1917 Louis Senften was murdered near Leo. This resulted in his neighbor, John Leibig, who was the only one to witness the death, being accused of murder.The accusations against Leibig seem to have been motivated, at least in part, by his being of German origin. Senften had just purchased his ranch after a long effort to do so but there were details concerning that purchased that may have caused Leibig's neighbors to wish him gone. Be that as it may, he was acquitted of murder but was also held on an additional eleven counts of espionage, a fairly absurd accusation against somebody who lived in such a remote location. Leibig, perhaps wanting to simply get past the matter, entered a guilty plea to those charges as part of a plea bargain. He was accordingly sentenced to a year and a half in a Federal Penitentiary, but President Wilson commuted the sentence to one year. The short length of the sentence would suggest that both the Court and the President doubted the espionage claims' veracity.Wyoming's U.S. Attorney continued Quixotic efforts to strip Leibig of his citizenship until 1922, although he had in fact lost it by operation of his sentence. He ultimately would relocate to Colorado after being released from the Federal Penitentiary at Ft. Leavenworth Kansas.
This sort of thing, the miscarriage of justice directed at foreign nationals from the Central Powers, or even just from the more exotic regions of Europe, was unfortunately quite common during World War One. Germans or Austrians who expressed doubts about the war were exposed to such an extent that many regions of the country that were strongly German in heritage made an effort to disguise that during the war. This succeeded so well that many such areas never revived German heritage events and German practices after the war's end.
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