Copyright, Michael J. Pfeifer, 2001
Race and Lynching1 in the American West in the Early Twentieth Century
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 version of this essay was presented at the British Association of American Studies (BAAS)
Meeting at Keele University, Staffordshire, UK, April 7, 2001
On December 9, 1918, Joel Woodson, an African American janitor at a Union Pacific Railroad social club in Green River, Wyoming, sought to order breakfast from a white waitress. When she stated that they were out of the item he had ordered, he called her a "liar," and she threw several salt shakers at him. Edward Miller, a white switchman, grabbed Woodson and ejected him from the diner. Shortly afterward, Woodson returned with a gun and shot Miller dead. A Union Pacific police officer captured Woodson and took him to the county jail. Soon a mob of several hundred whites gathered, seized Woodson from the jail, dragged him to the railroad depot, and hanged him from a light pole. Woodson's heated encounter with the waitress, which violated white Wyomingites' notion of the deference required from African American men in their encounters with white women, had set off a confrontation with Miller, a reportedly "popular" switchman from Missouri. Mobbers knocked Woodson unconscious as they dragged him to the depot and hanged him, publicly displaying his corpse for four hours until the county coroner finally arrived from Rock Springs to cut it down. Green River whites then expelled the African American residents of the town, many of whom travelled to Ogden, Utah without the chance to gather their possessions. The class and racial consciousness of white rail employees responding to the murder of a white co-worker played an integral role in the Green River mob killing.2
On July 9, 1901, at a lumber camp thirty-five miles east of Bakersfield, California, a Chinese cook at a boarding house, Yung Fook,3 slashed "Mrs. G.C. Kenney" across the face with a knife, and then reportedly slashed at another woman and Kenney's daughter in the room. Fook had apparently been angered by an order delivered by Mrs. Kenney, the wife of the sawmill's foreman; locals and the press claimed he was "insane" from opium. Learning of the assault millhands, led by G.C. Kenney, rushed Fook, as he slashed at several of them. One of the millhands rendered Fook unconscious with a blow to the head. Then the lumbermen secured a rope, placed it around Fook's neck, took him to a nearby oak tree and hanged him from it until he was dead. A coroner's jury, made up of "eight persons who are not lumber mill employes" questioned approximately sixteen mill workers about the affair, but these all claimed "to know absolutely nothing." A reward of $500 offered by a Seattle organization, the International Council of the World, for the capture and conviction of those involved in the murder of Fook, garnered no takers. The local and state press reported the details of the case, but avoided editorial comment. Some of the loggers later said they regretted the mob killing, given that Mrs. Kenney’s wounds were not serious, and that Fook “was insane at the time of the commission of his violent acts.” The Chinese man’s physical assault of a white woman catalyzed the mob killing by drawing on a deep reservoir of working class white sinophobia and fear of miscegenation.4
Racially motivated lynching was an infrequent but not anomalous occurrence in the western United States in the early twentieth century. The collective murder of Joel Woodson in Green River in 1918 had been preceded by the mob killings of three African Americans in Wyoming, each accused of raping white women, in the previous fourteen years. The lynching of Yung Fook in Kern County in 1901 had been anticipated by the collective killing of two Chinese, both accused of murder, in California in the preceding fourteen years.5
Our understanding of western collective violence has been dominated by an interpretation shaped by its initial historians, such as Hubert Howe Bancroft, and in representations in popular culture. This familiar view, of course, argued that western vigilantism resulted from the inadequacy of law enforcement and courts--either because of geographical distance, corruption, or the sheer novelty and instability of frontier society. This initial interpretation of western vigilantes legitimated and indeed sanctified their activities as the appropriate response of democratic citizens to frontier disorder.6 A fairly recent revision has underlined the excesses of and injustices perpetrated by western vigilantes. It has also noted the instrumentality of violence in economic competition and in the contest for social and political status in recently created and unstable communities. Finally, it has suggested that after the initial years of Euro-American settlement of the West--which ran roughly from the late 1840s through the early 1870s--that collective violence declined markedly, most notably because it no longer elicited substantial popular support.7
For all of the whitewashing that Bancroft and the West's initial interpretors did of vigilante violence their view had one virtue: it took the ideology of lynchers seriously, and this was an ideology that was rediscovered and analyzed perceptively by historian Richard Maxwell Brown in the 1970s.8 This ideology revolved around the American notions of popular sovereignty and the right to revolution, a belief that government was ultimately rooted in the people and could, if circumstances dictated, be reclaimed by them. On the other hand, the revisionist view of western vigilantism usefully desanctified and problematized the phenomenon and appropriately made chronological distinctions as to when, why, and where the practice was most prevalent. Yet several key elements are missing from both of these interpretations. The first is any serious attention to the role of conceptions of racial and ethnic difference in the region's collective violence.9 The second is the fact that lynching simply did not die out with the successive eras of economic and cultural consolidation that followed the initial period of Euro-American settlement. Indeed, 23 lynch mobs killed 36 persons in Wyoming between 1878 and 1918, including 25 whites, 4 blacks, 4 Indians, and one Hispanic; 42 lynch mobs killed 63 persons in California between 1875 and 1947, including 34 whites, 14 Hispanics, 8 Indians, 3 Chinese, and 2 blacks. Thus so-called "civilization," statehood, and the maturation of social, legal, economic, and political institutions certainly did not mean the end of lynching in the American West.
