Small Wonders: Frontier justice

True story. 

It's 1907. Some guy shows up into Bancroft, Nebraska, and just like that a hundred people surround him, spittin' fire. They accuse him of murder, and they're fit to be tied. It's no Chamber of Commerce welcome. Poor guy knows nothing about the bloody deeds they're talking about, but he can't help thinking he's on a road to the graveyard.

Bancroft is seething. There's been a double homicide at the home of good, good people, the parents of seven kids--oldest, a girl, just 13. Mother and father murdered; innocent, God-fearing people, the Copples, gunned down right outside the front door of their farm home. 

Sometime later, the murderer got caught, the real one. He confessed, got himself a knuckle-sandwich in the process but confessed, and no one doubted he was the guy. Loris Hay Higgins was his name, but in Thurston County he'd gone by "Fred Burke." 

Was he guilty? Absolutely no one doubted it. He'd been the Copples' hired man.

Higgens--or Burke--got himself arrested some miles away in a saloon in Hooper, where he politely asked the arresting lawman if he might finish his drink before getting dragged off. Sweet, soft-spoken guy--the sheriff had some misgivings because he thought such a good guy could hardly be the fiend who did what he'd done just outside of Rosalie back .

But Bancroft knew the score. The whole town acted judge and jury, determined that this Higgins was an abomination. According to the Sioux City Journal of 27 August 1907--look it up, librarians will help you--the Copples' 13-year-old told authorities that before Higgins left that awful night, he'd raped her, more than once. The girl's little brother told the law Higgins had told his sister sometime before that someday he was going to run off with her. 

Liquor was involved--way too much of it. It would be a dozen years before Article would usher in prohibition, but horrors like the deaths of an innocent farm family would run saloons down Main and out of town.

You know what they say about the wheels of justice. In the case of Loris Hay Higgins, they ran even slower. To the good, good people of Thurston County, 116 years ago now, justice delayed sure as anything was justice denied.

So they took it up themselves. Loris Hay Higgins was a poor excuse for a human being, and there he was, down in Omaha, leading the singing in some jail church full of do-gooders, making people smile with his phony faith--a drunk, a thief, a rapist, a murderer. 

So when the train came through Bancroft, taking prisoner Higgins to an arraignment in Pender, when that train stopped at the station, a masked crowd was there waiting. 

Let's just say it this way: to those masked men, justice was done once Loris Hay Higgins was taken out of town and hung from the Logan Creek bridge, a mile east of Bancroft. The story goes that Higgins's last words were these: "I wish you would consider my mother." All reports claim he went as a lamb to the slaughter.

If you look hard on Ebay, and you're willing to shell out a few bucks, you can still buy a post card, created back then, that features an awkwardly bent figure at the end of a rope hung from a steel bridge. I'm serious.

The Sioux City Journal sent their people to Bancroft to find out what they could of the whole story. What they told readers was what the County Attorney had told them: "It was the work of the transient population of Thurston County."

Sure it was. 

And more: "Many good citizens here wish that the case had gone through the courts and that the criminal might have been disposed of legally. Personally, I greatly desired that the law might take its course." So said the County Attorney. But then he added what most people probably felt: "If anyone was ever to suffer mob violence, it was Higgins."

That, I suppose, is what some people might call frontier justice. But it's also a reminder that justice, often enough, is bigger and greater than even the will of the majority.