About 8:30 p.m. on the evening of November 10, 1873, two men burst into the home of James A. Hunter four miles north of Minersville (now Oronogo) with revolvers drawn. They found twenty-six-year-old Catherine Hunter still up but had to rouse her husband from his bed. Putting their pistols to Hunter’s head, they demanded his money. The thirty-five-year-old Hunter handed over his pocketbook, which contained only about seventy-five cents.
One of the intruders stood guard over Hunter and his wife while the other ransacked the house in search of valuables. Hunter recognized the man guarding them as a fellow he'd seen in Minersville that very day, but he kept mum. Meanwhile, the other robber broke open two or three trunks, a washstand, and a table drawer, but the search proved fruitless, yielding only a pair of gold bracelets belonging to Mrs. Hunter. The desperadoes carried off their ill-gotten gain without further molesting the couple.
The next morning, Hunter trekked into Minersville to report the crime. He swore out a warrant before Justice Isaac Fountain, describing the robbers. Hunter and Fountain began scouring the town for any sign of the crooks, and they soon spotted the man who'd stood guard over Hunter and his wife the night before. As they placed him under arrest, Hunter remarked, “Last night you had me; now I have you.”
The culprit identified himself as Alfred T. Onan. He and four companions were all taken into custody and guarded overnight at Minersville. The next morning, November 12, the five prisoners appeared before Justice Fountain, and all were discharged expect Onan, who was held in lieu of $1,000 bond to appear at the circuit court in Carthage on a robbery charge.
Onan lived on Shoal Creek in Newton County, but he was also known around Minersville, where he sometimes worked in the mines. He was about thirty years old, was stoutly built, weighed about 180 pounds, and had red complexion and a light mustache. He was supposedly a desperate man who had been through many “hard scrapes and close contests,” and, according to at least one report, he claimed to have ridden with notorious Confederate guerrilla leader William Quantrill during the Civil War. He might have been a desperate man, but records show he was not a Quantrill man.
The plan was for Onan to be escorted to Carthage later the same day after he was indicted by Justice Fountain, but the guards, who had been up all night watching the prisoners, fell asleep and let the train go by. Resorting to a back-up plan, they loaded Onan into a buggy about sundown and started for Carthage with him. The posse had proceeded only about a mile when they were waylaid by a party of about fifteen disguised and armed men. The mob demanded that Onan be turned over to them, and the guards offered no resistance. While part of the gang covered the guards, the others took Onan a short distance into the woods and hanged him from a blackjack oak tree.
As soon as the lynching had been accomplished, the vigilantes released the guards, and they returned to Minersville to report what had happened. The next day, November 13, Fountain headed to Carthage to report the travesty of justice. On his way, he rode by the scene of the lynching and saw Onan’s dead body still “dangling between heaven and earth.”
This blog entry is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Midnight Associations and Other Evildoings: A Criminal History of Jasper County, Mo.
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