The Lynching of the Ruggles brothers took place on July 24, 1892 in Redding, California.
Brothers John and Charles Ruggles thought that they could make some easy money by robbing a stagecoach. John, a sex addict and ex-convict, had lost his wife to illness and had left his young daughter to live with relatives while he went to live off the land in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Concerned about his brother's well-being, Charles sought him out in the mountains. John had been robbing stagecoaches throughout California and Nevada with a man called Arizona Pete, and talked Charles into joining him on the outlaw trail.
On May 10, 1892, the brothers robbed the Weaverville stage, but the take was small. The men settled on a location on top of a hill five miles north of Redding to pull off their next robbery. The stage would be moving slowly, and the horses would be tired from the uphill journey. The brothers stopped the stage on May 12, 1892, and everything went according to plan, until Charles was hit with buckshot fired by a guard riding inside the coach. More shots rang out, and soon passenger George Suhr, driver Johnny Boyce and guard Amos "Buck" Montgomery were all wounded. John Ruggles ran up to Montgomery and shot the seriously wounded man in the back, killing him.
Boyce regained control of his team and drove off as fast as the horses could run. John, thinking that Charles was mortally wounded, said goodbye to his brother, grabbed the money and fled the scene. A posse found Charles where he was shot and took him into custody. His wounds looked worse than they were, and he was soon recovering in the Redding jail.
Under questioning by Wells Fargo detective John Thacker, Charles admitted that the other robber was his brother John. A reward of eleven hundred dollars was placed on John's head. John Ruggles was arrested while eating a meal at a restaurant in his hometown of Woodland, California, by a Yolo County deputy sheriff. Taken by train to Redding, John was overcome with joy upon seeing that his brother was not dead. [1]
"The recent sentimental attitude of a number of women toward the prisoners as well as the line of defense adopted by their counsel, who has been evidently endeavoring to implicate Messenger [Amos "Buck"] Montgomery [the dead victim] as a party to the crime, had been denounced by a number of persons in the county and it is believed the lynching was due to those causes." [2] "While in jail, the handsome brothers were fed and pampered by local ladies who brought flower bouquets, cakes, fruits, and even offers of marriage, which supposedly prompted their speedy hanging by local jealous males." [3] [4]
A trial was set for July 28, 1892. [5] On July 24, an armed mob of masked men (approximately 40-75 men) stormed the jail, blew open the safe that held the jail keys, dragged the brothers out of their cell, John Ruggles offered to reveal the stolen loot’s location if the mob would spare his brother Charles but the mob refused and hanged them from a derrick at the corner of Shasta street. No one was ever prosecuted for the lynching.
John Boessenecker, Shotguns and Stagecoaches: The Brave Men Who Rode for Wells Fargo in the Wild West (2018)
Yreka is the county seat of Siskiyou County, California, United States, near the Shasta River; the city has an area of about 10 square miles (26 km2), most of it land. As of the 2020 United States Census, the population was 7,807, reflecting a meager increase from 7,765 counted in the 2010 Census. Yreka is home to the College of the Siskiyous, Klamath National Forest Interpretive Museum and the Siskiyou County Museum.
The Dalton Gang was a group of outlaws in the American Old West during 1890–1892. It was also known as The Dalton Brothers because four of its members were brothers. The gang specialized in bank and train robberies. During an attempted double bank robbery in Coffeyville, Kansas in 1892, two of the brothers and two other gang members were killed; Emmett Dalton survived, was captured, and later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, although he later asserted that he never fired a shot during the robbery. He was paroled after serving 14 years in prison.
Brooke Leopold Hart was the eldest son of Alexander Hart, the owner of the L. Hart & Son department store in downtown San Jose, California, United States. His kidnapping and murder were heavily publicized, and the subsequent lynching of his alleged murderers, Thomas Harold Thurmond and John M. Holmes, sparked widespread political debate.
Charles E. Boles, also known as Black Bart, was an American outlaw noted for the poetic messages he left behind after two of his robberies. Often called Charley by his friends, he was also known as CharlesBolton. Considered a gentleman bandit with a reputation for style and sophistication, he was one of the most notorious stagecoach robbers to operate in and around Northern California and Southern Oregon during the 1870s and 1880s.
