“Calvin Graves Will Soon Be Liberated” proclaimed the headline in large, bold type on Page One of the Bangor Daily News on Dec. 17, 1904.

Underneath was a photograph of a neatly dressed man with a bow tie, starched collar and suit jacket. The blazing eyes, the air of regal haughtiness, the expression of repressed rage, however, let the reader know Calvin Penney Graves was no ordinary killer.

Eighteen years before, Graves had gunned down two game wardens deep in the woods in remote Down East Maine in what some rural people regarded as a blaze of righteous glory. Graves had become a folk hero of sorts. After all, he had been protecting his dog.

While the extreme nature of the crime was condemned, the man himself was spoken of in awed tones around campfires late at night at hunting camps deep in the woods. His story was repeated around kitchen wood stoves. Graves had taken on the establishment – the rich sport hunters, the railroad men and the hotel owners who catered to them and their minions, the lawmen who tried to enforce the new game laws.

After a decade of petitions, Gov. John Hill, in one of his last acts in office, had commuted Graves’ sentence. He would be a free man on March 6, 1906.

In the latter half of the 19th century, as part of a national conservation movement, Maine began to pass hunting laws that curtailed the activities of rural folk used to taking game when and where they chose. One of the laws banned “dogging,” the time-honored practice of using a dog to drive a deer or a moose into a nearby body of water where the hunter could shoot it with ease.

Even though dogging was considered a respectable and efficient hunting method in many circles, “doggers were portrayed as the blackest brigands in the Maine woods, and the state came down hard on them,” according to Edward D. Ives in his book “George Magoon and the Down East Game War,” which includes a thorough account of Graves’ career.

Calvin Graves was born in Amherst out on the Airline around 1844. As a young boy, he moved with his family to Hancock, but he maintained close ties to his relatives back in Washington County.

That’s where he was headed in November 1886 to go hunting with his friend Jim McFarland. Accompanying them was a neighbor’s dog, Smoker, that Graves said was along to scare up partridge.

Along the road they were warned that wardens would kill the dog, and Graves, who was known for his hot temper, replied on more than one occasion that he would shoot any man who shot his dog.

The hunters set up at an abandoned logging camp on Fletcher Brook in the Machias lakes region in Township 36. That’s where they ran into two game wardens, Lyman Hill, a one-armed Civil War veteran who lived in East Machias, and Charles Niles of Wesley.

Exactly what happened next remains a bit murky. The wardens made it clear the hunters had no right to have a dog in the woods and they were going to seize and presumably kill Smoker. One of them cocked his rifle and left it standing by the corner of the camp building.

There were more heated words in which Graves and McFarland argued they had a right to have a dog in the woods as long as it wasn’t hunting deer.

McFarland sat in a wagon with the dog between his knees. Hill ordered Niles to take the animal. As Niles moved toward the wagon, Graves shot him in the head with his double-barreled shotgun, and then quickly turned the gun on Hill, emptying the second barrel.

“God damn you,” said Graves to his companion. “No one cocks a gun on me, Jim, I told you so. No man gets the better of me.”

The wardens appeared to be unarmed, although each had a pistol under his shirt. McFarland told a man who appeared on the scene later that Hill had said, “Shoot the dog if you have to shoot the men first.”

McFarland hid in the woods for a few days and then gave himself up. He was tried as an accessory and found not guilty. Cheers went up in the courtroom.

After getting some money from relatives, Graves headed for the coast. He rowed a boat nights for three days out to an island in Penobscot Bay where he boarded a vessel to Portsmouth, N.H. He headed west by land, eventually settling in Anaheim, Calif., where he took a job as a hotel porter under the name of John T. Smith. After a relative in Amherst revealed where he was hiding, he was arrested in March by Maine law enforcement officers.

His return to Maine created a sensation. An estimated 1,500 people greeted him at the train station in Bangor. Crowds gathered outside the Calais jail, where he was allowed to talk to them through an open window, and they packed the courtroom for his trial

Graves was convicted of second-degree murder. He had convinced the jury that he had been threatened and acted in the heat of passion.

He had become a hero or at least a symbol to the poor folk who lived off the land and to a few others as well. He had done what some fantasized doing or what they knew would happen eventually under the oppressive game laws that favored rich people from away.

In a letter to his daughter, Fannie Pearson Hardy, who was then a college student, the fur trader and journalist Manly Hardy wrote, “Graves was sentenced to life. I think it a most unjust sentence and believe it was done by money. … The whole thing is a hollow farce. Rich men go to Nickatowis, and kill deer with hounds and then tie a rock to their necks and sink them and no one finds it out.”

The daughter, who became the famous Maine writer Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, wrote in a piece in Forest and Stream magazine several years later, “It is now and long will be considered a worse offense to kill a dog than to use him in running deer.” She warned more violence could happen if things didn’t change.

At Thomaston, Graves proved a model prisoner. In the 1890s efforts got under way to have him released. One petition reportedly contained thousands of names including the judge who sentenced him and 10 of the 12 men on the jury.

Upon announcement that his sentence had been commuted, the NEWS said in an editorial, “There is no question as to the fact that Governor Hill acted for the greatest good.”

The Bangor Daily Commercial sent a reporter to Hancock who wrote that among neighbors, “the general sentiment is in favor of a pardon for Graves.”

Upon his return home a year later, The Ellsworth American said, “Calvin P. Graves has been busy during the past week entertaining neighbors and friends. All are glad to see him.”

Today anyone who committed such a crime would be locked up and the key would be thrown away. Back then, however, before strict hunting laws had universal respect, the Fletcher Brook incident showed what can happen when competing cultural values clash.

Postscript: On a cold, windy day early in November of this year, a dozen game wardens gathered at the grave of Charles Niles in Wesley. The memorial service marked the beginning of an effort to erect a proper gravestone with his name on it. Also on hand were two granddaughters of Lyman Hill, who is buried at Gardner Lake in Whiting. His grave reads, “He gave his arm for his country and his life for his state.” Niles and Hill were the first two of 14 game wardens who have died in the line of duty in the 125-year history of the Maine Warden Service.

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordaily

news.net.