Photo – Rocky Mountain Newspaper cover – Courtesy jeffarnoldwest.com
Some say the Old West came to an end at the end of a rope in Cheyenne on this date in 1903.
Tom Horn had been found guilty for the murder of Willie Nickel. Some say it was the last breath of the American Frontier that one could hear with Tom’s last breath. The details surrounding the shooting of a 13 year old son of a sheep rancher are vague and circumstantial.
The cattlemen of southeast Wyoming hired the “enforcer”. The hired gunman on the payroll, who would do what needed to be done to protect the cattlemen’s financial interests. It was shadowy work, maybe even dirty work.
Photo – Tom Horn – Courtesy jeffarnoldswest.com
After the Civil War, Horn worked for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, tracking and arresting lawbreakers. Tom Horn was a 19th Century American West kind of man. The last of the Old West, a dying breed. Oddly enough, even the hanging was New West.
The following eye witness account of the hanging of Tom Horn was written by John Charles Thompson, a reporter. His account was originally published in the Denver, Colorado Posse of Westerners. Horn was executed with a new, and supposedly more humane method of hanging that relied on the emptying of a bucket of water to trigger the release of the trap door upon which the condemned man was standing. Just like the one at the prison in Rawlins.
“Would you like us to sing, Tom?”
We newspapermen were crammed into a little space at the edge of the platform adjoining Horn’s cell: the visiting sheriffs were marshaled on the first-tier level below. The Irwin brothers, flanked by guards, stood beside them. The executioners and a venerable Episcopal clergyman, Dr. George Rafter, an acquaintance of Horn, were on the gangway at the opposite edge of the platform. Beside the Irwins, stood two physicians, Dr. George P. Johnston and Dr. John H. Conway. They were gentlemen of the highest integrity, whom nothing could have induced to contribute to a criminal conspiracy.
Horn, his back against the cell grill, was half-reclining on his narrow bed, puffing a cigar. He was perfectly composed. His soft shirt was unbuttoned at the collar, thus exposing the scar of the wound he had suffered in a fight at Dixon.
“Ready, Tom.” said Proctor.
Horn arose, carefully placed his cigar on a cross reinforcement of the grill, strode firmly the few steps required to take him to the side of the gallows platform. He nodded to the Irwins; sardonically scanned the peace officers below. “Ed,” He commented to Smalley, “that’s the sickest looking lot of damned sheriffs I ever seen.”
“Would you like us to sing, Tom?” asked Charlie Irwin. “Yes, I’d like that.” responded Horn.
So, while Proctor buckled the straps that bound Horn’s arms and legs, the Irwins, each in a rich tenor, sang a rather lugubrious song popular on the range, Life Is Like A Mountain Railroad.
The clergyman read his church’s prayer for the dying Horn, standing relaxed, listened without a tremor.
“Would you like to say anything?” asked Smalley. “No.” replied Horn.
“Tom,” spoke up Charlie Irwin, “did you confess to the preacher?” “No.” was the reply.
Proctor adjusted the noose, formed with the conventional knot of 13 wraps, to Horn’s neck; drew a black hood over his head. Smalley was on one side and a friend of Horn, T. Joe Cahill, on the other, lifted the doomed man onto the trap.
Instantly, the sibilant sound of running water permeated the breathless stillness; the instrument of death had begun to operate. To the straining ears of the listeners that little sound had the magnitude of that of a rushing torrent.
Smalley, his face buried in the crook of an arm resting against the gallows tree, was trembling. “What’s the matter?” came, in a calm tone, through the black cap, “Getting nervous I might tip over?”
Seemingly interminable, the sound of escaping water ran on.
“Joe,” said Horn, addressing Cahill, “they tell me you’re married, now. I hope you are doing well. Treat her right.”
Indubitably, he was the best composed man in that chamber of death.
Still, the sinister sound of running water; then mercifully, the leaves of the trap parted with a crash and Horn’s body hung through the opening. Thirty one seconds had elapsed since they had lifted him on to the trap! He fell only four and one-half feet; his head and shoulders projected above the gallows floor. This drop was not sufficient; his neck was not broken. Proctor had feared to arrange a longer drop, apprehensive that stoppage of the fall of a body so heavy as Horn’s might tear the head off. The slam of the massive hangman’s knot against the side of Horn’s skull knocked him into unconsciousness, however, and he did not suffer. For seventeen minutes the physicians, with fingers on his pulse, felt impulses as a mighty heart labored on; then the pulse ceased.
Tom Horn was dead – unconfessed!
“The hanging of Tom Horn, 1903” www.eyewitnesstohistory.com (2012)
