Category Archives: Death Penalty

1890: Edward Gallagher, “none of your damned business!”

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On this date in 1890, thrashing in panicked resistance, Edward Gallagher hanged in Vancouver, Wash.

Louis Mar, an aged and solitary farmer who was known to carry large sums of cash on him, had been found in November 1889 shot dead outside his home — which had also been ransacked but to little effect. (Thousands of dollars were discovered tucked into the house’s nooks and crannies that the assailant(s) had overlooked.) A discarded scrap of a newspaper proved to match the edition Gallagher himself was carrying when detained lurking around the Mar place a few days later.

1890 was the year that America’s the western frontier officially closed, but the grueling life in its Cascade Mountain vestiges in the 1880s had taken a toll on the Chicago-born murderer. The Portland Oregonian (July 6, 1890) noted that he “is 24 years old, but looks to be over 30.” On top of that, he nearly burned to death awaiting trial in jail when Vancouver’s courthouse went up in flames in February of 1890.

Gallagher might very well have been non compos mentis, and it is not a mark in favor of his sanity that he elected to defend himself by agreeing that he pulled the trigger, but arguing that it had been done in self-defense … while on Mar’s land … and prior to burgling Mar’s house … with a mystery accomplice whom he refused to name.

As much as the circumstances implied a cold-blooded killing, Gallagher’s erratic behavior, disjointed nonsense story of the crime, and inexplicable confidence in his pardon all struck many observers as the mark of a genuinely unbalanced man.

“Gallagher does not seem to comprehend his fate,” the Oregonian puzzled. “One would be in a quandary to decide whether he was insane or lacked brains to comprehend the enormity of his crime.”

He maintained that incomprehension all the way to the gallows platform. As a fascinating 2013 retrospective in the Vancouver Columbian described it,

didn’t believe he would die that day — despite the bloodthirsty crowd before him, the $225 spent on his execution, the lawmen flanking his left and right.

Instead, with a “slickly idiotic smile,” he apologized to the audience for his appearance and promised he would do better next time. He said “the soldiers” would save him.

Reality struck when his hands were bound. For three maniacal minutes, Gallagher swung his arms and kicked violently, knocking over the sheriff and his helpers. Seven men finally subdued him.

The death warrant was read, a black hood pulled over Gallagher’s head and the noose tightened. Sheriff [M.J.] Fleming, who was paid $50 for the deed, gave the condemned man one more chance to confess to killing and robbing Lewis Marr, an old farmer found dead on his land in the Lower Cascades area of Skamania County.

“Did you kill that man, or did you not? Now, answer,” the sheriff said, according to newspaper accounts.

From beneath the black hood, Gallagher sneered his last words: “None of your damned business.”

His egregious death was witnessed by 200 official ticket-holding invitees, but the wooden stockade nominally enclosing the gallows was easily peered through or over … so another 500 people outside the stockade also peeped on the de facto public execution.

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1584: Francis Throckmorton, plotter

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Francis Throckmorton (Throgmorton), was executed at Tyburn on this date in 1584 for his plot to make Mary, Queen of Scots the Queen of England, too.

The son of a prominent Warwickshire family — his father’s monumental tomb still adorns the church at Coughton, while London’s Throgmorton Street is named for our guy’s uncle Nicholas — Francis was a staunch Catholic who as a 20-something man on the make did a continental tour where he huddled with papist exiles cogitating how to win England back for the faith.

Naturally many a plot centered on the Catholic Queen of Scotland Mary, who as Henry VIII’s great-niece stood well within the scope of consanguinity necessary to rule England with legitimacy. (Mary’s son James VI of Scotland and James I of England would do justice that.)

On his return to London in 1583, the subtle agents of Elizabeth’s spymaster Francis Walsingham sniffed out his project to establish a line of communication from Mary to the Duke of Guise who contemplated a pro-Mary invasion.

