"Midnight Justice" in the Pacific Northwest

Copyright, Michael J. Pfeifer, 2001

“Midnight Justice” in the Pacific Northwest:
Lynching1 and Law in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, 1882-1919

Professor Michael J. Pfeifer, Faculty Member, American Social History, The Evergreen State College,
Olympia, Washington 98505, tel: (360) 867-6009, e-mail: pfeiferm@evergreen.edu,
home page: http://academic.evergreen.edu/p/pfeiferm/home.htm
A paper presented at the American Historical Association West Coast Branch's
Ninety-Fourth Annual Meeting, Vancouver, British Columbia, August 11, 2001

    April was a bloody month in the second year, 1891, of Washington's statehood. In the early hours of April 11, a mob of forty masked men arrived by boats at the oyster harvesting town of Oysterville, along the coast of southwest Washington. The mob, after seizing a guard, entered the jail and fired into the cells that held John Rose and John Edwards, killing them. The band of forty then departed in their boats into Shoalwater (now called Willapa) Bay. Rose, a hotel proprietor and land speculator, and Edwards, a cook in Rose's hotel, had been convicted of killing Hans Frederickson and his wife, homesteading Danish immigrants, and burying their bodies in a cowpath and pigpen, after a land dispute. Their conviction in Pacific County and sentence to hang the previous November had been reversed by the Washington State Supreme Court, which had ordered a new trial on the grounds that the evidence that had convicted the men was "the uncorroborated testimony of an accomplice" and that prejudiced jurors had been allowed to stand. The lawyers for the men, aware of murmurs of “discontent” by Frederickson’s friends at the legal system’s delay, had requested their removal for safekeeping to another county, and their transfer was imminent.2
    Exactly two weeks later, a masked mob of more than 50 soldiers stationed at the fort near Walla Walla sliced the town's telephone lines and forced their way into the county jail, dragging out "tin-horn gambler" A.J. Hunt, whom they dispatched in a mass shooting with revolvers and carbines. Hunt, born in Illinois but resident in Walla Walla since the 1850s, had enraged the fort by mortally shooting Private E. Miller in a saloon after Miller had objected to Hunt's declaration that "All the soldiers of the First cavalry were s--s of b--s." 75 soldiers lay in ambush of county law officers who carried Hunt from the fort following a deposition by the dying Miller, a scheme narrowly averted when blurted by a drunken soldier. Yet the fort's commanding officer, Colonel Compton, refused the pleas of county officials that soldiers hungry for lynching be confined to the garrison. Fearing further retaliation post mobbing by soldiers who resented the town's saloon proprietors and police, the sheriff deputized and armed 100 men to patrol Walla Walla's streets; Colonel Compton now forbade his men from leaving the grounds. In a telegram to his Secretary of War, Redfield H. Proctor, President Benjamin Harrison termed the affair "very discreditable to army discipline", and demanded a court of inquiry and a rapid trial. Inspector general Lieutenant Colonel S.S. Sumner soon arrived, swore there would not be a "whitewash," and promised to assist the county prosecutor. After a county grand jury indicted seven soldiers, Sheriff McFarland arrested them without incident, although he had prepared with 2,000 rounds of ammunition.3
    Pacific Northwesterners compared the two Washington state lynchings and saw little likeness, if the views of the editors of the region's newspapers may serve as an index. Some condemned the Oysterville affair, but many offered praise or apology. Most deplored the Walla Walla affair, but even this excoriation suggested by contrast what was and what was not acceptable grounds for lynching in the region. More broadly, lynching elicited substantial approval in the Northwest in the late nineteenth century, if not the groundswell that boosted mob killings in the contemporaneous South or in California in the mid nineteenth century. Lethal vigilantism was not new to the region--vigilantes had killed two murderers and two claims-jumpers in southern Puget Sound in the decade after 1860, for instance--but it was transformed in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.4 Contrary to the conventional understanding, early territorial lynching probably had not resulted from an absence or distance of law enforcement, but rather from the social instability of early communities, and their contest for property, status and the definition of social order.
