Gold camp residents considered hanging a shameful death. It was a manner of launching an individual into eternity with the guarantee of an eternally disgraced name. Therefore most mining frontiersmen would have preferred to commit suicide rather than die on the gallows. At one lynching, the sight of the human body free falling in space for one instant and in the next jerking to neck-snapping suspension caused horrified Indians to vomit up the dog meat they had just ingested. Seeing them disgorge their queasy stomachs, vigilantes reported, provided a bit of comic relief which enabled the lynching party to proceed with the victim's burial in a more lighthearted mood.[1]
Indians were not the only witnesses revolted by the sight of an impromptu execution. Many pioneer reminiscences preserve the personal trauma of unexpectedly viewing such a scene. "One frosty morning," Molly Sheehan related,
when I opened the back door of our cabin I saw in the gulch below a crowd of men gathered around a scaffold.... Beneath the scaffold stood a young man with a rope around his neck. He shook hands with several of the men, then pulled a black cap over his face. I knew the portent. I slammed the door and rushed into the house, but I could not shut out from my memory, then or ever, that awful creaking sound of the hangman's rope.[2]And a young greenhorn named David Bailey heard shortly after his arrival at the mines how midnight stranglers would turn their overcoats wrong side out, put on flour sack masks, march double file, and drag some individual to a convenient tree and hang him. Still, as Bailey set out early one morning to round up his oxen, he was not prepared for the image that greeted him:
An old hay frame of mammoth size had been raised to the top of a high picket corral,... and to a rung of the frame were tied the ropes.... I saw two men dangling at the end of ropes.... These fellows were cleanly shaven and apparently well dressed, but their hats were gone, their hair disheveled, eyes bloodshot, features distorted, necks craned by the ropes, tongue of one protruded and bloody.... I did not tarry long.... To me this was a ghastly, repulsive sight, and caused a sensation to permeate my nervous system that was not dispelled for many hours.[3]John Overton, an early resident of Alder Gulch, heard one evening that a man was about to be hanged for stealing a large sum of money. Hurrying to the scene, Overton discovered not the hardened thief of "scowling features" that he had expected, but a "beardless boy weeping." In the flickering rays of dusk, the boy stepped upon the platform, bid his friends goodbye, and fell to his death. "I turned me away sick at heart," Overton recalled.[4] When vigilantes placed two of their victims on display at Virginia City, James Knox Polk Miller joined the hundreds of curious miners flocking to town to view the corpses. That night Miller recorded his impressions in his diary: the "very visable" rope markings on the necks, the "blue faces and open eyes looking very much like when alive."[5] None of the foregoing accounts, however, describe the twenty-one subjects of this work. In fact, some of the victims mentioned in previous paragraphs remain unidentified.