Of Vices and Virtues: Medicalization, Alcohol, and Conduct
As early as 1950, inmates caught exhibiting same-sex desires before or during their incarceration faced medicalization that resulted in their transfer to State Hospital South in Blackfoot. Whether due to a fear of medical intervention or social repercussions, most of the men involved with adult men claimed alcohol as the reason for their conviction. While claiming drunkenness did not protect inmates from time at State Hospital South, it gave them an argument for pardon requests. The men who established alcohol as the root of their crime were predominately people of color. In the cases of men who had sex with other men, judges and penitentiary administrators treated men of color as though their conviction was a fluke incident and did not reflect their identity. The case of William Buffalo and Gaylord Deavila reveals biases held by the middle- and upper-class white men handing down the sentences.[1]
Of Vices
William Buffalo and Gaylord Deavila
A farm and ranch laborer by trade, William Buffalo insisted he was too drunk to realize that he had had sex with another man. Buffalo was born in 1917 in Beowawe, Nevada, to parents of Shoshone descent. He attended the Sherman Indian High School in Riverside, California, which opened in 1901 to assimilate children from a wide swath of indigenous tribes.[2] From a young age, Buffalo fostered an interest in boxing; a boxing match in Battle Mountain, Nevada, listed him as a participant in 1947.[3] On his social history questionnaire, in which relatives or people known to inmates would give narrative descriptions of their lives, his sister Josie Buffalo listed boxing as his only recreational activity.[4]
Buffalo lived in Idaho only ten days before authorities arrested him. On September 27, 1951, a police officer discovered Buffalo on top of Gaylord Deavila in a bathroom at the Porters and Waiters Club, in Pocatello, Idaho. Opened by Joe Hamilton, the Porters and Waiters Club served as a place for Black travelers denied food and lodging elsewhere.[5] The arresting policeman claimed that Buffalo swore he thought Deavila was a woman; police did not document whether Deavila wore feminine clothing during their encounter. Judge Henry McQuade sentenced Buffalo on November 23, 1951, to fourteen years for intent to commit ICAN.[6] Police previously had arrested Buffalo multiple times for being drunk and referenced alcohol as the reason for this crime.[7]
Buffalo’s inmate file documents the violence, mistreatment, and punishment he faced throughout his sentence. On May 27, 1952, for example, fellow inmate Roberto Samaniego stabbed Buffalo. Buffalo later faced solitary confinement for almost three months for throwing a tray of food in the dining hall and possessing a knife.[8] In 1954, guards placed Buffalo in solitary confinement for one month for fighting in Cellhouse Two, and again from April to December for kicking an inmate in the face. After his punishment, he remained in segregation in Cellhouse Two from 1956 until his final release.[9]
In his pardon requests, Buffalo expressed a desire to go to Elko, Nevada, as he believed he could get a job there. During a visit, Buffalo’s sister Josie voiced her concern for her brother’s wellbeing and agreed to take him back to Elko with her; the Board of Pardons approved of his pardon and released him on August 6, 1963.[10] Were it not for his sister’s intervention, Buffalo might have served his full fourteen years. Buffalo died four years later after his pickup truck rolled over while avoiding a hole in the road on Highway 51 near Grasmere, Idaho.[11]
Gaylord Deavila drank heavily throughout his life. He was born in 1922, in Pocatello, Idaho, to parents of Mexican descent. Deavila served in the army from 1942 to 1946 and received an honorable discharge. After his service, he found work as a common laborer for the Union Pacific Railroad in Pocatello.[12]
Like Buffalo, Deavila had many prior arrests for drunkenness. Deavila claimed that, before their arrest at the Porters and Waiters Club, he had been drinking for four or five days straight. He remembered being passed out on the bathroom floor and telling a Pocatello detective that sex with men was how he “obtained his sexual satisfaction.”[13] In a letter to George R. Phillips, Warden L. E. Clapp wrote that because Blackfoot has such limited capacity, he and his staff could not move the “sex cases” like Deavila’s out to State Hospital South as fast as they would like.[14]
During his incarceration, Deavila attended the Student School, worked in the laundry, and served as a trusty at Eagle Island Ranch in Eagle. Deavila’s family wanted him to return to his parents’ home in Pocatello after he was paroled and his father emphasized to the Board of Pardons that he would be welcome back home. For both Deavila and Buffalo, no matter their supposed crime, their families stood by them. The Board released Deavila on parole on December 10, 1954; he immediately violated it and received a new term ending on December 1, 1956.[15] Penitentiary staff discharged him for one final time on November 6, 1956, and by 1957 he had returned to Pocatello, where he worked at Kahn Furniture.[16] He died in Seattle and his death certificate noted alcohol abuse as a factor contributing to his death.[17]
Of Virtues
Penitentiary administrators expected inmates to aspire to be the type of person the Board of Correction was willing to release back into the community. Religion played a major role in how the Board treated an inmate; Board members viewed inmates who regularly attended Christian service more favorably than those who did not. In the 1962 inmate rule book, which was given to new inmates to help set expectations and restrictions, penitentiary authorities considered regular church attendance to be part of the “character-building program” for inmates.[18]
Ross Draper
Just as inmates of color experienced heightened policing, penitentiary staff and legal council gave some white inmates, like Ross Draper, leniency if they kept their heads down and did their work.
