This new work from North Dakota State University Press, Lynched — it’s not a feel-good book. “The fact that we were a nation where lynching was a common occurrence should never be forgotten or excused,” say the authors, Doreen Chaky and Adrienne Stepanek, of Williston. Newswoman Chaky is the author of a notable book on the Dakota War in Dakota Territory called Terrible Justice. For Lynched she is joined by a research colleague, Stepanek, a professional genealogist whose granular research skills bring sharp focus to the episodes treated in the book.
“Lynching is an American phenomenon,” they say. Was it a salient feature of life and death in North Dakota? Here nine tragic instances are treated critically as they never have been before, with serious intent and common sense. The work comprises four lynchings in the territorial era; four in the time of early statehood, often referred to as the progressive era; and one chronological outlier, the lynching at Schaefer, McKenzie County, in 1931.
In three cases race was a salient, maybe dominant, factor. The first of these three is the notorious case of Charles Thurber, who after allegedly assaulting two rural women was taken from the Grand Forks county jail and hung from the Manitoba Railway bridge over the Red River. The bare events are scandalous; the descriptions of hilarity, malice, and general racial animus worse. (These include newspaper headlines couched in mock-epic rhyming verse.) Disregard guilt or innocence — the mob actions are shamefully evil.
A later, 1913 lynching at Mondak (which straddled the Montana state line) took the life of a Black bridge construction worker, J. C. Collins, who shot two lawmen attempting to serve a warrant. He was a bad man, but the theft of his lifeless body by parties who threw it into the icy Missouri River hardly indicates a concern for human justice. Nor did the lynching of three men from Standing Rock — Alex Cuodotte, Paul Holy Track, and Philip Ireland, the apparent killers of the Spicer family, in Emmons County in 1913. They were hung from a windlass built to slaughter beeves at Williamsport.
In terms of the machinery of justice, the most interesting case is that of Cleve Culbertson, the random killer of a family of three near Ray in 1913, ultimately taken from the Williams County jail, hung from a bridge, and shot multiple times as he hung. This followed the trial appearance as prosecutor of the rising political star Usher Burdick, football and baseball star, formerly speaker of the house and lieutenant governor, and an engaging historian who discussed the case in a memoir. Also distinguishing, or rather disgracing, the case was the anemic defense by Sheriff Carl Erickson of his prisoner against the lynch mob.
Indeed, as Chaky and Stepanek observe, local authorities let down the side all over in cases of lynching. “Why, then, were these particular northern plains lynchers, in every case, allowed to get away with it?”, the authors ask. “None of the sheriffs and other lawmen put up much of a fight to defend their prisoners. . . . Why did territorial and state officials not pursue lynch mobs with any alacrity? . . . The wall of silence about who might have been behind the masks was universal.” Lawyers were derelict. Communities failed.
The authors perhaps cut the mobsters too much slack by admitting frontier conditions and a western tradition of rough justice were in play. It seems to me the lynchings took place in communities that were not chaotic, but vibrant. It happens I read Lynched at the same time I was rereading the Book of Acts at home. Students of the New Testament will understand when I say, we need to read this latter-day book of acts and reflect on the questions its authors raise, for we tread a Field of Blood.
