Early in the Twentieth Century – we do not know exactly when or where – James Christianson embarked on a path that led to his premature death by violence. His life was largely a mystery, to be sketched in from scattered records, comments made to fellow criminals, and a few newspaper accounts. Authorities generally accepted that he was born in Denmark, probably around 1895. Some evidence suggests that Christianson served some time in the Royal Danish Navy, which spent World War I maintaining minefields in their national waters. (Both sides “mostly” respected Denmark’s neutrality.)
At some point, Christianson became a sailor in the merchant marine. (The Danish shipping industry had boomed during the war, and remained strong afterwards.) Then his ship docked at the port of New York. A best guess is that this was in 1920 or 1921, when the Roaring Twenties and the Jazz Age were taking flight. Attracted by the glamor and excitement, Christianson chose to emigrate to the U.S. … without benefit of formal paperwork.
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| New York Docks, ca 1920. Library of Congress. |
At first, he probably got by as a common laborer. However, there is good reason to suspect that he soon became a “yegg” or “yeggman” (the source of the term is disputed); that is, a safecracker. Safes of the day might be penetrated by a drill and other tools, or blown open with “soup” – nitroglycerine or gelignite. Because of the skills required, the yegg was considered a cut above an ordinary burglar. They typically travelled a lot to hit small town targets where expensive top-level safes and vaults were less common. There was also the expectation – too often true – that villages and towns would have few law officers, and even fewer that had any training in law enforcement techniques.
In their travels, yeggmen generally tried to blend in with the amorphous crowd of seasonal workers, hoboes, and other wanderers who rode the rails during that era. Christianson was in Minnesota in 1925. By then, he had been in and out of jail a number of times for minor offenses. These were not specifically reported in the newspapers, but got his identity and fingerprints into law enforcement records. Christianson first came to the notice of reporters on the evening of December 17, 1925, when he was arrested for stealing a car in St. Cloud. Further inquiry then uncovered his times behind bars. He pled guilty in mid-January and was sentenced to two years in the Minnesota State Penitentiary at Stillwater.
Christianson was presumably out by 1928. Most likely, he was “back in business” and slowly working his way westward. His tragic journey continued into Montana, where it would end in the spring of 1930. The lawman responsible was only a few years older than the Dane.
Walter Prochnow was born April 26, 1892 in a densely populated area of New Jersey just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Initially a carpenter, he moved to Montana some time after 1910. He married there in the summer of 1916 and claimed a homestead about twenty-five miles northwest of Miles City the following spring. However, in January 1920, he, his wife Matilda, and five-month-old daughter were living in Miles City itself. Prochnow gave his occupation as “general farmer,” but he had apparently decided farm life was not for him.
Thus, in 1922, he joined the Miles City police department. Prochnow took a deep interest in law enforcement. During that summer, he even visited the state prison in Deer Lodge to observe that operation. Reports said he might be interested in eventually becoming the warden there. He also extensively studied fingerprint techniques, in terms of both recording them from suspects or victims, and collecting latent prints at crime scenes. Prochnow became the “go to” expert in the region, often being sent to help other jurisdictions. He was promoted to sergeant after a few years on the force.
Montana law enforcement became particularly busy from 1928 on, when safecrackers apparently decided that the state was fertile ground for their operations. Every week brought reports of attacks all around Montana, sometimes hitting two or three businesses in the same town. Thus, three safes were cracked in Miles City on the night of February 6, 1929. Some yeggs were careless and left fingerprints, but their constant movement made it difficult to track down suspects.
Another hit in Miles City on March 3, 1930, spurred Prochnow to a special effort. The year before, someone had raided the Custer County High School and cracked the principal’s safe. All the revenue from the school’s annual fund-raising carnival had been stolen. The event for 1930 was only a few weeks away, on Friday, March 21. An experienced cop like Prochnow would surely know that transient camps were hotbeds of gossip and gab. Might some yegg again make a try at such a tempting target?
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| Officer Walter Prochnow. Miles City Police Department |
When the last carnival event closed down for the night, organizers gathered their take and placed it in the principal’s safe. After that, the sergeant settled in for his stakeout. Three safecrackers arrived about 3 o’clock Saturday morning. Prochnow pinned them with the beam of his flashlight and ordered them to get their hands up. One intruder immediately shot toward the officer but the slug went wide. Prochnow fired back while diving for cover. The would-be thieves sprayed several wild shots as they fled the office.
Three yeggmen entered the building; only two left it alive. Officers found the body of the third on the floor; he seemed to have been killed instantly. Thirty to thirty-five years old, he was not a local, and carried no identification. The high school Vice Principal did recall him milling about in the carnival crowd. She thought he had been accompanied by two other men, both strangers. Quick raids on trains and transient camps in the region resulted in the arrest of fifteen men. However, only one was armed and none could be identified as companions of the dead man.
Saturday afternoon, authorities convened a coroner’s jury, which found no fault with Prochnow’s actions, and praised his initiative and courage. They also sent images of the dead man’s fingerprints to the Bureau of Investigation (the future FBI) in Washington, D.C. The Bureau identified him as James Christianson and directed them to Minnesota officials for more information.
Along with his minimal history (outlined above), they said he had no known relatives in St. Cloud. However, Minnesota was then home to hundreds, if not thousands, of people named Christianson, or one of its variants. It seems likely that James might have had a distant relative there. In any case, locals were fairly sure his parents still lived in Copenhagen. Four days after his death, James “Christenson” was buried without ceremony in the paupers’ field of the county cemetery.
Most likely in early April, Miles City police hired criminologist Luke S. May to assess the firearms evidence for the case. We don’t have May’s report, but he was probably first asked to verify that Prochnow’s weapon had felled the intruder. (That would eliminate the possibility that he had been shot by one of his companions.) By then, officers should have also recovered slugs scattered about by the bandits’ wild shots. May could at least tell them the make and model of weapon(s) they needed to look for. However, the case went nowhere after that.
So far as can be determined from newspaper reports, this incident was the only time Walter Prochnow ever fired his weapon in a police incident, much less shot anybody. He retired from the force around 1942 and took a job building homes for defense workers in Seattle, Washington. Toward the end of World War II, Prochnow moved to a place about twelve miles north of Bremerton and continued working as a carpenter. In early June 1945, less than a month after VE-Day, Matilda joined him there.
Walter retired around 1957, about the time one of the couple’s three married daughters moved to Seattle. Four years later they moved to Mesa, Arizona. Matilda died there in 1973 and Walter moved back to Miles City. Two years after that, he passed away at the Custer County Rest Home.
| References: Jonathon Green, Crooked Talk: Five Hundred Years of the Language of Crime, Random House UK, London (2011). |
| Luke S. May, Luke S. May Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington (1969). |
| “[Prochnow-Christianson News],” Montana Standard, Butte, Independent-Record, Helena, The Missoulian, Missoula, Ravali Republic, Hamilton, Billings Gazette, Great Falls Tribune, Anaconda Standard, Montana; Arizona Republic, Phoenix, Arizona; St. Cloud Times, Minnesota (June 1922 – September 1975). |
| Nils Arne Sørensen, “Denmark,” International Encyclopedia of the First World War (online), Freie Universität Berlin (October 8, 2014). |
| Thomas Streissguth, The Roaring Twenties, Updated Edition, Facts On File, Inc. New York, New York (2007). |
