“You see it all over and over again in the dark.” While the coroner’s jury may have heard this, they gave more weight to Donohue’s many previous threats and returned a verdict of “justifiable homicide.” Butler went free, except that years later he told a friend that he never again enjoyed an untroubled sleep. Donohue pled for mercy, but Butler responded with a fatal bullet through the head. According to Sharp, when Donohue lay wounded in the street, Butler grasped him by the shoulder and raised him up. They grappled, and Donohue fired several ineffectual shots, one of which set Butler’s hat and coat on fire and inflicted an injury that left him infertile. Mary McCann Sharp, one of these, called it: “The eternal triangle, two men and a woman dissatisfied with her husband.all the way to the inevitable, the death of one or both of the men.” The inevitable arrived on a September evening in 1888 in a Tybo street where Donohue waited with a pistol in his hand for Butler. Tybo residents would tell the tale for the rest of their days. The result was explosive, Butler in flames and Donohue expiring in a pool of blood. ![]() ![]() In September, 1888, she filed for divorce from Donohue. Increasingly his suspicions centered on Jim Butler, a ne’er-do-well rancher from Little Antelope Valley who spent a great deal of time in the Shoshone camps and bore the reputation of a squaw man, but he was an affable young man of warm sympathies. The more jealous Donohue became, the more he drank and mistreated Belle, further alienating her and fueling the causes of his jealousy. Over the next dozen years, Donohue was prone to long absences, perhaps prospecting, perhaps spying on Belle, for he had grown increasingly distrustful of his young wife. In 1876, when she was sixteen to his thirty-nine, Belle married Maurice and had three children, Nevada Belle, Frank, and Lottie. His fondness for racing and fine steeds may have given him a vaquero’s reckless charm. Here she met Maurice Donohue, a prospector and miner nearly as old as her father. Later they moved to run a boarding house in Tybo, a mining camp in the Hot Creek Mountains. Five years later when Belle was a small child, her parents migrated with Belle and their two other children to the Fish Lake Valley in the remotest regions of southern Nevada. Isabella McCormick was born at Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, probably in 1860.
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