“I have seen as resolute men as Throckmorton stoop, notwithstanding the great shew he hath made of a Roman resolution,” Walsingham prophesied of the obdurate young man whose fidelity to his project was to be tested by torture in the Tower. “I suppose the grief of the last torture will suffice, without anye extremity of racking, to make him more comformable than he hath hitherto showed himself.”

Indeed Throckmorton did succumb.

The ensuing bust-up of his plot forms a station on Queen Mary’s own path to Calvary: the treasonable design empowered Walsingham successfully to impel creation of the Bond of Association, a sort of legal pledge to execute anyone who attempted to usurp Elizabeth. That “bond” was called in two years later by Mary’s connection to the Babington Plot, leading directly to the Scots queen’s own trial and execution.

* Throckmorton’s plot also resulted in the expulsion of Spanish ambassador Bernardino de Mendoza, an energetic spy for the Catholics’ overseas allies.

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1861: Robert Thomas Palin, under Ordinance 17 Victoria Number 7

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On this date in 1861,* Western Australia’s Ordinance 17 Victoria Number 7 claimed its one and only victim.

Implemented early in Western Australia’s convict era as the influx of criminals made existing settlers jumpy, this law made a wide variety of violent but non-fatal crimes potentially subject to the death penalty when committed by an escaped fugitive.

Robert Thomas Palin was a newcomer to Australia, having debarked from a convict ship only in January 1860. Despite his burglary conviction back in the mother country, he was an exemplary prisoner and earned his ticket of leave (a sort of limited furlough). He even kept a house in Fremantle and took lodgers.

In May 1861, he threw every away every bit of good will and more by burgling another Fremantle home. A Mrs. Susan Harding awoke in the moonlight to find this invader looming over her bed — and he greeted her in that classic of convict argot, “Your money or your life.”

Mrs. Harding didn’t have any — in the words of her testimony on July 3:**

He repeatedly told me to “hush.” He took hold of me by the arm and pulled my hair about, and then pulled the bed clothes down, and felt about the bed. I was afraid he was about to commit some assault — he touched my night dress, not to move it, and then I got so dreadfully alarmed, that I jumped out of bed on the opposite side of the bed. I went to my looking-glass drawer, and took out a watch and chain, which I handed him, and prayed him to leave me.

Palin did so.

Although terrifying for Susan Harding, the encounter did not result in any injury; as Palin’s boot-prints were easily followed back to his own house, even her watch and chain were recovered. To send this offender to the gallows seemed like a punishment out of the wrong century, as Perth’s Inquirer and Commercial News editorialized (June 10):

Burglary attended with violence, however brutal that violence might be, so long as it did not result fatally, is not punished with death in the United Kingdom.

… What was the violence on this occasion? Catching hold of the arm of the principal witness; and it does not appear from the evidence that even the grasp was violent, nor was it necessary to be so according to the acceptation of the meaning of the word laid down for us. It was propounded by the Chief Justice that, strictly speaking, merely laying a hand upon a person, under such circumstances, constituted violence. Is this truly the spirit of the law? …

Palin might have taken everything in that house, yet he would not have been hung. He might have threatened with the presumed pistol, have gesticulated, have stormed and terrified the occupant of the chamber almost to the verge of insanity, and yet he would not have been hung, but he touched her arm, and death is the penalty. There is something horrible in this. But there is something more fearful still when we further look into the matter and find that had he committed any enormity, even to the shedding of blood, he could not have had awarded to him a more extreme measure of punishment. …

[It is our] fervent hope that never again may the pages of our Colonial History be inscribed with so terrible a record; that never again will it be our province to allude to an event of so dreadful a character as that which has lately passed away.

The fervent hope was realized. In the only other case where Ordinance 17 Victoria Number 7 was used to secure a death penalty for an ordinarily non-capital crime, the sentence was commuted.

* As of this writing, Wikipedia avers July 6. References from 1861 newspapers make it clear that this is erroneous. (example, another).

** Yes, that’s six days before the execution occurred.

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1949: Antoun Saadeh

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On this date in 1949, Lebanese writer and political leader Antoun Saadeh was shot following a failed coup by his Syrian Social Nationalist Party.

