside for signs of the fugitive, with Conger and Baker riding ahead as scouts, knocking on doors and pressing residents for information. On the night of April 25 into April 26, 1865, the detachment cornered Booth and his companion David Herold at the Garrett farm outside Port Royal, Virginia.

Conger’s own account, given to a Montana newspaper more than fifty years later, describes the standoff at the tobacco barn where Booth had taken shelter. Conger recalled trying to force the door in the darkness, calling on Booth to surrender, and Booth answering that he would fight the whole detachment if they withdrew forty yards, before asking for five minutes to confer with Herold. Herold emerged after those five minutes to cries of “coward” from inside the barn, while Booth refused to give up his carbine and vowed he would never surrender. It was Conger who set fire to the straw inside the structure to force Booth into the open. As Conger moved toward the door with his revolver drawn, a shot rang out; he found Booth lying face down, and a fellow officer told him that Sergeant Boston Corbett had fired through a crack in the barn wall, the ball entering Booth’s neck from behind. Booth was carried to the farmhouse porch, where, according to Conger, he asked that a message be relayed to his mother — that what he had done, he had done for his country — before dying roughly half an hour later.

For his part in the operation, Conger received fifteen thousand dollars, the largest single share of the one-hundred-thousand-dollar government reward, and he later testified at the trial of Lincoln’s alleged co-conspirators, describing his role in the manhunt and identifying personal effects taken from Booth’s body. That disproportionate share of the reward money did not go unresented. Luther Baker, who received a fraction of the sum, spent years afterward suggesting Conger had fired the fatal shot himself rather than Corbett, a claim later assassination researchers such as Otto Eisenschiml amplified without ever substantiating it. No credible primary evidence supports the theory, and Conger’s own trial testimony and later interviews consistently credit Corbett with the shot.

From Illinois Law Office to Montana Bench

After the war, Conger settled in Carmi, in southern Illinois, where his brother Chauncey had a law practice. Conger studied law there and, in 1871, built a home in Carmi that still stands, later commemorated with a historical marker. His old Fremont acquaintance Rutherford B. Hayes had by then risen to the presidency, and in 1880 Hayes rewarded the friendship with an appointment that would carry Conger to the northern Rockies. He was named an associate justice of the Montana Territorial Supreme Court, succeeding Henry N. Blake, and served in that capacity from 1880 to 1884.

Territorial judging in Montana was a punishing, itinerant business, and Conger’s tenure illustrates why. Riding circuit meant enduring long overland trips through raw, sparsely settled country, often in brutal weather, to preside over courts that convened wherever space could be found — including, in the territory’s rougher early years, saloons. Conger arrived in Montana without his wife, Emma, who remained in Ohio, and he leaned on old vices, particularly gambling and, increasingly, alcohol and morphine taken to manage the pain of his still-unhealed war wounds.

In 1883 those habits became a political weapon. A dispute in Custer County pitted Governor John Schuyler Crosby, a Republican who had engineered the removal of sitting county commissioners, against Democratic opponents and against attorney Wilbur Fisk Sanders, with whom Conger had personal history — Conger had ruled against a major Sanders client, the Northern Pacific Railroad. Sanders and Crosby moved against Conger, and President Chester A. Arthur suspended him from the bench on charges of incompetence, neglect of duty, gambling, drunkenness, and improper associations. Historian John D. W. Guice, in his study of the territorial supreme courts of the Rocky Mountain region, later noted that the complaints against Conger were confined to Gallatin and Custer counties and never arose in Madison or Beaverhead counties, where Conger also held court, casting doubt on whether the charges reflected genuine judicial incompetence rather than political retaliation.

The federal government sent investigator Peter Shannon to Helena to take testimony, a process that generated more than a thousand pages of transcript now held in the National Archives. Shannon’s report acknowledged that Conger’s war wounds likely contributed to his drug and alcohol use, but concluded that his drinking exceeded what medical necessity could excuse, ruling his conduct “unbecoming, unseemly, and indecorous.” Even so, Shannon urged leniency on account of Conger’s military record and lasting injuries, and Conger was reappointed to the bench — but only one day before his term expired, effectively ending his judicial career.

Beaverhead County and Final Years

Conger did not leave Montana. He resettled in the Beaverhead Valley in the southwestern part of the territory, working as an attorney and rancher out of Virginia City and later Dillon. In 1887 he was elected prosecuting attorney of Beaverhead County, a post he held until Montana achieved statehood in 1889. Federal census records place him in Dillon, Beaverhead County, by 1910, and local histories and genealogical indexes confirm he remained a fixture of the small southwestern Montana legal community for the rest of his working life, his role in the Booth manhunt becoming, in his adopted state, a matter of local memory rather than national fame.

In his final years, Conger left Montana to live with his daughter and her husband in Hawaii. His son-in-law’s later appointment as a federal judge in the Territory of Hawaii brought the family to Honolulu, where Conger, then eighty-four, gave what would be his last interview to a Montana newspaper, the Conrad Independent, in April 1918 — recounting, one final time, the details of the barn at Garrett’s farm. He died in Honolulu on July 12, 1918, roughly three months after that interview appeared. His body was returned to Montana and interred at Mountain View Cemetery in Dillon, the county where, unlike Gallatin or Custer, his reputation had reportedly remained untouched by the 1883 scandal.

A Life Between Two Frontiers

Conger’s story resists the easy shape of frontier legend. He was neither the storybook lawman nor the disgraced villain that later writers sometimes made of him; he was a wounded veteran who parlayed a single, violent night in Virginia into a modest fortune and a judicial appointment, then spent the rest of his life navigating the ordinary hazards of territorial public life — political feuds, chronic pain, and the scrutiny that came with holding office in a place still assembling its institutions from scratch. His arc from a Ford’s Theatre-era manhunt to a Beaverhead County courtroom is a reminder that Montana’s territorial bench, often remembered only through the men who built its enduring legal architecture, also absorbed figures whose fame originated somewhere else entirely and whose Montana years were, by comparison, quieter and more contested than their earlier headlines suggested.

Works Cited

“Colonel Conger House.” Illinois State Historical Society and White County Historical Society, Historical Marker Database, 1965, www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=177874. Accessed 15 Aug. 2026.

“Everton Judson Conger (1834–1918).” FamilySearch, Ancestors, ancestors.familysearch.org/en/MR6L-TGL/everton-judson-conger-1834-1918. Accessed 15 Aug. 2026.

Guice, John D. W. The Rocky Mountain Bench: The Territorial Supreme Courts of Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming, 1861–1890. Yale UP, 1972.

“LTC Everton Judson Conger (1834–1918).” Find a Grave, Memorial ID 15688545, Mountain View Cemetery, Dillon, Beaverhead County, Montana, www.findagrave.com/memorial/15688545/everton_judson-conger. Accessed 15 Aug. 2026.

Montana Historical Society Library and Archives. Vertical Files Index, Biographical, entry “Conger, Everton J.” Montana Historical Society, mths.mt.gov/Research/Compass/docs/MTHS-Vertical-Files-Index-Biographical.pdf. Accessed 15 Aug. 2026.

Wick, Rob. “A Malign Satan in Human Form” and “Just Who Is Everton J. Conger…” One Man’s Rebellion Record, 15 Apr. 2008 and 17 Mar. 2008, ejconger.wordpress.com/category/everton-j-conger/. Accessed 15 Aug. 2026.

Wolfe, Richard A. “Tracking Booth: Everton and Seymour Conger.” Military Images, Spring 2021, www.militaryimagesmagazine-digital.com/2021/04/09/tracking-booth-everton-seymour-conger-spring-2021/. Accessed 15 Aug. 2026.