    After 1880, as railroads remade the region with immigrants from “back east" and as others came from the "Far East" across the Pacific Ocean, lynching registered an uneasy transition from customary notions of criminal justice that had been grounded in communal supervision of the social control of crime and harsh retribution for serious offenses. A more bureaucratic understanding of criminal justice, especially prevalent among urban middle classes, as well as small town lawyers, some petty entrepreneurs, and occasional editors, stressed the priority of due process safeguards, legal regularity, and professional law enforcement for the promotion of social order and the flow of capital. As in the South, the Midwest, and elsewhere in the West due process advocacy, with its emphasis on fairness in judicial procedure and humanitarian considerations in the penal system and capital punishment, spread slowly and unevenly from its crystallization in the Northeast into the Pacific Northwest in the late nineteenth century.   Given an aggravated homicide in their locality, rural and working class Northwesterners might reveal sympathies for "rough justice" by participating in or apologizing for lynching. Thus Washington state lynchers murdered at least twelve men, eleven after allegations of homicide, between 1882 and 1903.5
    Unlike the region’s most well-known mob killing, the hanging and mutilation of Wesley Everest, a Wobbly, after a shootout with Legionnaires in Centralia in November 1919, earlier collective murders involved few political overtones or overt class antipathies. They resulted instead from a protracted cultural conflict over whether a changing legal system afforded retribution that was sufficiently harsh, rapid, and grounded in customary community prerogatives. Many of these collective killings elicited a mixture of praise and condemnation, indicating ideological fault lines of class and culture in the Northwest. Rural and working class Northwesterners sometimes participated in and endorsed lynching; middle class people tended to oppose it. Acts of homicide that were perceived as particularly egregious, especially those with female, elderly, or “well-known” victims, and in which the deliberative nature of due process law was made especially evident, were most likely to provoke a lynch mob. Finally, with few African Americans and Hispanics in the region’s population in that era, lynching in the Northwest lacked a significant racial dimension, unlike that in other parts of the West and in the South.6
    In April 1891, Northwesterners pointedly compared the Oysterville and Walla Walla lynchings, unveiling an ambivalence towards due process law and a sympathy for collective violence that supposedly redressed its defects. The Astoria (Oregon) Bulletin argued that "At Oysterville the mob performed a solemn duty in which the law had failed. At Walla Walla the mob refused to give the law a chance, and by their hasty action disgraced the fair name of Walla Walla and of the state of Washington.”7   Similarly, the Portland Oregonian asserted that “The Walla Walla lynching is akin to the Sealand [Oysterville] affair, though it had none of the features which explained, if they did not justify that. Both are the fruit of weak, halting and inefficient administration in the state of Washington, which permitted the murderers of the Frederichsens to escape legal punishment.”8   Moreover the Oregonian posited that the maladministration of capital cases, with the Oregon State Supreme Court a kindred culprit, bred a regional contagion of mob violence: “The bloody tragedy which followed the act of the supreme court of Washington helped to establish in the public mind throughout the state that familiarity with the idea of public violence which makes it easy to practice.”9   The Seattle Post-Intelligencer unfavorably compared the Walla Walla mob execution with the one a month earlier in New Orleans, where 11 Italians accused of complicity in the murder of the police chief were taken out of jail and shot and hanged by a huge mob10: "There had been no failure of justice. There had been no acquittal of the prisoner. He had been promptly arrested and imprisoned, and there was not the slightest reason to doubt that he would be rigorously prosecuted and properly punished."11
    In fact, the Oysterville lynching had evoked a mixed reaction, even in the coastland surrounding Oysterville. For some, the mob’s defiance of the state supreme court’s safeguarding of defendant’s rights resonated deeply with a preference for efficient capital punishment and a suspicion of the deliberative and seemingly haphazard nature of legal process. A Seattle Post-Intelligencer headline opined "Pacific County Men Overrule the Supreme Court", and the P-I’s correspondent half-reported and half-judged that “While the taking off of these men was awful in the extreme, yet nearly all feel that it was justice. They have paid the penalty for their butchering of a defenseless woman and an honest man with their lives.”12   However, A.C.A. Perkes, editor of the neighboring South Bend Journal, praised the supreme court’s decision as legally and morally correct and vehemently warned against lynching amid rampant rumors that it was impending:
Men of Pacific County, the highest Court of Justice created by the glorious Constitution has told you THAT YOU WERE WRONG in condemning John R. Rose upon the evidence you found against him; and that nothing but blind prejudice made you do it!...Do you think you can right it by committing another wrong, and by defying the highest tribunal you have placed over yourselves. Perish the thought! For the fair name and fame of our county, desist, or your own children will learn to revile you!13
    Perkes also cited the opinion of a South Bend merchant that a lynching would “militate against the prosperity of the Harbor” and would discourage immigration to it.14 After the lynching, Perkes denied aspersions by “the people of Oysterville” that his stance was inspired by ties to the South Bend land corporation in which the lynched John Rose had been active. But Perkes did intimate that his social class influenced his perspective on the affair and explained differences in opinion in the community.
No doubt there were men in the Oysterville mob who conscientiously thought they were doing right and serving the ends of justice. But this belief did not make them right, or lessen the enormity of their crime. It simply shows that they were very ignorant and most seriously misguided....When right and wrong are so fearfully confounded the more enlightened and law-abiding portion of the community to whom such truths are clear, is morally bound to vehemently uphold the right and condemn the wrong.15
    Finally, a Portland letter writer to the Oregonian, J.E.M., responded with alarm to that paper’s “quasi approval” of the Oysterville lynching and denunciation of the Washington state supreme court’s decision. In so doing, the letter writer oddly amended a seminal line from the Declaration of Independence, perhaps clarifying the association stalwarts of due process made between the observance of law and the flow of capital. “The law gives every man a right to a fair trial. It is the shield of every good citizen in his right to life, liberty and prosperity.”16
    The Walla Walla lynching elicited unanimous condemnation because it seemed a deliberate defiance of civilian legal institutions and it threw into harsh relief the characteristic tensions between civilian populations and the military, a symbiotic if restive relationship in many locales in the nineteenth century West. To Northwesterners, the troops at Walla Walla had manifestly confused their distinctive role in the polity, tragically betraying their assigned role as “the last resort of those who execute and uphold the law” by appointing themselves instead “the judge and jury.”17   Yet even the general disapproval of the soldier lynchers at Walla Walla coexisted with a curious understanding that mob law might be the appropriate recourse of Northwest citizens under certain circumstances. These notions had their strangest but perhaps most telling juxtaposition in Judge Upton’s grandiloquent charge to the Walla Walla County grand jury called to investigate the lynching and find indictments against its perpetrators. Upton spoke in solemn tones of the grandeur of law, A.J. Hunt’s rights, and the outrage of their violation by the soldiers.
It is nothing to point out that the victim was a gambler, accused of crime. The saint and the sinner, the rich and poor, the soldier and civilian, the vilest criminal, the meanest vagrant, are as fully entitled to the protection of the law as the priest at the altar. When protection is denied, the chief support of our liberties is undermined. The highest duty which citizens owe to the state is to do all in their power to see that the law is fully and impartially administered, and the greatest misfortune that can befall a community is to be forced to lose faith in the integrity and capacity of those charged with the execution of the laws.18
    Yet in his very next sentence Upton continued: “Then it is that vigilance committees seem to have excuse for existing. That the people of this county are not in that melancholy plight is shown by the patience, hope and confidence with which they wait your action.” Furthermore, Upton began his charge by citing the desire to avoid the necessity of the activation of the vigilance committee’s quasi-legal cousin, the committee of safety: “The time seems to have come when only the action of a determined, active, fearless grand jury will avoid the necessity of a large, less desirable and more expensive organization, the committee of safety, that last resort of a civilized community against organized lawlessness.”19   Upton understood the power of appeals to traditions of popular sovereignty in ensuring “justice” and crime control in the minds of his farmer and businessmen grand jurors. He framed the grand jury’s work as a noble alternative consistent with but preferable to quasilegal and extralegal “rough justice” precedents.