Born to a globetrotting journalist, the young polyglot Saadeh was living abroad in Brazil when his native Lebanon fell from the collapsing Ottoman Empire into French hands.

He returned in 1930 to Lebanon an irredentist on the make and churned out a prodigious literary output: fiction, newspaper stories, political pamphlets.

It was his vision for a “Greater Syria” that would define the man’s legacy, and cause his death. In 1932 he secretly founded the Syrian Social Nationalist Party to advocate for a vast Syrian state encompassing what now comprise Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel/Palestine. At its most ambitious this prospective state dreamt itself inscribed upon the whole Fertile Crescent from the Tauras Mountains to the Persian Gulf.

The SSNP still exists in Syria and Lebanon to this day, but it was a big cheese in the French Mandate by the late 1930s — when the imminent end of colonialism put the future shape of the entire region into question. Saadeh, harried by French authorities who had clapped him in prison a couple of times, emigrated to Argentina and carried on the struggle through exile publications.

In 1947, Saadeh returned to a rapturous reception in now-independent Lebanon:

But his pan-Syria idea was distinctly at odds with what had happened on the ground. Whatever the colonial roots of the borders that had been set down, they defined not only zones on a map but elites with an interest in their maintenance. Lebanon’s founding “National Pact” arrangement among Christians and Muslims also committed all involved to Lebanon as an independent state not to merge with Syria.

So despite (or rather because of) Saadeh’s popularity, the SSNP faced renewed crackdowns in 1948. Revolutionaries, reformers, and pan-Arabist types were surging throughout the region thanks to the distressingly shabby performance of Arab armies in their 1948 war to strangle Israel in its crib. (Lebanon fielded only a tiny force in this fight which also won no laurels; instead, Israel began its long tradition of occupying southern Lebanon.) Saadeh was certainly alarmed by the birth of a Zionist state so inimical to his own programme; “Our struggle with the enemy is not a struggle for borders but for existence,” he declared in 1948.

On July 4, 1949, the SSNP put its muscle to the test by attempting to seize state power in Lebanon — and disastrously failed. Saadeh had traveled to Damascus hoping to gain the support of the Syrian military dictator Husni al-Za’im;* instead, al-Za’im simply handed Saadeh right back to Lebanese authorities who had him tried in secret and swiftly executed.

* A gentleman who would himself be overthrown and executed just a few weeks hence.

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1911: Daniel “Nealy” Duncan, posthumous pardon candidate

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On this date in 1911, still professing his innocence, Daniel “Nealy” Duncan hanged in the county jail at Charleston, South Carolina.

“Short, thick set and very black,”* Duncan was, at length, arrested for the murder of a King Street tailor named Max Lubelsky. Poor Mr. Lubelsky had been discovered on June 21, 1910 as he lay dying of a fractured skull — the bloody cudgel rudely enhanced with a nail abandoned beside its victim was the only clue, besides someone in the neighborhood who thought they noticed “a negro, dressed in a blue suit, wearing a derby hat”** who left the store around the time of the midday attack. The attacker’s purpose was robbery.

With very little to go on, police “rounded up a number of characters” and, the papers forthrightly reported, gave these black men “the ‘third degree'”: that is, tortured them.

Granting that we find ourselves at this moment at the nadir of race relations in the Jim Crow south, these officers conceived themselves acting in good faith, torture and all. They were not utterly indiscriminate; several of the beaten-up suspects were able to produce an alibi and were duly released with their newly acquired welts. But in the absence of a witness (or knuckle-assisted self-incrimination) they had little to work with.

And so the assailant remained a mystery.

There matters still stood on July 8 when the widow Mrs. Lubelsky came racing out of her late husband’s store with blood streaming down her own face, crying murder at the top of her lungs.