The majority of lynching victims in the West after 1875 or so were white, some targeted because of alleged trangressions of property (for instance, rustling or horse thievery),10 but many others were accused of homicide.11 Typically lynchers and their defenders in these nonracial cases, and these were usually rural residents or members of the growing urban mercantile or working class, drew upon an elaborate critique of the criminal justice system, namely its purported leniency. In homicide cases, particularly ones aggravated by inflammatory circumstance, for example, excessive brutality in the manner of the crime, the murder of a woman by a man, or the murder of a law officer, this critique involved the supposed failure of legislators, juries, and judges to ensure that murder was consistently punished with the death penalty.
For instance, in July 1887 Hong Di, employed as a house boy in Colusa, northwest of Sacramento, shot and killed Mrs. Julia Billiou, his employer, and wounded William Weaver, a house guest. A jury found him guilty of murder in the first degree and, when two jurors reportedly held out against a death sentence, requested a penalty of life imprisonment, a recommendation that according to state law was legally binding on the judge. Expecting a death sentence, spectators were enraged and Judge Bridgeford ordered them out of the courtroom. Governor Bartlett acceded to Sheriff Beville's request for the muster of the local militia, but local merchants refused to sell them arms. The sheriff hid Hong Di in a cellar, but a mob of one hundred fifty, led by Bud Welch, a young bartender, searched the jail meticulously, uncovered the hiding spot, and dragged Di out to a "railroad turntable" at the town's far end and hanged him.12 A Colusa County coroner's inquest passionately and aptly expressed townspeople's perception of the jury's supposed capricious leniency, Di's heinous criminality, and Julia Billiou's sterling white womanhood.We, the jury, summoned by the Coroner of Colusa County, California, on the 11th day of July, 1887, to hold an inquest on the dead body of a Chinaman, do recognize it as the body of one Hong Di, aged seventeen years. After viewing the dead body of a Chinaman, do recognize it as the body of one Hong Di, aged seventeen years. After viewing the dead body and hearing the evidence, we find that he came to his death by hanging on the morning of July 11, 1887, by hands unknown to the jury, growing out of and the result of the verdict of the trial in the Superior Court of Colusa County, California, July 10, 1887, who by their verdict outraged the memory, the chastity and unimpeachable good character of Mrs. Julia Billiou, a lady of high, pure, and modest worth, by prostituting the law, and savoring of perjury and criminality by bartering justice to save the life of a wilfull, deliberate, and malicious murderer, who had by his own sworn statement, with malice aforethought killed and murdered one of Colusa County’s purest and noblest women; and we hereby censure and condemn the said trial jury for said verdict so rendered by them, as being wholly wanting in moral courage to assert the dignity of the law and proclaim by their verdict the case of [the] People of California vs. Hong Di.13
But this elaborate critique was usually absent from racially motivated lynchings in the West. Rather, lynchings of blacks and Chinese tended to reflect the salience of white solidarity and the power of conceptions of racial order amid the fluid social landscape of what historian Carlos Schwantes has termed the "wageworking frontier," that is the camps and company towns associated with the railroad and with extractive industries, such as logging and mining.14
Collective killings were sometimes performed by groups of working class white men suddenly aroused by news of a crime that seemed to offend wageworkers’ sense of social order. Racial, ethnic, and gender ideologies had particular effect in transient settings where mobile, exploited workers often did not know each other well. Laborers such as miners, loggers, and railroad men relied instead on informal, hastily constructed reputations predicated upon personal friendship, and on the reflexive comfort of racial and ethnic solidarities amid temporary social crisis. Working class men might respond with nearly spontaneous lethal violence to alleged violations of sexual and gender etiquette, especially those tinged with racial and ethnic overtones. Lynchings of this kind evoked little support from the broader citizenry, and usually elicited condemnation or no comment from the petty entrepreneurial men who edited hinterland newspapers. Collective murder of this sort may also have been more likely to be prosecuted by legal authorities, who often did not share working class sympathies.
