By Ron Brown
October 2, 2009
MEDFORD, Ore. - The arrival of the first miners and settlers in the Oregon territory in the 19th century also brought the challenge of how to handle crime.
"When you're looking at things that happened 150 years ago, or 100 years ago, people had a different kind of concept of what justice was and how to apply it," said Diane Goeres-Gardner, Author of '"Necktie Parties".
Apply it they did. A few years ago Gardner published a book titled "Necktie Parties- Legal Executions in Oregon." There are many stories of quick justice in the mining camps of Southern and Eastern Oregon. Where someone killed someone, a judge and jury were quickly convened and justice dispensed. Today, we'd call those hangings lynchings.
"You're looking at times when law was not as respected... People were not really trusting that things would be taken care of. So they did take the law into their own hands," Gardner said.
Maybe it's the movies or the stories handed down, but many people believe that hangings were common occurrences and a popular form of entertainment. Gardner says that actually, there was hardly ever more than one hanging a year statewide between 1851 and 1905.
"About 1879 people started realizing that it probably wasn't a good thing for children to be exposed to this kind of thing without some sort of supervision. And so then the Legislature passed a law saying that they had to have stockades around the gallows," Gardner said.
A stockade means you had to be invited to witness the hanging of a convicted murderer. Women were usually excluded as well. Many people still showed at some of the hangings, even if they had to wait outside stockades that were sometimes 30 feet high.
The last hanging in Jackson County was for Lewis O'Neal in 1886. He was convicted of killing an Ashland man.
However, a few years before that, the Modoc Indian War led to one of the most sensational trials and hangings in state history; that of the Modoc Chief Captain Jack and several other Modocs.
"There were approximately 155 Modocs, mostly old men, women and children. Captain Jack, Schonchin John, Black Jim, Boston Charley, Benacho, Slowlocks, Hooka Jim, Scarface Charley, all came back here to Fort Klamath," said Kevin Fields with the Klamath County Museum.
Jack and several others were accused of killing General Canby and the peace commissioner at the lava beds before retreating into the badlands to be captured months later.
The capture, the trial and the hanging of Captain Jack and his companions at Fort Klamath was one of the top news stories in Southern Oregon in all of the late 1800s. But news of that story would not have gotten out to the national newspapers were it not for a group of intrepid pony express riders who brought it to the telegraph in Jacksonville.
"Frank Wheaton ordered that the Modocs be buried on the edge of the parade ground out of respect for the war that they had fought, so that we, as an army can protect them even in death. He had heard rumors coming out of Jacksonville, Portland and Yreka of people wanting to obtain Captain Jack's corpse and send it around the country in a sideshow, and he didn't want that to happen. So he had the four buried here on the parade ground. And they were guarded 24 hours a day, right up until the fort's closing," Fields said.
There are no known pictures of the hanging. The gallows were a mile from the guard house and were taken down soon afterward. Gallows became a thing of the past in Oregon in 1937, when the state dropped hanging as a form of capital punishment. Today it may seem like a bizarre way to administer justice, but when it was in practice, it made perfect sense to most people.
"It's like trying to apply our values and morals to a different society, because it was a different society. It was a different culture," Gardner said.
Saturday, October 3rd is the 136th anniversary of the hanging of Captain Jack.
Gardner says there were 63 legal hangings in Oregon outside of Salem before they were transferred to the state penitentiary in 1905. There were three in Jackson County, two each in Josephine and Coos counties, and one in Curry County.