Tom Bell was a western outlaw and physician known as the "Outlaw Doc". He was the first outlaw to organize a stagecoach robbery in the United States.
Buck English was an American Old West outlaw, and one of Lake County, California's most notorious thieves and stagecoach robbers toward the end of the 19th century.
James B. Hume was one of the American West's premier lawmen.
The People's Grocery lynchings of 1892 occurred on March 9, 1892, in Memphis, Tennessee, when black grocery owner Thomas Moss and two of his workers, Will Stewart and Calvin McDowell, were lynched by a white mob while in police custody. The lynchings occurred in the aftermath of a fight between whites and blacks and two subsequent shooting altercations in which two white police officers were wounded.
Roy Belton was a 19-year-old white man arrested in Tulsa, Oklahoma with a female accomplice for the August 21, 1920 hijacking and shooting of a white man, local taxi driver Homer Nida. He was taken from the county jail by a group of armed men, after a confrontation with the sheriff, and taken to an isolated area where he was lynched.
The Reno Gang, also known as the Reno Brothers Gang and The Jackson Thieves, were a group of criminals that operated in the Midwestern United States during and just after the American Civil War. Though short-lived, the gang carried out the first three peacetime train robberies in U.S. history. Most of the stolen money was never recovered.
Dan Tucker, better known as "Dangerous Dan" Tucker,, is a little-known Canadian-American lawman and gunfighter of the Old West.
The Hangman is a 1959 American western film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Robert Taylor, Tina Louise and Fess Parker. It was distributed by Paramount Pictures. The film is based on the short story of the same name by Luke Short.
Richard H. Barter, known as "Rattlesnake Dick", was born in Lower Canada. Around 1850, he came to California on the Oregon Trail with three other family members. He tried his luck at mining at Rattlesnake Bar during the California Gold Rush. He was twice charged, and once convicted, of being a thief, the second time for stealing a mule. Once the mule and the real thief were found, he was released.
Robert Rennick Dalton was an American outlaw in the American Old West. Beginning in 1891, he led the Dalton Gang, whose varying members included three of his brothers. They were known for robbing banks, stagecoaches and trains, primarily in Kansas and Oklahoma Territory, quickly attracting pursuit by lawmen.
The Santa Rosa Police Department is the police force for Santa Rosa, California. The department has 270 sworn and civilian employees.
On April 13, 1937, Roosevelt Townes and Robert McDaniels, two black men, were lynched in Duck Hill, Mississippi by a white mob after being labeled as the murderers of a white storekeeper. They had only been legally accused of the crime a few minutes before they were kidnapped from the courthouse, chained to trees, and tortured with a blow torch. Following the torture, McDaniels was shot to death and Townes was burned alive.
Ephraim Grizzard and Henry Grizzard were African-American brothers who were lynched in Middle Tennessee in April 1892 as suspects in the assaults on two white sisters. Henry Grizzard was hanged by a white mob on April 24 near the house of the young women in Goodlettsville, Tennessee.
Samuel Smith was a 15-year-old African-American youth who was lynched by a white mob, hanged and shot in Nolensville, Tennessee, on December 15, 1924. No one was ever convicted of the lynching.
David Jones was an African-American man who was lynched in Nashville, Tennessee on March 25, 1872 after being arrested as a suspect in a killing. He was mortally wounded while in jail, shot twice in the back while resisting white mob members who came to take him out; the whites pulled him into the Public Square and hanged him from a post outside the police station, with a crowd of an estimated 2,000 in attendance. The sheriff interrupted the hanging and took Jones down. Taken back to the jail, Jones died of his injuries on April 9, 1872.
On March 15, 1901, an African American woman named Ballie Crutchfield was lynched by a white mob in Rome, Tennessee. The mob had tried to murder her brother, earlier that night, but was unsuccessful and took vengeance on his sister, whom they bound, shot, and threw in a creek.