A March 1904 mob killing in the Mojave Desert town of Mojave, California is illustrative. On March 11, James Cummings, an African American hobo, was arrested and lodged in jail after an allegation that he had committed an “unmentionable crime,” that is, a sexual offense, on a hobo boy. Later newspaper reports stated that the allegation was groundless. A group of miners and workers in the local railroad shops, thirty of whom were eventually implicated, broke into the jail and shot Cummings, may have hit him in the head with a large piece of iron, and tarred and feathered him. Cummings sustained mortal wounds and the deputy jailer discovered his corpse lying inside the jail door.15 The Bakersfield Californian attacked the lynching in classist terms, denouncing the proletarian rabble who would resort to such a measure.By the death of a negro at the hands of a mob at Mojave on Friday night, a disgrace has been brought to the county which has for years been trying to live down the reputation for lawlessness it gained in its earlier days. That the crime was committed by irresponsible loafers who represented no sentiment among the better class of people in the desert town, is needless to say, but that the community should have held so many men,--there were twelve or fifteen of them--who would participate in so dastardly an act does not speak well for that particular section.16
African Americans in the state protested the lynching. A mass meeting of blacks at the African M.E. Church in San Jose adopted resolutions that condemned the mob murder and requested that those responsible be punished. The Rev. J.E. Transue, pastor of the A.M.E. Church, argued that “We, as a race, think that the lynching of Cummings was uncalled for, not merely because he was a negro, but because it is a most barbarous act.”17 After an investigation, James Cowan, a miner, was tried and convicted of manslaughter for fatally shooting Cummings as he resisted the mob’s efforts to punish him. Cowan received an eight year prison sentence.18
As we have seen, working class whites actually performed most of the early twentieth century racial violence. Yet middle class whites, enamored with a "progressive" impulse to cleanse the social disorder allegedly rampant in towns and cities also contributed a great deal to a marked deterioration in race relations across the West that coincided with the turn of the century. The Wyoming state legislature's enactment of an anti-miscegenation law in 1913 represented, for example, the 'de jure' effort of bourgeois whites to redraw the lines between the races.19 But the anti-miscegenation law was merely the statutory pinnacle of white middle class efforts to purify racially ambiguous areas of urban life. Virtually all of Wyoming's towns and cities had notorious areas where whites, Mexicans, and blacks mixed in saloons, bordellos, and drug dens. Crimes committed in these neighborhoods, especially ones allegedly perpetrated by African Americans, received hysterical newspaper coverage.20
Working class and middle class Wyomingites also became increasingly concerned in the early twentieth century with limiting African Americans' access to public amenities. A white fear of the social mixing, and the perceived latent sexuality, of African American men and white women in urban spaces fueled the trend towards de facto 'Jim Crow' practice in public accommodations. Black Wyomingites protested the infringement of their rights, revealing in the process class divisions which were sublimated by a shared racial consciousness within the state's small African American community.
