The Lookout Lynching.

Coming down to a later date, perhaps no event of its character has attracted so much comment, and been the subject, of more gross misrepresentation than the “Lookout Lynching.”  I have, therefore, been asked to give a true account of the deplorable affair, the causes leading up to the same, and the sensational trial of nineteen citizens accused of participating in the act.

To begin at the beginning:  Along in the early 70’s the United State government established a military post at Fort Crook, in Fall River valley, which was occupied by a company of cavalry under command of one Capt.  Wagner.  The post was designed to afford protection to settlers against depredations by hostile Indians.  Soon after the arrival of the troops the Captain began to cast eyes of favor on a comely young Indian woman, the wife of a Pit River brave.  The Captain had been sent to civilize the Indians, and was not long in taking the woman under his protection.  The arrangement was agreeable to the woman, who preferred the favor of the white chief to that of her dusky husband.

Time wore on and the government concluded to abandon the post, and ordered Capt.  Wagner and his company elsewhere.  Of course, he could not take the Indian woman with him, and she must be got rid of.  The means presented itself in the person of a soldier named Calvin Hall, whose term of enlistment had expired.  He proposed to Hall that if he would take the woman off his hands he, the Captain, would give him a small portable sawmill which the government had sent to the post to saw lumber with which to build quarters, etc.  The arrangement being agreeable to Hall, the trade was made and the woman and sawmill passed to a different ownership.

In the course of time Hall sold the sawmill and settled on a piece of land not far from the present town of Lookout.  Here the two full blood children of the woman grew to manhood.  Another child was born to the woman, the father being a man named Wilson, with whom she lived during one of her changes of lovers, for Mary (her Christian name) was a woman of many loves.  The half breed boy was fifteen years old, and probably by reason of environment was not a model.  The two full bloods, Frank and Jim Hall, the names by which they were known, gradually became looked upon as desperate characters.  Their many misdeeds brought them into prominence, and frequent arrests followed.  But somehow Hall managed to enable them to escape the vengeance of the law.  This only served to make them bolder in their misdeeds.  Cattle were killed and horses mutilated, merely because the owners had incurred their enmity.  The school house in the neighborhood was broken open, books destroyed and other vandal acts committed.  In fact, they became the terror of the neighborhood, the Hall home being a place of refuge and shelter, and Hall a protector when arrests followed their crimes.