To take up the narration reported in the next day’s edition of The State,

Just then a negro emerged and two men, Isaac Goodman and Moses Needle, who were passing, gave chase of the negro. He was caught a few blocks distant and promptly turned over to Police Officer Stanley and Detective Levy, who had also taken up the chase. Protesting his innocence and declaring that another negro had attempted to kill the woman, Daniels was taken to the station house amidst great excitement and the patrol wagon did not roll off any too soon from the excited neighborhood …

The State has given us an incriminating narration, but if we begin from our suspect’s denial it is not too difficult to conceive the scene otherwise — a bystander swept into the chaos as the panicked Mrs. Lubelsky barges out of her shop, the sudden attention of a crowd which the newsman gives us to understand was wound up enough for a lynching. You’d run, too.

The traumatized Mrs. Lubelsky insisted that it was Duncan who attacked her; this is one of the few pieces of palpable evidence we have in the case, though eyewitness error is a frequent factor in wrongful convictions. She would have glimpsed her assailant for a moment, dashed out of the store in a panic, then a fleeing man was chased down and hauled back to her — perfect cues for her memory to fix this man with all sincerity as the picture of her assailant.

And whatever the cliche about criminals returning to the scenes of their crimes, few are bold enough to repeat a literally identical attack days apart. It was basically just by analogy that the July 8 assault was held to place Duncan at the scene of the murder 17 days before; the vague description of the blue-suited man who might or might not have had anything to do with the murder could have fit Duncan or numerous other people. A local black man said that Duncan had been in the area on the day Max Lubelsky was killed, which would scarcely rise to the level of circumstantial even were one to discount the possible confirmation bias (or police pressure) introduced by Duncan’s arrest.

One would like to think (forlorn hope!) that a jury in 2015 would demand better than this to stretch a man’s neck … but in Charleston in 1910, it was enough to surpass reasonable doubt.†


The State, Oct. 8, 1910.

Duncan’s insistence on innocence was passed down in his own family and in the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church whose congregation the hanged man once belonged to. In these halls, he is widely understood to have been an innocent man and this conclusion has not wanted for latter-day advocates.‡

The case surfaced to the broader public recently, with a push around the centennial of Duncan’s hanging to have him posthumously exonerated. The measure failed on a 3-3 vote in 19112011.

Left: Dead Weight, a historical novel based on the Duncan case; right: Charleston’s Trial, a nonfiction account.

Duncan was the last person hanged in Charleston, but not the last in South Carolina; there was a double execution in December of 1911 before the Palmetto state adopted electrocution beginning in 1912.

* The State (Columbia, S.C.), June 11, 1911.

** The State, June 22, 1911.

† The supernaturally inclined took notice from the August 1911 hurricane that devastated Charleston as a portend of Duncan’s innocence — and nicknamed it “the Duncan storm”.

‡ 2010-2011 media accounts indicated that the victim’s descendants did not share such confidence in Duncan’s innocence.

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2009: Yahia al-Raghwa, shot in Sana’a

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On this date in 2009, Yemen conducted the public execution of Yahia al-Raghwa for the rape-murder of an 11-year-old boy who had visited his barber shop the previous December.

Reportedly, the sentence had initially called for the man to be thrown from a high building as punishment for same-sex activity. Instead, it was “commuted” to the shooting depicted below, in the capital city of Sana’a. (ISIS has carried out such executions-by-precipitation more recently.)

Warning: Mature Content. (Actually only the very last image is truly bloody.)

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2007: Jafar Kiani, stoned

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On this date in 2007, Jafar Kiani was stoned to death in Iran for committing “adultery while married” with Mokarrameh Ebrahimi, by whom Kiani had two children. She was condemned to the same death, for the same crime.

Ma’iz b. Malik al-Aslami came to Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) and said: Allah’s Messenger, I have wronged myself; I have committed adultery and I earnestly desire that you should purify me … a ditch was dug for him and he (the Holy Prophet) pronounced judgment about him and he was stoned.

