Lee Chow Was Taken from Jail and Hanged by a Mob

After Chung Sow, a Chinese woman in Cheney, was found “literally hacked to pieces,” authorities arrested Lee Chow (also reported as Lee Gow) at Ritzville and lodged him in the Cheney jail. Los Angeles Herald and The Idaho Statesman reported that a mob of about eighty citizens broke the jail lock, seized him from custody, and “in ten minutes” he was “swinging to the limb of a neighboring pine." The guard “made no resistance.” Brief notices in papers from Fort Wayne, St. Louis, and Paxton repeated the same core account: a Chinese man accused of murdering and robbing a Chinese woman was taken from jail and hanged before he could be tried. By 1883, this case was very familiar to newspaper readers: a mob broke into a jail, abducted a prisoner, and hanged the prisoner in an act of vigilante justice. As was often the case, prison guards offered no resistance.