Wyoming's blacks articulated their grievance at the discriminatory treatment they received in attempting to eat in restaurants and rent rooms in hotels. Russel Taylor, a black Presbyterian minister and author, shared his experience in a letter to a Cheyenne newspaper after the 1918 Green River lynching. Taylor stated that he had been consistently denied admission to the finer restaurants and hotels in Cheyenne and other Wyoming towns. Proprietors instantly served white patrons, but he had to settle for places that were "of little credit to a minister." In a Chinese restaurant in Cheyenne, staff served Taylor but also "boxed" him, i.e., concealed him from white customers. Taylor pleaded with white Wyomingites "of conscience" to live up to Wyoming's motto as the "equal rights state."21
Russel Taylor sought a degree of social respectability in public accommodations that white Wyomingites denied him because of race. Taylor responded by voicing a shared sense of African American community grievance that went beyond class divisions among blacks. He distanced himself from Joel Woodson's "procedure" in Green River but stressed that he understood the lynched black janitor's aggravation. Similarly, the Reverend Nathaniel Hawthorne Jeltz, pastor of the A.M.E. Church in Cheyenne, derided Wade Hamilton, hanged and shot by a small mob in a mining suburb of Rock Springs in December 1917 for allegedly breaking into the homes of three women and attempting to assault them, as a "degraded negro-he must have been a bad sort." But Jeltz also castigated the "race hate" motivating the lynching of Hamilton, a "member of my race." The A.M.E. Pastor argued that a United States fighting for democracy abroad in World War I must ensure that justice be served at home.22
Thus the West participated in a national trend toward racial proscription after the turn of the century23 while drawing upon the region's own legal and popular traditions, which had emerged in the context of political and labor competition in the mid nineteenth century,24 that sought to separate whites from Chinese, blacks, and Mexicans. Whites pulled from various locales and ethnicities to labor in the region's farflung, sometimes remote industries drew impulsively on harsh, collective understandings of race, gender, criminality, and punishment. Although blacks constituted a miniscule portion of the region's population and the Chinese a small and declining one after the 1880s,25 they sometimes fell prey to lynch mobs amid the waves of economic and cultural consolidation that followed the frontier era.
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 (Cheyenne) Wyoming Tribune, December 10, 11, 1918; Green River (Wy.) Star, December 10, 1918; Salt Lake City (Utah) Semi-Weekly Tribune, December 13, 1918.
3 His name is also given in some sources as "Ah Sing".
4 (Bakersfield) Daily Californian, July 10, 11, 12, 16, 19, 1901; San Francisco Chronicle, July 10, 11, 1901; San Francisco Examiner, July 10, 1901; Warren Franklin Webb, “A History of Lynching in California Since 1875,” (M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1934), 73. See Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Penguin USA, 1990), 99-103, for the development of anti-Chinese sentiment and its sexual dimensions in California.
5 In Rock Springs, Wyoming, in September 1885, culminating a decade-long conflict with Union Pacific management over the employment of Chinese labor, white miners attacked the Chinese district, shooting some Chinese and setting afire to dwellings, some occupied. An estimated fifty-one Chinese died in the Rock Springs Massacre, approximately half perishing from exposure in the hills outside Rock Springs where they fled. Craig Storti, Incident at Bitter Creek: The Story of the Rock Springs Massacre (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1991).
6 Hubert Howe Bancroft, Popular Tribunals (San Francisco: The History Company, 1887). Wayne Gard, Frontier Justice (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1949), v-vi, posits a simple transition from "savagery" to "social stability" in the West, with vigilantism serving as the transitional device.
7 For revisionist accounts that emphasize the nefarious and ephemeral nature of western lynching, see David Johnson, "Vigilance and the Law: The Moral Authority of Popular Justice in the Far West," American Quarterly 33 (1981), 558-86; Frank E. Vyzralek, "Murder in Masquerade: A Commentary on Lynching and Mob Violence in North Dakota's Past, 1882-1931," North Dakota History 57 (1990), 20-29; David Grimsted, "Making Violence Relevant," Reviews in American History 4, no. 3 (September 1976), 331-338.
8 Richard Maxwell Brown, Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 113-118, analyzes the roots, components, and uses of the ideology of vigilantism.
9 For recent work that redresses this lacuna by analyzing the lynching of Mexican Americans, see William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, "Muerto Por Unos Desconocidos (Killed by Persons Unknown): Mob Violence against African Americans and Mexican Americans," in Stephanie Cole and Alison Parker, eds., Beyond Black and White: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the US South and Southwest (College Park: Texas A & M University Press, 2001).
10 27% of lynching victims (17 persons) in California, 1875-1947, were charged (by the mobs) with property crimes. By contrast, in Wyoming, 1878-1918, 60% of lynching victims (21 persons) were accused of property crimes.
11 49% of lynching victims (31 persons) in California, 1875-1947, were accused of homicide; three persons (4.8%) were accused of rape. In Wyoming, 1878-1918, 31% (11 persons) were charged (by the mobs) with homicide; 9% (3 persons) with rape. For analysis of the lynching of whites and its relation to capital punishment in Wyoming, see Michael J. Pfeifer, "Lynching and Criminal Justice in Regional Context: Iowa, Wyoming, and Louisiana, 1878-1946," (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa, 1998), 87-139.
