Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Historian tells story of hanging trees

Sandy Battin News-Bulletin Staff Writer; sbattin@news-bulletin.com

Belen If you're a fan of Western movies, you know that stealing a horse or rustling cattle was a capital offense.

But, says former state historian Robert J. Tórrez, it never happened. Not at least in territorial New Mexico. At least not sentenced by a judge. Maybe by lynching. Maybe.

Tórrez, who addressed the annual meeting of the Valencia County Historical Society on Sunday, said according to the law, you were no more likely to be hanged for stealing a horse than you would be for taking a chicken. All livestock was considered equal by law.

The author of "The Myth of the Hanging Tree: Stories of Crime and Punishment in Territorial New Mexico," Tórrez shared his research as he stood under the cottonwoods in the patio of the Felipe Chavez Hacienda. One of them by local legend is a hanging tree, although Tórrez said he hasn't found any historical documentation of it.

That doesn't mean that New Mexico didn't have its share of wild and wooly tales that could make fairly interesting movies of their own.

"In the movies we were brought up with, someone stole a horse or some cattle or robbed a bank ... and a mob takes him outside of town to an ominous-looking tree. In the more graphic movies, the last scene was a pair of dangling boots. In the most graphic ones, the boots twitched a little bit," he said.

There are reports in New Mexico newspapers that say some folks were hung "by an enigmatic judge. They might say something like 'Judge Lynch held court at Los Lunas last night,'" he said.

During the state's territorial days, he reported, there were 51 legal executions and 125 lynchings from 1850 to 1912. "Of those 125, in a significant percentage, newspapers gave enough information that you can learn what happened," he said.

And despite that pesky local hanging tree legend, he said, there is no evidence that any of the 51 legal executions made use of a tree. "A scaffold was usually built," he said. "In some cases, it was a matter of civic pride."

In many cases, the person about to be executed was driven to the scaffold on a wagon, which served as a mobile platform. "A broken neck seldom happened in those cases because it was such a short fall," he said. "Instead, in most cases, they strangled to death."

There were no professional hangmen and no instruction on how to carry out an execution. "In 51 executions over a period of 65 years, it wouldn't be much of a living," he quipped.

Usually, the dismal duty of serving as hangman was relegated to the county sheriff. "There are some horrific stories of individuals suffering horrible deaths," Tórrez said.

In perhaps the most famous, Thomas "Black Jack" Ketchum was decapitated when being hung in Clayton for a train robbery.

In 1875, William Wilson was put into his coffin after being hung in Lincoln County, but someone noticed that he was still alive. He wound up being strung up for another 20 minutes, Tórrez said, because the warrant said he was to be hanged until dead.

The historian noted that, in some cases, the governor had actually written that the hanging must be carried on until the defendant was "dead, dead, dead."

Judges had no leeway in sentencing anyone convicted of first-degree murder to anything other than hanging, he noted. In some historical documents, there is a "thread of deep frustration of the judges in the difficulty of convicting anyone of capital murder" since juries were loath to be responsible for someone's death.

Governors often granted clemency, although there were very few outright pardons, he said, and the defendant landed up serving life in prison.

Some jurisidictions solved that problem, he continued, by making it "really easy to escape from New Mexico jails. Billy the Kid is merely the most famous escapee who was awaiting execution."

Because there was so little money to feed prisoners, when they escaped, he said, "you can almost hear the sigh or relief.

"There was no cloud of dust, no indication that they were chased."

Tórrez noted that, during those days, there were "a lot of examples of women poisoning their husbands ... I'm not going to commit sociology to try to explain why."

In 1907, two teenage girls were charged with husband poisoning, and in 1897 a Colfax County women was tried.

"Our ancestors lived more interesting and exciting lives than we give them credit for," he noted.

Only one woman, Paula Angel, was executed in territorial New Mexico. In 1861, she was convicted of murdering her lover in Las Vegas. Tórrez noted that she was loaded into a wagon with her coffin and taken to the execution spot where a noose already dangled. Her neck was put through the rope and the sheriff drove off.

When he turned around, Angel had her hands around the noose and was climbing up — he'd forgotten to tie her wrists. The sheriff ran back, grabbed her around the waist and they started to struggle.

The historian says that the crowd rushed forward under the notion that there was some common law that, if the execution doesn't work, the defendant should be set free.

But a town father stepped up holding the death warrant, noting that Angel had to be hung until she was death. As the historian noted, she had to go through the whole experience again.

On a local note, Tórrez noted that "the Belen and Los Lunas area had more lynchings that any other place in New Mexico ... so it is possible there is a hanging tree somewhere here."

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