Ross Draper embodied the ideal inmate; he accepted his sentence, worked hard, and complied with penitentiary rules. Originally from Ontario, Oregon, Draper received a five-to-fifteen-year sentence for ICAN in 1934. In his crime statement, Draper wrote that while staying in the Sparks rooming house in Nampa, Idaho, he allowed a man to stay in his bed. During the night, Draper tried to engage him in oral sex; the man refused and kicked him out of the room. Draper further confessed to actively participating in other homosexual interactions with consenting adult men and one seventeen-year-old male. His intake form labelled him as a “habitual criminal,” a menace to society, and unfit for pardon and parole.[19]
Throughout his incarceration, Draper kept in contact with his niece, Jessie Moore, who lived on Moore’s Ranch in Ontario, Oregon. For the 1930s, Jessie appeared open minded and sympathetic to her uncle’s plight. An early letter asserted Jessie’s belief in Draper’s innocence and reminded him of how he always had said that if the courts convicted someone like him, “he had just as well take his medicine.”[20] It is unclear whether Jessie knew the details of Draper’s crime. In one letter, Jessie wrote, “Your own inhuman carelessness or faults are between you and your God, they are not for one to judge.” Most of what Jessie wrote to Draper included daily occurrences at her and her husband’s farm, as well as current events in the family. She mentioned coming to Boise twice, but in her November 1935 letter, she admitted that she would not be able to see him and in December 1936 she admitted she had never gone to Boise. Jessie continued to send Draper letters throughout 1935, 1936, and 1937, with multiple mentions in 1937 of how she wanted him to write back to her.[21]
Draper’s inmate record remained spotless; his progress report listed him as a good worker and a trusty. A farmer by trade, Draper monitored the pump house at Eagle Island Ranch, a farm in Eagle, Idaho, maintained by trusties that supplied the penitentiary with dairy and meat products.[22] Draper applied for parole in August 1936 and February 1938. Before he could be released, he died at Eagle Island Ranch on March 10, 1938; he was sixty-six years old.[23]
Notes
[1] Boag, Same-Sex Affairs, 8.
[2] Stephanie Mushrush, “Sherman Indian High School Beginning to the Present,” Sherman Indian Museum, accessed 12 Jan. 2026, https://www.shermanindianmuseum.org/sherman_hist.htm.
[3] “Battle Mountain Has Fight Card,” Nevada State Journal, 5 Oct. 1947.
[4] William Buffalo inmate file, ISPIFC, AR 42, ISA.
[5] Laurie Mercier, “Idaho’s Ethnic History” in Idaho’s Place: A New History of the Gem State, ed. Adam M. Sowards (University of Washington Press, 2014), 177.
[6] During the trial, one of the jurors felt reluctant to give the two men life sentences, so the judge changed their crimes to “intent.” See William Buffalo inmate file, ISPIFC, AR 42, ISA.
[7] William Buffalo inmate file, ISPIFC, AR 42, ISA; “Nine New Inmates Listed at Prison,” Idaho Statesman, 5 Dec. 1951.
[8] William Buffalo inmate file, ISPIFC, AR 42, ISA.
[9] William Buffalo inmate file, ISPIFC, AR 42, ISA.
[10] William Buffalo inmate file, ISPIFC, AR 42, ISA.
[11] “Driver Dies in Rollover,” Idaho Free Press, 23 June 1967.
[12] Gaylord Deavila inmate file, ISPIFC, AR 42, ISA.
[13] Gaylord Deavila inmate file, ISPIFC, AR 42, ISA.
[14] Warden L. E. Clapp to George R. Phillips, 17 Sept. 1952, Gaylord Deavila inmate file, ISPIFC, AR 42, ISA.
[15] Deavila’s file did not indicate how he violated his parole. See Gaylord Deavila inmate file, ISPIFC, AR 42, ISA.
[16] Gaylord Deavila inmate file, ISPIFC, AR 42, ISA; “Pocatello City Directory 1957,” U.S., City Directories, 1822-1995, Ancestry.com.
[17] “Gaylord Deavila,” The Marjorie Rawson Obituary Collection, Pocatello Idaho Family History Center, Pocatello, Idaho, Ancestry.com; “Certificate of Death,” 6 Nov. 1981, State of Washington Department of Social and Health Services, Ancestry.com.
[18] In Board of Pardons requests, inmates with a record of attending religious service had a more favorable outcome. See “Rules and Regulations Governing the Inmates of Idaho State Penitentiary with Comments and Information Beneficial to All,” ID DOCS C7000.06 INM01 1962, ISA, Boise, Idaho.
[19] Ross Draper inmate file, ISPIFC, AR 42, ISA.
[20] Jessie Moore to Ross Draper, 30 Jan. 1935, Ross Draper inmate file, ISPIFC, AR 42, ISA.
[21] Ross Draper inmate file, ISPIFC, AR 42, ISA.
[22] Beierle, Phillips, and Wakatsuki, Old Idaho Penitentiary, 52.
[23] Ross Draper inmate file, ISPIFC, AR 42, ISA.