Record 24 of 72
April 13, 1874 – Corrine, Utah Territory: Mob Removed Chinese Man Suspected of Murder from Prison and Lynched Him
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Narrative
In April 1874, in Corrine, Utah Territory, a vigilante mob forcefully removed a Chinese laborer from jail and hanged him. The Chinese man was accused of murdering a local man. The Fort Scott Daily Monitor reported that “while the officers were endeavoring to take the prisoner to Brigham City for safekeeping, the citizens en masse took him from the Marshal down to the railroad bridge one mile east of town and hung him from the trestle works” (April 15, 1874). We see again that a vigilante mob overrode the legal process even before the suspect was imprisoned. Vigilantes in the American West often claimed to be performing law enforcement in the absence of established, formal law and order. The Corrinne lynching undermines the validity of this pretext since, obviously, the suspect was in the custody of law officers and on his way to prison.
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