… There came to him (the Holy Prophet) a woman from Ghamid and said: Allah’s Messenger, I have committed adultery, so purify me. … He said: Well, if you insist upon it, then go away until you give birth to (the child). When she was delivered she came with the child (wrapped) in a rag and said: Here is the child whom I have given birth to. He said: Go away and suckle him until you wean him. When she had weaned him, she came to him (the Holy Prophet) with the child who was holding a piece of bread in his hand. She said: Allah’s Apostle, here is he as I have weaned him and he eats food. He (the Holy Prophet) entrusted the child to one of the Muslims and then pronounced punishment. And she was put in a ditch up to her chest and he commanded people and they stoned her. Khalid b Walid came forward with a stone which he flung at her head and there spurted blood on the face of Khalid and so he abused her. Allah’s Apostle (may peace be upon him) heard his (Khalid’s) curse that he had huried upon her. Thereupon he (the Holy Prophet) said: Khalid, be gentle. By Him in Whose Hand is my life, she has made such a repentance that even if a wrongful tax-collector were to repent, he would have been forgiven. Then giving command regarding her, he prayed over her and she was buried.

–one of many hadiths to sanction stoning (the Quran does not do so explicitly)

A frighteningly primitive form of execution, stoning is a legally prescribed form of execution for extramarital concupiscience in Iran.

“Article 102 — An adulterous man shall be buried in a ditch up to near his waist and an adulterous woman up to near her chest and then stoned to death.” (

Such sentences were implemented fairly widely in the immediate aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, when sharia strictures were inscribed in law. (Human Rights Watch estimates that the Islamic Republic has conducted at least 70 executions by stoning since its birth in 1979, though reckonings of double that figure or more can also be had. Iran has not exactly prioritized transparency in this area.)

In the 21st century, however, Iran has distinctly toned down stoning executions.

The head of Iran’s judiciary announced in 2002 what was widely reported as a “moratorium” or even a “ban” on stonings.

It is obvious from Kiani’s execution that this directive did not carry absolute authority; with a pair of 2009 stonings, a judiciary spokesman explained that the so-called moratorium was merely an “advisory”, and that “judges are independent.” Kiani’s execution was justified on the grounds that the Supreme Court had approved the sentence.

Amnesty International reported at least six stonings from 2006 to 2009, but the independence of local judges has not since that time sufficed to overcome Tehran’s growing reservations about the controversial punishment. It appears that Iran has not carried out any known stonings from 2010 onward, which was right around the time worldwide outcry saved adulteress Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani from death by stoning. (She was eventually released altogether.)

Nevertheless, the stoning laws have remained on the books, and people are still being sentenced to be buried in a hole and lethally pelted with rocks. Iran explored removing stoning from its penal codes altogether in 2012, but the Guardian Council reportedly rescued stoning and the final version of that legislation in 2013 retained the option.

Jafar Kiani’s lover Mokarrameh Ebrahimi, who had also been languishing under the same sentence for 11 long years at the time of Kiani’s execution, was, at least, a beneficiary of Iran’s growing reticence to implement such sentences. Campaigners were able to win her release in March 2008.

Elahe Amani discusses stoning in Iran in a 2013 podcast here.

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1865: Okada Izo, barbarian-expeller

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On this date in 1865, the Japanese samurai Okada Izo was dispatched by crucifixion.

He was one of* the “Four Hitokiri“ — manslayers — whose legendary blades coruscated in the Bakumatsu era that marked Japan’s pivot from an isolationist feudal state, one where samurai were big men on prefectures, to a burgeoning modern power ruled by industry and mass conscription.

The irony was that dinosaurs like the Hitokiri helped bring the asteroid down on their own heads.

During the chaotic Bakumatsu period, triggered by Japan’s becoming involuntarily opened to the outside world, the emperor — long a figurehead marginalized by the shogun — entered the political fray under the xenophobic banner “revere the emperor, expel the barbarians.”

Warriors/assassins like the Hitokiri were wooed by the imperial camp and the promise of a policy that would maintain the purpose and privilege of elite swordsmen. But once power was conquered, the Meiji emperor repaid those knights’ exertions by doing the modernization thing that Hitokiri types had hoped to avoid.

