PENDLETON, Ore. Convicted killer Claude Dallas is trying to sell the saddle he rode for more than a year to escape a manhunt after he killed two Idaho Fish and Game officers.
The self-styled mountain man is hoping to sell the saddle for $10,000 through an Oregon dealer during the Pendleton Round-Up next week.
Jerry Severe, 63, the owner of Working Girls Gift and Antique Shop in Pendleton, says she never met Dallas.
But the longtime horsewoman and former rodeo queen says many consider Dallas a legend for twice outrunning police in the wilderness. Some old friends of Dallas kept the saddle in storage before asking her to sell it for him during the annual rodeo.
''This is the saddle he loved,'' Severe said. ''This is his only saddle that I know of, other than pack saddles.''
Dallas is serving a 30-year manslaughter sentence at the El Dorado Correctional Facility in El Dorado, Kan., for the January 1981 slayings of Idaho Fish and Game officers Conley Elms and Bill Pogue.
Elms and Pogue had tried to arrest Dallas for poaching. Each of the bodies was found at a remote southwestern Idaho camp with a .22-caliber rifle bullet to the head.
Dallas eluded police for 16 months before his arrest and conviction in 1982, then spent nearly another year on the run after he broke out of the Idaho State Prison in 1986.
He was on the FBI's ''10 Most Wanted'' list and became the quarry of bounty hunters hoping to claim a $15,000 reward. He led pursuers on a chase throughout the Western United States and Mexico before he was captured by federal agents at Riverside, Calif., in March 1987.
Dallas became the first person in Idaho history to be cleared of a prison escape charge following his 1987 capture, and was later transferred to the Midwest because Idaho authorities considered him an escape risk.
Dallas, 43, since has been the subject of at least two books and a television movie. Author Jack Olson mentioned the saddle in his 1985 bestseller about Dallas, ''Give a Boy a Gun.''
The saddle is one of a kind, with a high fork and saddle horn, round cantle and narrow loop seat. It was built especially for Dallas by the Ray Hole Saddle Shop in Grangeville.
Dallas ordered the saddle in the spring of 1971 while working as a buckaroo on the Alvord Ranch in southeastern Oregon. He took delivery the following year in Nevada, paying $375 at a time when he was earning $200 a month, according to a letter he sent Severe.
''I had that saddle built to fit the type of horse I was riding at that time I ordered it,'' Dallas said in the letter. ''Never have ridden a saddle that suited me more. Unfortunately, I had to leave it behind'' following his arrest in 1982.
Severe said she has the original bill of sale for the Dallas saddle. If it does not sell during the Round-Up, it's going to the High Noon Auction in Mesa, Ariz.
''I'm not sure why he needs money; I think it's legal fees,'' she said.
