The Schumachers at 521 9th St N

Clay County Histories

Markus Krueger | Program Director HCSCC

Here’s a good Halloween story for you. The house of Charley Schumacher, Moorhead’s most notorious Prohibition booze smuggler, was said to be haunted by Slim Jim Shumway, the Wild West desperado whose death caused the formation of Clay County’s government.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve told the story of the gunfight between Shang Stanton and Slim Jim Shumway. It occurred on April 25, 1872, in a Wild West tent town called Moorhead. The eight-month-old settlement had no law, no order, no police, no jail, and nobody in charge. “A gunfight before and after breakfast was not an uncommon occurrence,” pioneer James Sharp recalled of this time.
Dan “Slim Jim” Shumway was a particularly rotten desperado who got into an argument with a gambler named Charlie “Shang” Stanton. The next morning, Slim Jim walked up to Shang in a tent saloon and shoved him. Shang turned around and shot Slim Jim in the gut. It was a mortal but not immediately fatal wound, so Slim Jim started shooting back at Shang as he ran away down the road. Before Slim Jim collapsed into the mud, one of his stray bullets hit and killed bartender J. P. Thompson. This happened at Herberger’s in Center Mall.
This gunfight was not unique. Rather, the significance of this gunfight, the reason I keep retelling this story, is that it was the last straw. A mob of early Moorheadians formed and appointed a sheriff to arrest Shang, a county attorney and a judge to put Shang on trial, and some County Commissioners to make these appointments official. Clay County now had a government. But we didn’t have a graveyard yet, so people walked a bit north and east of town, dug a hole in the prairie grass along the river’s tree line, and put Slim Jim Shumway in it.
The town grew over the decades, and according to the stories, the Partridge family built a house on top of Slim Jim Shumway. They didn’t know that at the time, though. They found out a couple years later when they decided to add a basement and Mr. Partridge dug up a skeleton. That’s not just anybody’s skeleton, old timers realized. That’s right about where we buried Slim Jim. Our first city directory in 1884 lists Sam and Jane Partridge living in this vicinity, and Sam died in 1891.
Naturally, after the skeleton was discovered, everyone assumed the house was haunted. And maybe it was. Some of the later residents apparently believed it to be haunted, and the house was often vacant. In 1910, Charlie and Anna Schumacher moved into the house at 521 9th St N, Moorhead. Half a decade later, when alcohol prohibition spread across the Red River Valley, the Schumachers changed their family vocation from butcher to bootlegger. Charlie, Anna, and their adult children specialized in smuggling quality alcohol into and through our area from Canada. They were our area’s most notorious rum runners, keeping our speakeasys stocked with booze and our newspapers stocked with colorful stories of their exploits.
This house by the river was torn down as a flood buyout around 2010. What happens to a ghost when their haunted house gets torn down? Since it was never his house anyway, Slim Jim might still be haunting the yard across the street from 522 9th St N. But he was only there for a bit over a decade. When the Partridges found his bones, Dan Shumway was reinterred in an unmarked grave along the tree line at the northern edge of Moorhead’s Riverside Cemetery.