Okada Izo was among the first barbarian-expellers to be caught up by the policy swing. After a couple of years running amok in Kyoto, the anti-foreigner movement was suppressed and its leader forced to commit seppuku, which was still more deference than Izo received.

The execution, usually conceived as the end, is the jumping-off point for the surreal time-and-space-hopping 2004 Takasha Miike bloodbath Izo, “one of the most difficult works of art to be made in recent times.”

* Along with fellow-execution victim Kawakami Gensai, and two other guys who met violent deaths that were not (more’s the pity for this site) executions.

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1752: Thomas Wilford, the first hanged under the Murder Act of 1751

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On this date in 1752,* Thomas Wilford hanged at Tyburn — the first person executed under the Murder Act of 1751.

Approved the previous year but just come into effect on the first of June of 1752, the Murder Act proposed “that some further terror and peculiar mark of infamy be added to the punishment of death” for homicides.**

Since even shoplifting could get you hanged at this period, actually killing someone required an extra twist on the punishment. Parliament killed two birds with one stone here by also addressing the country’s need for anatomical corpses, requiring that the bodies of hanged murderers be delivered “to the hall of the Surgeons Company” where it “shall be dissected and anatomized by the said Surgeons.”†

Wilford presented the surgeons a one-armed specimen with questionable impulse control. As a teenager, he met a prostitute named Sarah Williams in their shared workhouse, and married her, but the honeymoon did not last long. Four days later, his bride stayed out late and to his queries admitted having gone “to the Park” — whereupon Wilford grabbed a knife and slashed her neck so deep as to nearly decapitate her.

“He had no sooner committed the horrid deed than he threw down the knife, opened the chamber door, and was going downstairs when a woman, who lodged in an adjacent room, asked who was there; to which Wilford replied: ‘It is me. I have murdered my poor wife, whom I loved as dearly as my own life,'” quoth the Newgate calendar.

A simple and pathetic crime with an easy disposition for the judiciary. The Newgate Ordinary’s account has a few more details. As specified, his remains were indeed turned over for anatomization.

Another provision of the Murder Act: a death sentence for murder is to “be executed according to law, on the day next but one after sentence passed, unless the same shall happen to be the Lord’s day, commonly called Sunday.” Wilford was condemned on a Tuesday and hanged on Thursday morning; however, the predominant practice moving forward would be to issue such sentences on Fridays in order to give the doomed an extra day to prepare themselves.‡

* Thursday, July 2 was the Julian calendar date of Wilford’s hanging. Our norm has been to prefer the local date (Gregorian or Julian, depending on the country) prior to England’s changeover in 1752 — and then generally to prefer the Gregorian date thereafter. (We’ve made a few exceptions.)

England spent the first eight months of 1752 on the Julian calendar, then transitioned to the Gregorian calendar in September of that year, so in this particular instance we’re hewing it close to the bone.

I infer that the calendar switch is probably also the reason why the Newgate Calendar incorrectly attributes Wilford’s hanging to June 22: the discrepancy between the Julian and Gregorian calendars at this point was 11 days, so a later interlocutor might have supposed that July 2 was a Gregorian date that wanted subtraction. It was a confusing, 355-day leap year for Old Blighty, complete with a new New Year’s Day, so if that’s the explanation I’m inclined to give the author a mulligan for making an unnecessary date adjustment and then miscounting the number of days to adjust.

** The Act’s preamble claims that the “horrid crime of murder has of late been more frequently perpetrated than formerly, and particularly in and near the metropolis of this kingdom, contrary to the known humanity and natural genius of the British nation.” We lack dependable crime statistics for this period to verify this sense of parliamentarians.

† The Murder Act also empowered judges, at their discretion, to order a criminal hung in chains, like these blokes.

‡ The eleven other people — non-murderers — condemned at the same assize were not executed until July 13.

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1819: Neyonibe and Naugechek

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From the Northern Sentinel, June 18, 1819:

Extract of a letter, dated Danbury, (Ohio) May 6, 1819, addressed to a gentleman in Albany.

