Martin Wehinger was born in Dorbein, Austria, in 1860. His older brother Michael emigrated to the United States and landed in Miles City in 1883. Martin followed and became a freighter, a man who handled wagon trains pulled by long strings of horses. He was a tough cuss. He once related to photographer L.A. Huffman, who made a studio portrait of him around 1889, how he had killed a bear with his ax as it was pawing through his wagon. In time, as the teamster business gave way to the railroads, Martin became a farmer and homesteaded land in Pine Hills near his brother. He never married. In World War I, he was a ripe target for the anti-German hysteria.

In the spring of 1918, while on his ranch, Wehinger allegedly told some passing teamsters that: "[W]e had no business sticking our nose in there and we should get licked for doing so. In the first place we don't have any soldiers to amount to anything and those that did amount to something didn't have any guns and those behind them would have to wait until the first ones dropped so the other fellows could pick up the guns and fire; that one German soldier could kill 5 or 6 American soldiers without any trouble, because we didn't have any experience and were not trained and didn't know anything about war..; that if people here could read the German papers they would get the right news and that U.S. papers were not getting the facts...”

Custer County was an exceptionally bad place to say such things. It had an ambitious D.A., a reactionary newspaper editor who was constantly sounding the alarm and a hanging judge. Thirteen men were charged with sedition (more than in any other county); ten men were convicted, Wehinger and a neighbor among them. He received a 3-6 year sentence, and served 18 months in Deer Lodge State Penitentiary. He was released just before Christmas in 1919. His teeth were all gone. He died four months later, before reaching the age of 60, on April 12, 1920. The man who once killed a bear with an ax died a toothless felon for having spoken his mind.

Ben Kahn was a traveling salesman for the Sierra Campo Wine and Brandy Co. in San Francisco. His territory was Montana and Wyoming. He had been representing the company in the area for about a year, based in Billings. Kahn, 38, had come to the United States as an infant from Eastern Poland. He grew up in St. Joseph, Missouri, and left home at age 17. He helped support his father, Aaron, who was in the Old People’s Home in St. Paul.

In Red Lodge, he stayed at the Pollard Hotel, the social and business center of the coal-mining town. Early guests had included such legends as Calamity Jane, Buffalo Bill Cody and William Jennings Bryan. The proprietor, T.F. Pollard, was an influential man in town and, unbeknownst to Kahn, was the chairman of the county council of defense.

At about 8:30 a.m. on the morning of March 6, 1918, Kahn sauntered downstairs from his room to the lobby to await breakfast. He struck up a conversation with Pollard. Kahn griped that Prohibition, set to come soon to the state and nation, would put a lot of salesmen like him out of business. Pollard seemed to agree.

"Mr. Pollard, this is a rich man’s war," Kahn ventured.

Pollard warned him he could get in trouble for saying things like that.

Kahn turned to the food regulations enacted by the U.S. Food Administration under Herbert Hoover, popularly known as Hooverism.

"There’s nothing to that, it’s all a big joke," he said.

Pollard got up and walked over toward his office. Kahn followed.

"Well, if you feel that way about it, you must justify the sinking of the Lusitania," Pollard exclaimed.

"[The Americans] had no business in that boat," Kahn replied. "They were hauling over munitions and wheat."

“Anyone who says that is either a pro-German or an I.W.W. or a damn fool,” Pollard growled.

Kahn walked out of the hotel and visited several saloonkeepers on business. By lunchtime, he had been arrested for sedition.

The jury promptly found Kahn guilty on the "big joke" statement.

Judge A.C. Spencer sentenced him to 7 1/2 to 20 years in Deer Lodge. Kahn served 34 months, one of the longest terms of the state’s sedition prisoners. In Deer Lodge, he played in the band. His appeal, the first heard by the Montana Supreme Court, was turned down on May 20, 1919.

Janet Smith, 42, born in Iowa, was the second wife of William K. Smith. She was the postmistress in Sayle, Montana, near the Wyoming border in what is now Powder River County. She and her husband together owned close to 1,000 acres, on part of which Smith ran sheep. He also owned 300 head of cattle, 35 horses and had “accumulated a competency” of $30,000 to $50,000.

The couple were arrested for sedition and tried in Miles City. The statements and actions attributed to them sound hard-bitten and distrustful, the kind made by tough, taciturn loners—in other words, the kind of people that might be expected to survive in the desolate buttes and gulches of southeast Montana.

Witnesses testified that Janet Smith "advocated turning the stock into the crops to prevent helping the government." They said she declared the Red Cross to be a “fake,” and that "while she didn’t mind helping the Belgians with the relief work, the trouble was that the damned soldiers would get it." She allegedly sent back War Savings Stamps supplied by the Post Office Department.

Although she denied all the allegations and was hospitalized at the end of the trial, Janet Smith received a 5-10 year prison sentence. Her husband got the max: 10-20 years as well as a $20,000 fine (satisfied with a sheriff’s sale of 80 acres of his land).

William Smith's sentencing the next day, Oct. 19, prompted a wrathful 15- or 20-minute sermon from Judge Spencer. Gushed Miles City Star editor Joseph Scanlon, It was "an address the like of which has rarely been heard in Custer County and will live long in the minds of the fortunate ones who heard it."

"If I could follow the dictates of my own judgement," thundered the judge, "I would either sentence you to a term in the state prison for your natural life, or I would order you banished entirely from the country…I would send you straight to Germany, where you would flourish and glory among the savages and barbarous people the Germans have shown themselves to be."

The Smiths ended up staying about two years as Warden Conley’s guests—he slightly less, working at the penitentiary as a weaver, she slightly more, one of only two women incarcerated at Deer Lodge at the time. Both were paroled in late 1920.

Fred Rodewald was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1875, and was a woodworker there before emigrating to the United States at the turn of the century. In Iowa, he met a girl named Pearl from England with an infant daughter. They married there in 1903 and farmed in Charter Oak, Iowa. They had four more children before moving to Sumatra, Rosebud County, Montana, to homestead 320 acres around 1912.

Fred and Pearl had three more kids. A ninth was on the way when Fred was arrested for sedition. He allegedly said, "In substance as follows: that we (meaning the people and citizens of the United States) would have hard times unless the Kaiser didn't get over here and rule this country."

Fred's trial was over in a day, and he was off to Deer Lodge prison a week after the judge sentenced him to 2-5 years. He was in Deer Lodge from Oct. 13, 1918 to April 18, 1920. The warden had a special dislike for seditionists. Fred worked as a carpenter in prison, using the skills that he had brought with him from Germany many years before.

His pregnant wife and eight children lived through one of the worst droughts in settlers’ memory. The ninth child, a daughter, was born while he was in prison.

Shortly after leaving prison, the family moved to Minnesota, where a tenth child was born. Fred and Pearl farmed in Litchfield, Minn. Pearl died on July 4, 1955. Fred was almost 85 when he died on Oct. 9, 1960.