The Night of the Three Nooses
A double lynching followed by a swift vigilante mob justice against a third prisoner defined one of the most violent episodes in early Seattle history.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
In the yard of Henry Yesler’s residence, James Sullivan and William Howard were hanged by an infuriated people for shooting George B. Reynolds on the corner of Third and Marion streets. The lynching occurred about 6 o'clock in the evening of January 17, 1861. After the hanging, a crowd suggested that Benjamin Payne, confined for the murder of Police Officer David Sires, should suffer the same penalty. The crowd battered down the doors of the jail, seized the trembling man, and marched him to the gallows where Sullivan and Howard were still hanging. Before he could speak, his body was hoisted to take its place between the other two.
“You hang me and you will hang an innocent man.”
This 1861 event occurred near the current site of Pioneer Square. It serves as a stark reminder of Seattle’s frontier-era reliance on extrajudicial violence before formal institutions were fully established.
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