I thought it would be prudent to inform you of some unhappy circumstances which have recently occurred in our neighborhood, in order to save you from any groundless alarm, which common report might create about us.

Last Sunday, a week, (April 25,) we received the intelligence, that two of our neighbors, George Bishop and John Wood, had been found a little above the forks of Portage river, cruelly butchered by the Indians. We immediately armed ourselves, and proceeded to the river’s mouth, where the bodies had been brought.

An inquest was immediately held over them, and on examining them, found “they were murdered willfully, by persons unknown.” — I dare say, in your time, you have seen men sufficiently cut up, but never like them. On the head of Bishop alone, there were six strokes of a tomahawk, each of which let out the brain; his eyes ran out, &c. A page would not be sufficient to give you a description of one body.

The Indians in the neighborhood appeared much alarmed, and kept coming in all day. A number of them volunteered their services to go with us in pursuit of the murderers — some of them we accepted.

After we had buried the bodies, we held a council among ourselves, and agreed that we would parade all the Indians, and express to them what our determination was. The duty of addressing them was performed by me, through an interpreter, in which I set forth to them, our determination to have the murderers at all hazards — our ample abilities to take them, wherever they were — and it was their duty to have had Indians cut off to prevent future crimes.

After I had finished, Sasa, a young, bold and enterprising chief, (who with the other Indians, had listened with extreme attention, and great solemnity,) said in answer “that he with his party, would find the bad Indians, or never return again; he was thankful that the white men did not think them guilty, and they would show by their conduct, that our confidence in them was not misplaced.”

We organized them under a Mr. Tupper, and two other white men — gave them rations, and on Monday morning early they started. They left their squaws to whom we issued rations.

We then returned home, to act as circumstances should require.

On Wednesday, an express came to us, with the report that the murderers, with many of their tribe (Potowattomies,) had assembled near the place of the murder with hideous shrieks, yells, &c.

We immediately got together and I was chosen to command. Away we marched, or rather ran, and encamped at Portage, after sunset. Early in the morning we started — forded rivers, creeks, marshes and prairies, and crosses Toupoint river, before noon, (30 miles,) about two miles beyond this river we met Tupper & his party, with the three murderers, prisoners. These had taken them by the consent of their chiefs two nights before, near the forks of the Miami river — surprised them in their camp about midnight, in the midst of a large settlement of that powerful tribe, and travelled back, with all their strength for fear of being pursued and overpowered. We were still among them and in danger of a rescue.

I accordingly ordered our refreshments to be given them, and in fiteen [sic] minutes we marched again. Before dark we reached Portage again; and the next day at 4 o’clock we delivered them at Portland, or Sandusky city, to the sheriff.

The same night a legal examination of the prisoners took place, who made a full confession of the murder. They also told where they had secreted the plunder. A party was despatched to find it, who have returned it. Our circuit court sits the 18th of this month, and they will undoubtedly condemn them to be hung.

There is not in the annals of the United States, an instance of such a rapid pursuit and capture of Indian murderers, as the one I have now related. Our friendly Indians received handsome presents, and all is now in peace and quietness.*

From the Cleveland Register, June 8, 1819:

TRIAL FOR MURDER.

We have been politely favored with the trial of the three Indians, who were taken on suspicion of having murdered Messrs. Wood and Bishop, on Portage river, Huron county, Ohio.

At the court of Common Pleas, held at Norwalk, Huron county, Ohio, May term, 1819: three Indians by the names of Neyonibe, Naugechek, and Negossum, were indicted and tried for a murder committed a few weeks since on the bodies of two white men John Wood and George Bishop — Wood and Bishop were out hunting and taken lodgings for the night, in a small hut, a few rods from Carrying river, and 8 or 10 miles from its mouth, where the horrid deed was perpetrated.

The Indians could neither speak nor understand English; all communications with them was [sic] by means of an interpreter. Counsel were assigned them by the court, and on the indictment being read and interpreted to them, they elected to be tried by the court of common pleas, and severally plead not guilty, and the court proceeded to try them separately.

