Justice at the end of a rope - or injustice as the case might have been - was not exactly uncommon in the Old West. With the local sheriff maybe several days' ride away, lynchings were often the quickest and simplest solution to a problem.
Generations later, people today wink and write off that brand of frontier justice as nothing more than the colorful lore that gave the West its maverick spirit.But one particular lynching remains among the darkest chapters in Utah history. It had nothing to do with cattle rustlers or stagecoach robbers or any of the other romantic images of the Old West.
It was a racially motivated hanging that occurred in the presence of lawmen who said they were overpowered and could not identify the perpetrators.
The incident concerns the June 18, 1925, lynching of Robert Marshall, a black man accused of robbery and murder of a white man.
According to witnesses, deputy sheriff J. Milton Burns was making his rounds as a night watchman at the Utah Fuel Co. in nearby Castlegate, Carbon County, when Marshall reportedly pulled a pistol and shot the guard five times. Marshall then kicked the fallen deputy and struck him with the end of his pistol, shouted, "Take that, whitey," and then robbed the deputy of about $140 and his pistol.
The June 15 killing outraged many white folks in Price, particularly members of the Ku Klux Klan, then active in the area. Marshall had been hiding at a cabin owned by a local resident, who feared the growing racial unrest in the community and eventually turned Marshall over to authorities.
Newspaper accounts reported that by the time the sheriff's car carrying Marshall arrived in Price, an angry mob had assembled and was chanting, "Kill the nigger." Some accounts say people rushed to gather their families to witness the event, some even packing picnic lunches.
According to Lynnda Johnson, who researched the incident for the Price Sun-Advocate, "The heated frenzy gained momentum, with hatred and hostility fueling the fire, until mob rule took control of the day's fateful chain of events. The crowd seized custody of the black man and carried Marshall approximately 21/2 miles east of town."
The crowd by then had swelled to more than 800 people. According to a June 18, 1925, newspaper account of the incident, people in the crowd shouted, "You are going to suffer a long, lingering death" as they made preparations to hang Marshall.
According to the newspaper account, Marshall was hanged once but showed signs of regaining consciousness as deputies were removing the body to a car.
" `Lynch him, he isn't dead yet,' members of the mob cried. The officers were overpowered and Marshall was rehanged," the newspaper account said.
Marshall's body was later placed on public display in Price, where hundreds of people turned the spectacle into more of a carnival.
At a formal inquest into the lynching, deputies testified they were overpowered by the mob. Deputy Sam Garrett, who cut Marshall down the first time, said, "I started to lift him up, when they jumped us."
Price City Marshall Warren Peacock testified he didn't see who had lynched Marshall. "I don't know who. We picked him up and started to put him in the car. Someone dragged me from behind and drug me to the edge of the crowd."
None of the seven lawmen who were called to testify could, or would, identify the participants in the lynching.
According to Johnson's account of the aftermath, District Attorney F.W. Keller was assigned to investigate the lynching, and he even filed first-degree murder charges against six men, some of them prominent citizens in Carbon County. But when it came time to present evidence before a grand jury, none of the 125 people called to testify would identify the six as participants. Nor would they point the finger at anyone else who had participated.
That prompted Keller to say, "How can these people who testified demand others to uphold the laws of the United States of America, to give equal justice to all races, live next to and around all men involved in the lynching? I am ashamed at the disgraceful mockery of the law and order which has resulted in the affair right from the beginning, and the manner in which the state has been held up to ridicule. May God have pity on you."
Because of the lack of evidence, murder charges were dismissed.
Many questions still remain about the lynching. The identities of the witnesses who claimed to have seen Marshall commit the murder were never released, and some claim there was an actual conspiracy to keep the details of the entire episode obscure.
Johnson's 1990 article revealing the names of those actually charged in the lynching raised the hackles of some in Price who either didn't know or who didn't believe their fathers and grandfathers had been charged with murder.
"And I can see why they are upset," she said. "Obviously it was a definite scar on Carbon County history. It was one of the last lynchings anywhere in the United States. And most of the adults in the town were involved as either spectators or participants. "
Many even posed for photographs with the body, and postcards of the dead man were printed. "History isn't pretty," Johnson added. "You can't juggle it around to remember only the happy times."