    Fin-de-siècle Northwest lynchings were not limited to Washington territory and state, although they were more numerous there.20   Across the Columbia River from Oysterville, for instance, Finns and Scandinavians gathered in “the Upper Town” of Astoria, Oregon in late July 1893 to demand the lynching of John Hansen, a wife-murderer. Lacking a leader and faced with the Clatsop County sheriff’s vow to wound or kill if need be to defend his prisoner, this crowd of “the unfortunate Mrs. Hansen’s fellow countrymen” dissipated.21   In January 1893 at Lewiston, Idaho, across the Snake River from Washington state, a masked mob of around a dozen removed Albert B. Roberts from jail and strangled him after reportedly forcing a deputy-sheriff to open the jail cell. Roberts had allegedly murdered “Old Man” John Sutherland.22   A correspondent for the nearby Colfax (Washington) Commoner denounced the lynching and sympathized with its victim: “The man was helpless and under the protection of law. Last night’s victim was humble, poor and in strange country. The family of his victim was, to judge from their surroundings, rich, powerful, and had hired the best legal talent of this region to send him to the gallows.”23
    Nor were the region’s burgeoning cities immune to lynching. In January 1882 in boomtown Seattle, a “committee of safety” angered by the death of Geo. B. Reynolds (reportedly “a most worthy young man” who was a clerk in the store of D.A. Jennings and a son of Capt. Reynolds “of the ship Topgallant”) after he was shot by “foot-pads” who sought to rob him, transmogrified into a mob of 400 that hanged James Sullivan and William Howard, pulled from their preliminary examination, and Benjamin Payne, the murderer of a police officer, extricated from jail. Congratulatory telegrams arrived from points including Olympia and Port Townsend and a coroner’s jury issued an exonerating and adulatory verdict: "We, the jury summoned in the above case, find that they came to the death by hanging, but from the evidence frnished [sic], we [a]re unable to find by whose hands, and we are satisfied that in their deaths substantial and speedy justice has been subserved.”24
    Lynching faded in the region in the early years of the twentieth century, as due process sentiments became more influential, mob killings became too incongruous with the Northwest’s development and ambitions, and as working class and rural Northwesterners increasingly placed their confidence in a technocratic and bureaucratic death penalty (albeit by hanging in Washington state) instead of customary “rough justice” rituals of public executions and lynchings.25   Interestingly, the hanging of William Hamilton, a “well-to-do” young rancher, for the alleged rape and murder of twelve-year-old Mabel Richards in Asotin in southeastern Washington in August 1903 provoked little editorial comment. A masked mob of around 100 easily seized Hamilton from jail and then debated whether to torture and burn him. Settling on more moderate means, the masked lynchers hanged Hamilton from an electric guy wire with his head enshrouded in a black hood as a crowd of a thousand raptly observed from more than a city block away.26
    The Asotin County Sentinel reported the cheers that erupted upon Hamilton’s expiration, from a crowd “happy in knowing that the slayer of an innocent child could no more run at large, and that the murder of little Mabel Richards had, so far as public sentiment was concerned, been speedily avenged without the aid of court or jury.”27 No attempt at further defending or explaining the lynching or jousting among editors with contrary opinions ensued. In Asotin, the act seemed self-explanatory; elsewhere in the Northwest, the mob killing of Hamilton may have seemed an atavistic anomaly that hardly required the hand-wringing re-examination of Northwest society that earlier mob murders had elicited. No longer did the practice resonate with ambivalent and changing regional perspectives on law, crime, and punishment. Only when the divisive aftermath of World War I pitted the labor radicalism of the Wobblies against the hyperpatriotic Legionnaires amid a polarized logging economy, would the Northwest’s tradition of lynching briefly re-emerge, in Centralia, Washington, in November 1919.28

1 This analysis defines a lynching as experts on mob violence did at Tuskegee, Alabama in 1940: "there must be legal evidence that a person has been killed, and that he met his death illegally at the hands of a group acting under the pretext of service to justice, race, or tradition," with a group defined as "three" or more persons. For an insightful discussion of the historical problem of definition, see Christopher Waldrep, “Word and Deed: The Language of Lynching, 1820-1953,” in Michael Bellesiles, Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History (New York: New York University Press, 1999). I believe that the Tuskegee definition, while historically contingent and imperfect, remains useful to historians of the phenomenon. Its emphasis on the collective, purposeful, ideological, lethal, and unlawful nature of lynching is in fact consistent with the popular usage of the term as well as the actual praxis of violence from the mid nineteenth century through the present day.