Neyonibe was first tried, who was informed of his privilege of peremptorily challenging twenty three jurors. This privilege, on the jurors being singly called and presented to his view and after a short but critical view of the jurors countenance, he exercised with much promptness and decision. He challenged nearly half that were called.

The evidence to support the charge was chiefly derived from the confession of the prisoner. From these, it appeared to have been a deliberately formed plan by Nangachek and Neyonibe, who knew where Wood and Bishop spent their nights, to murder them and pillage their property.

They accordingly accompanied by Negossum, and armed with hatchets, went in the night to the hut where Wood and Bishop were; and each took his man in a profound sleep, and by repeated strokes with their hatchets, upon the heads and breasts of their victims, they dispatched them, in a few moments and took what property they had with them a part of which they concealed near the place.

It was proved that the property was afterwards found in the place, where they acknowledged they had concealed it.

This case was so plain that the counsel, on both sides deemed it useless to argue it to the jury. Judge Todd, on submitting the cause to the jury, in a very concise and lucid manner instructed them, by what principles they were to be governed in forming their verdict; and the jury after retiring a short time, returned a verdict of Guilty.

Naugechek was next tried and convicted. This case did not differ in a material point from Neyonibe’s, and the circumstances attending their trials were similar.

The case of Negossum who was last tried excited much the most interests.

He is a lad about 16 years old, of good appearance, and as was proved had sustained a good character.

He also peremptorily challenged a number of jurors.

The principal evidence in this case was also derived from his confession, and his declarations accompanying them. From these it appeared, that the other two had taken him into their company without disclosing to him their plan, until they had approached near to the place of murder.

He then being partially intoxicated went on with them voluntarily, but carried no weapon to the hut where Wood and Bishop were; but it did not appear that he knew that to be the place where they lodged, until he entered it with his companions.

Upon entering the hut he went to the opposite side from where Wood and Bishop were, asleep, and there stayed until the murder was committed.

Then Naugechek, told him he should do something, and ordered him to come and strike but he did not move, Naugachek then reached forth his bloody hatchet, and in anger told him to come and strike, he then took the hatchet, and with the handle of it, struck several times across the legs of the dead body of Bishop.

He took none of the plunder, at the hut, but some of it was given to him, afterwards by the other Indians.

After hearing the testimony, the attorney for the state entered a Nolle Prosequi, and the prisoner was released.

Naugechek, and Neyonibe received their sentence, and are to be executed on the first day of July next, between the hours of ten and twelve o’clock. They are of the Potawatama tribe — Negossum is of the Ottowa tribe.

Naugechek, in attempting after he was taken to make his escape, was severely wounded by a shot from one of the keepers. Probably he never could recover from his wounds, and they may prove mortal before the time set for his execution.

From the Utica (N.Y.) Columbian Gazette, July 20, 1819:

Warren, (Ohio) July 8. — On Thursday last, agreeably to their sentence, Naugechek and Neyonibe were executed for the murder of John Wood and George Bishop, at Huron [county, specifically Norwalk -ed.].

They met their fate, we are informed by a gentleman who was present at the execution, with that stubborn impertinence and unconcern so characteristic of the savage tribes; regretting only that they could not be shot or tomahawked instead of being hung, stating the the Great Spirit would be angry with them for appearing before him with a halter about their necks.

One of them, however, a day or two previous to their execution, expressed a wish that he might live to kill six more white people to make up the number of twenty, saying that he had already killed fourteen — and then he would not care how he died. It was thought that there were upwards of two thousand spectators present; and among them but six Indians, who viewed the scene with apparent indifference.

* The reader will surely guess that no pleasant feelings from this or any other incident between the peoples would serve to protect the Potawatomi in the end from westward removal — which is why the name of this nation from the Great Lakes region adorns a creek in Kansas, and the pre-Civil War “Pottawatomie massacre” of John Brown‘s anti-slavery partisans that occurred near said creek.

On this day..