According to author Ken Weinman, the Jarbidge Stage Robbery is one of the "best authenticated buried treasure stories in Nevada's long history.

Because Rogerson, Idaho, was the closest railroad town, wagon driver Fred Searcy made trips to Jarbridge to deliver both mail and company payrolls for the local miners.

When Searcy failed to arrive in town at the expected time, a small group of men began to assemble at the post office, assuming that heavy snow was the cause of the delay.

However, when Searcy still did not appear, Postmaster Scott Fleming asked a man named Frank Leonard to ride up to the top of Crippen Grade, a 2,000 foot decline in the road that led down to the canyon floor and the town.

Before leaving, he telephoned a woman named Rose Dexter, who lived about a half mile north of Jarbidge along the grade.

Weinman says that at first the search party thought that Searcy had frozen to death in the extreme cold, but closer examination revealed that he had been shot in the head at a very close range.

[2] Because the snow storm that was raging showed no sign of letting up, the search party returned to town with the intention of continuing the investigation of the area on the following morning.

According to Weinman, it was determined that the assailant must have hidden in the sagebrush along the road and jumped aboard the wagon to kill Searcy and take control.

In 1903, he served four months in jail at Marysville, California for petty larceny and, at some other time, he was sent to the Oregon State Penitentiary for stealing horses.

The evidence gathered by the search party was all circumstantial, but two forensic scientists from California linked a bloody palm print on an envelope to Kuhl.

Kuhl chose execution by firing squad, but the Nevada Board of Pardons later commuted his sentence to life in prison.

Weinman says that the $4,000 was never recovered and that Kuhl never admitted to the crime or the existence of buried money, even though the police offered him a reduced sentence if he revealed its location.

A colorful story tells of a burly miner frequently using the bunk to raise the roof to slip out and return to the saloon, climbing back in his cell before morning.

Most noted prisoner was Ben Kuhl, who robbed the Rogerson-Jarbidge stage in December 1916, killing Fred Searcy the driver, the last mail stagecoach robbery in the U.S. and the first conviction based on a bloody palm print.