Most of the household retired to their rooms at about 8 p.m., but Constable Steele stayed up to watch the prisoner, who was probably in the parlour. Before he turned in, Owen Hughes had made certain all the doors and windows were locked. Approximately one hour later, the entire house was roused by a banging at the front door, coupled with the sound of many horses. From upstairs, Thomas York and others heard a man yell, “Open the door, or I will break it in!” By the time he descended the stairs, trousers in hand, the door was already open and the room full of armed men with blackened faces. They greeted him with drawn weapons and an order to stay out of the way if he didn’t want to get hurt. Hughes rushed downstairs as well, and had a pistol thrust in his face before being pushed behind a door and ordered to stay back.
Hughes later estimated that there were twenty men in the front room. Ann Marie York believed there were another fifteen in the kitchen, and about seventy-five in all. For some reason, the intruders took the time to put on Louie Sam’s shoes; they also demanded his gun. Steele, though armed, was sitting quietly in a corner; this may have been the wisest thing to do under the circumstances, or it may have been part of a plan. Hughes, the one who had locked the doors earlier, believed that the armed stranger had not gone to bed with everyone else, or at least had not undressed; he further claimed that someone, possibly this man, had descended the stairs about ten minutes before the mob showed up.
Special Constable York, who estimated that the men “did not stay over three minutes,” made a strange request before they left. Although they had taken two rifles and his prisoner, it was the handcuffs he demanded they leave behind. The men refused, telling York he “could get them tomorrow.” Then the boy, already manacled, was bound with a rope, thrown onto a horse, and borne away into the darkness, surrounded by dozens of angry men in drag. The following morning, Louie Sam’s body was found hanging from a cedar tree on the Whatcom Trail, not 200 paces from the US border.
The York household seemed to have returned to bed after the traumatic events of the evening. What else could they have done? The idea of further endangering themselves on behalf of a boy who was not only an aboriginal but very possibly a thief and a murderer was likely beyond the pale of contemplation. The following morning, perhaps over breakfast, the Traveller told York he had known the mob was coming. It has never come clear who unlocked the door and let the men inside.
Most of the surviving witness accounts come from a coroner’s inquest that took place across several days following the lynching. The coroner, Charles Todd, interviewed everyone in the house except for the Traveller and the Stranger, both of whom had disappeared, and Constable Steele, who had returned to his home south of the border. Steele had, however, stayed around long enough to notify Campbell, the justice of the peace. It was these two, along with two Sto:lo men named Big Charley and Indian Jim, who went to cut Louie Sam’s body down. “The boy was tied with his feet together. And handcuffs on his hands,” recalled Big Charley. “Campbell came and said, ‘I wonder what they took him away for?’ ”
In his testimony, Campbell noted “no signs of violence except the mark of the rope around the neck.” After removing the noose, on which he detected a “strong smell of musk,” he removed the handcuffs, which he kept for the rest of his life.
The bad news travelled fast, and that same afternoon the BC Attorney General sent a telegram to the governor of Washington Territory, requesting that his police be prepared to arrest members of the lynch party, “pending our application for extradition.”
Eighteen eighty-four was a bad year for lynching in America; in fact, it was the second-worst on record. Not including Louie Sam, 211 people were killed. More than three-quarters of the victims recorded that year were white.
In the hands of a lynch mob, the legal concept of habeas corpus ad subjiciendum — “You shall have the body for submitting” — takes on a sinister meaning. Outside the scope of a fair trial, it devolves into a feral mockery of the law. The body is certainly there, and so is the submission, in a manner of speaking, but the legal armature designed to offer protection has been cast aside. Victims of such rough justice were often described as having gone before Judge Lynch, or having been subject to Lynch’s Law — an allusion to Captain William Lynch (1742–1820), who argued on behalf of a vigilance committee in an apparently lawless region of Virginia during the Revolutionary War. In Lynch’s day, though, punishment wasn’t always terminal; it tended to come in the form of flogging or tarring and feathering.
Although escaped and rebellious slaves were severely punished and even burned alive as far north as New York, it wasn’t until the 1830s and the rise of the abolition movement that summary, extralegal execution by a self-empowered group was regularly referred to as “lynching.” In the South over the next century, these relatively rare events became steadily more frequent, until they metastasized into public spectacles where slow, agonizing death was commonplace. Between 1890 and 1952, seven presidents petitioned Congress to end the practice, and in the first half of the twentieth century alone nearly 200 anti- lynching bills were introduced. Three made it through the House of Representatives, only to be stopped in the Senate by filibusters driven by powerful southern senators who claimed such a law would infringe on states’ rights.