12 Webb, “A History of Lynching in California Since 1875,” 41-47.
13 Quoted in Webb, “A History of Lynching in California Since 1875,” 44.
14 See Carlos A. Schwantes, “The Concept of the Wageworkers’ Frontier: A Framework for Future Research.” Western Historical Quarterly 18 (January 1987), 39-55.
15 Bakersfield Daily Californian, March 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 25, 1904; Los Angeles Times, March 13, 14, 17, 1904; San Francisco Chronicle, March 13, 15, 1904.
16 Bakersfield Daily Californian, March 15, 1904.
17 Bakersfield Daily Californian, March 25, 1904.
18 Los Angeles Times, March 13, 1904; Bakersfield Daily Californian, March 16, 17, 18, April 22, 30, May 1, 20, June 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, July 2, 22, 1904.
19 Todd Guenther, "'Y'all Call me Nigger Jim Now, But Someday You'll Call Me Mr. James Edwards': Black Success on the Plains of the Equality State," Annals of Wyoming 61, no. 2 (Fall 1989), 23. Guenther notes that another Wyoming law permitted segregated schools. In 1882, as the results of the efforts of a Kentucky-born black legislator, William Jefferson Hardin, the Wyoming territorial legislature had repealed an anti-miscegenation clause in the 1869 constitution. Roger D. Hardaway, "William Jefferson Hardin: Wyoming's Nineteenth Century Black Legislator," Annals of Wyoming 63, no. 1, 2-13.
20 See (Cheyenne) Wyoming Tribune, December 19, 26, January 1, 1917, which printed bold headlines such as "Negroes Murder Casper Men," "Negro Women at Casper Face Trial for Murder," and "11 Murders Occur in 'Wet' Cheyenne." For an analysis that interprets an early twentieth century anti-gambling campaign as a precursor of "Wyoming progressivism," see William Howard Moore, "Progressivism and the Social Gospel in Wyoming: The Antigambling Act of 1901 as a Test Case," Western Historical Quarterly 15 (1984), 299-316. Moore argues that Wyoming reformers shared a preoccupation with vices such as "the brothel, saloon, and gambling parlor" with "Progressives" elsewhere. Unmentioned by Moore, "Progressive" rhetoric in Wyoming also contained a strong racial element.
21(Cheyenne) Wyoming Tribune, December 19, 1918. On the basis of his own experience, Russel Taylor believed that lynching victim Joel Woodson may have been justified in disbelieving the white waitress, who did not wish to serve an African American man, and that there may have been more to his encounter with the white switchman than revealed in the newspapers.
22 (Cheyenne) Wyoming Tribune, December 13, 1917.
23 For one of the most recent of many works that chart this transition in the South see Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999). For the same period in the West, although without an emphasis on qualitative shift in race relations after 1900, see Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 192-227. For a discussion of race relations, law, and lynching during this period in Wyoming and in Iowa, see Pfeifer, "Lynching and Criminal Justice in Regional Context," 140-196.
24 For the origins of the anti-Chinese racial ideology among working class whites in the West, see Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 99-112; Alexander P. Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
25 In Wyoming, the census of 1890, the year of statehood, enumerated 922 blacks, or 1.6 per cent of the population; the percentage slipped to just over 1 per cent in 1900, climbed again to 1.6 per cent in 1910, and declined to less than 1 per cent in 1920. Chinese composed 0.7 per cent of the state's persons in 1890, 0.5 per cent in 1900, and 0.2 per cent in 1910. In 1900, Chinese constituted 3.1 % of the California's population; blacks less than 1%. U.S. Census, Twelfth Census of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1901); U.S. Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1913); U.S. Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1922). By 1905, the majority of Wyoming's African American population was concentrated not in rural settlement but in towns and cities such as Cheyenne, Sheridan, Rock Springs, Green River, Casper, and Laramie. In these small African American communities, men predominated by a 5:3 ratio, and most blacks worked as porters, domestic servants, and in other kinds of unskilled labor. While none of these towns surpassed 15,000 in population in 1905, they all possessed a critical mass of several thousand persons, and black populations of at least 100, and sometimes several hundred persons. A small floating workforce of African American men in Wyoming's towns and cities seemed to especially threaten white Wyomingites' conceptions of racial order. State of Wyoming, The Census of Wyoming, 1905 (Cheyenne: 1905).