After prominent Lafayette County farmer George W. Johnson was killed in the wee hours of August 5, 1902, when he interrupted two chicken thieves on his farm south of Lexington, Missouri, Charles Salyers and Harry Gates were arrested on suspicion later the same morning. Fearing mob violence, Sheriff Oscar Thomas tried to move the prisoners to Kansas City that afternoon, but he and his posse were overtaken west of Lexington by a mob demanding the suspects be brought back to Lexington. The gang assured the sheriff they would do the prisoners no harm if they were brought back, and Thomas let himself be persuaded. Rumors of vigilantism continued for the next day or two, but by August 9, things had settled down to the point that the Lexington Intelligencer was convinced that the law would be allowed to take its course.
Well, not quite, as it turned out.
Both Gates, who was black, and Salyers, who was white, gave confessions after they were brought back to Lexington, and their stories largely agreed as far as their movements leading up to the killing of George Johnson. The two men had gotten together in Lexington on the night of August 4 to shoot craps, and when they parted that evening, they agreed to meet up a few hours later near Johnson’s place to steal some of his chickens. They sneaked into Johnson’s henhouse shortly after 2:00 a.m. and loaded more than a dozen chickens each into two gunny sacks. They had just made their escape through a fence when Johnson, alerted by an electric alarm system he’d recently installed in his henhouse, confronted them on the road that ran in front of his house.
Both men agreed that Johnson fired two shots at them when they failed to respond promptly to his order to halt and that one of the shots slightly wounded Gates. But what Gates and Salyers couldn’t agree on was whose idea it was to steal the chickens in the first place and who fired the fatal shots at Johnson. Each one blamed the other on both counts.
Salyers claimed at first that neither he nor Gates had a weapon when they went to the Johnson place but that, after Johnson fired at them with a pistol, Gates wrested it away from Johnson and shot him with it. Gates countered that Johnson fired at them with a shotgun and that Salyers returned fire with a pistol he had brought with him, killing Johnson. Gates said he didn’t even know his partner in crime had a weapon until he heard Salyers fire the shots that killed Johnson as he (Gates) was running away.
Salyers’s initial claim that Johnson had fired at him and Gates with a pistol cast doubt on his story, because the evidence showed that Johnson had used a shotgun, as Gates said. Salyers finally admitted the pistol that killed Johnson belonged to him, but he claimed he’d given it to Gates on the night of August 4. Still, few people believed Salyers’s story. “The statement made by Salyers is incorrect,” declared the Lexington News, “as it is definitely known by the officers that he fired the shot that killed Mr. Johnson.”
Gates’s lesser culpability, however, didn’t matter to the would-be lynchers of Lafayette County. He was a black chicken thief, and George Johnson was dead. That was good enough for them.
In the wee hours of August 12, exactly a week after Johnson’s death, a mob of about 200 masked men swarmed into Lexington from the south, shut off electricity to the downtown area, and surrounded the courthouse square. On foot except for two surreys they’d brought along in which to convey the prisoners, the vigilantes knocked down the door of the jail and overpowered Sheriff Thomas and his deputies. Part of the mob broke open Salyers’s upstairs cell and hauled him downstairs while another group went to work on Gates’s downstairs cell door. It soon yielded to the hammer, and Gates was herded outside to join his fellow prisoner.
The two men were loaded into the surreys and taken about two and half miles to Edenview Church, not far from the scene of the week-old crime. Positioned beneath an elm tree, the two were invited to say any last words, and they got into an argument, each accusing the other of having killed Johnson and now lying about it. Gates’s statement was “more consistent,” according to the Lexington Intelligencer, but his apparent honesty bought him no mercy.
Both men were swung up simultaneously to the same limb of the elm tree and left “hanging between heaven and earth,” as the mob dispersed. About 4:00 a.m., county officers went out the scene, cut the bodies down, and brought them back to Lexington. As was usual in early nineteenth century lynchings, very little effort was made to identify and prosecute the leaders of the mob.
This story is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri History.
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