2 South Bend (Wash.) Journal, April 17, 24, 1891; The Sou' wester (Pacific County, Wash., Historical Society: Autumn 1994), vol. xxix, no. 3; "The Fredericksen Story," The Sou' wester (Pacific County, Wash., Historical Society: Spring 1978), vol. xiii, no. 1.
3 Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 1891; Walla Walla Daily Union, April 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 1891; South Bend (Wash.) Journal, May 1, 1891, June 5, 1891.
4 An analysis of this process across the country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be found in Michael J. Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874-1947 (mss. in revision, University of Illinois Press).
5 For an approximately complete list of lynchings in Washington, see http://academic.evergreen.edu/users5/pfeiferm/Washingtonstate.html. In a lynching for property crime, around 20 settlers in the vicinity of Rockford near Spokane, Washington, hanged a 19-year-old horse herder “Oldie” (also “Aldy”) Neal in June 1882. The “citizen’s committee” that performed the lynching asserted that Neal was implicated in the theft of horses in the locality, and that his uncle ran a horse theft ring ranging from Oregon to Canada. Collective memory disputed Neal’s guilt and fashioned varying versions of the incident. For an analysis of accounts of the episode, many from oral history, see Herbert Stevens, Vigilantes Ride in 1882 (Fairfield, Wash.: Ye Galleon Press, 1975).
6 Racial considerations did shape the lynchings of native Americans in Washington territory and state. 20 "prominent whites" removed a 15-year-old Colville Indian boy, Steven, from the jail at Conconully in north central Washington in January 1891, for his alleged role in the murder of a "well-known freighter," Samuel Smith Cole. Tensions in Indian-white relations and jurisdictional problems in local criminal justice administration over Indian and white populations influenced the mob killing. Bruce A. Wilson, "The Indian Scare of 1891," Late Frontier: A History of Okanogan County, Washington, 1800-1941 (Okanogan, Wash.: Okanogan County Historical Society, 1990), 133-137; Lambert Florin, "Indian Steve's story," Washington Ghost Towns (Seattle: Superior Press, 1970), 82. Lynchings of Native Americans also occurred in the territorial period. Whites in the southern Puget Sound towns of Steilacoom and Tacoma, Washington, hanged Indians for murdering a Chinese cook and a "half-breed" in the early 1860s and in 1873. Herbert Hunt, "Judge Lynch in Old Tacoma," History of Tacoma (Chicago: S.J.Clarke, 1916). In the winter of 1885-86, residents of Puget Sound also participated in a lethal working class white sinophobia that surged across the West. A riot occurred in Seattle, all Chinese were forced to leave Tacoma, and whites and Indians killed several Chinese in the Issaquah Valley. Governor Watson Squire declared martial law and dispatched militia; President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to Seattle. Historical Highlights of Washington State (Olympia, Wash.: 1950), 29.
7 Quoted in Walla Walla Daily Union, April 28, 1891.
8 Quoted in Walla Walla Daily Union, April 28, 1891.
9 Quoted in Walla Walla Daily Union, April 28, 1891.
10 A jury the previous day had failed to convict nine Italians accused in the murder, acquitting six and disagreeing on the fate of three of those accused. Allegations of jury tampering flowed amid the ethno-racial antagonism catalyzed by reputed "mafiosi" involvement in the assassination of Police Chief David Hennessy. For accounts of the March 14, 1891, lynching in New Orleans, see New Orleans Picayune, March 14, 15, 16, 1891; William Ivy Hair, The Kingfish and His Realm: the Life and Times of Huey P. Long (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 12-15; Joy J. Jackson, New Orleans in the Gilded Age: Politics and Urban Progress (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 247-253.
11 Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 26, 1891.
12 Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 14, 1891.
13 South Bend Journal, April 10, 1891.
14 South Bend Journal, April 10, 1891.
15 South Bend Journal, April 17, 1891.
16 Quoted in South Bend Journal, April 24, 1891; my italics.
17 Walla Walla Daily Union, April 25, 1891. Newspapers around the region similarly noted the irony of the army’s lawlessness in editorials reprinted in succeeding issues by the Walla Walla Daily Union. For example the Salt Lake Times, perhaps with memories of the U.S. Army’s confrontation with Latter-Day-Saints in Utah, noted that lynchings were often winked at but this one must be punished because “soldiers are regarded as the embodiment of law and lawless actions on their part cannot be tolerated.” Walla Walla Daily Union, April 30, 1891.
18 Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 30, 1891.
19 Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 30, 1891.
20 The preponderance of lynchings in Washington compared to Oregon is not easily explained by factors of population or ethnoculture. As seen above, Washington's lynchings were evenly distributed East and West of the Cascade Mountains, in ranching and maritime settings, and in small towns and cities. Idaho's smaller population may explain a lesser number there. Alaska apparently saw only one lynching, the collective hanging of Martin Severts after an informal trial on October 26, 1899 in Lituya Bay off the Gulf of Alaska (now in Glacier Bay National Monument). Severts had murdered a fellow member of a small party of gold placer miners and had attempted to murder the others. The site was remote from law enforcement and the settlers there may have feared further violence from Severts. Jack London later fictionalized the episode. William R. Hunt, Distant Justice: Policing the Alaska Frontier (Norman, Ok.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), pp. 254-258. The lateness of Alaska’s frontier, which occurred as due process sentiments had begun to prevail in their cultural conflict with the rough justice perspective across the West, may account for its dearth of lynchings.
21 (Portland) Oregonian, August 1, 1893; Colfax (Wash.) Commoner, August 4, 1893.
22 Colfax (Wash.) Commoner, January 6, 1893.
23 Colfax (Wash.) Commoner, January 6, 1893.
24 Olympia Transcript, January 21, 1882.
25 For instance, a thousand watched the execution of Jack Leonard on March 25, 1898 at Colfax, Washington: 15 bearing invitations to the execution platform, 300 from the courthouse yard surrounding the scaffold, and the remaining hundreds from a “snow-clad hill” overlooking “the instrument of death.” Colfax Commoner, March 25, April 2, 1898.
26 Asotin County Sentinel, August 8, 1903; Seattle Post-Intelligencer, August 5, 1903; Seattle Times, August 5, 1903; San Francisco Chronicle, August 5, 1903. Neither of the Seattle newspapers editorialized on the Asotin lynching, although their reporting of it more pointedly stressed its brutality.
27 Asotin County Sentinel, August 8, 1903.
28 On November 11, 1919, a small mob took Wesley Everest, a Wobbly, from jail, hanged him from a bridge over the Chehalis River and possibly castrated him. The lynching occurred after a shootout in which four Legionnaires died in Centralia. Much has been written about the Centralia lynching, most of it slanted toward either the Wobblies or the Legionnaires. The best account is John M. McLelland, Jr., Wobbly War: The Centralia Story (Tacoma, Wash.: Washington State Historical Society, 1987).