The lynching of Native Americans (American Indians) is one of the few areas in lynching studies that has seen relatively little development amid the flowering of scholarship on mob violence inspired at least in part by W. Fitzhugh Brundage’s highly influential 1993 monograph Lynching in the New South.Footnote ¹ Brundage’s book helped to inspire expanded study of the lynching of African Americans in particular as well as broadened consideration of American lynching violence more generally, yet it cannot be said that the latter direction of post-Brundage scholarship has meaningfully incorporated the history of lynchings that targeted Natives. The relative dearth of scholarship on the lynching of Native Americans flows from several factors. First, given the nineteenth-century histories of Native removal, white settlement, and the regional distribution of the lynching impulse, most of the dozens (perhaps hundreds) of Natives that were mobbed were collectively murdered by whites in the Midwest and West, not in the South.Footnote ² Significantly, the southern border territory and state of Oklahoma, which would incorporate Indian Territory, and which saw a significant number of lynchings of Native Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was left out of the important inventory of lynchings compiled by sociologists Stewart Tolnay and E.M. Beck.Footnote ³ Yet with key exceptions, the post-Brundage efflorescence of scholarship on mob violence has largely fixated on the South, which is not where most lynchings of Native Americans occurred. Meanwhile western historians still have yet to fully absorb the significance of lynching, racially motivated and otherwise, in the trans-Mississippi West, despite the crucial efforts scholars such as Ken Gonzales-Day, William Carrigan and Clive Webb, and Nicholas Villanueva, Jr., have made in recent years to recover the history of the lynching of hundreds of Mexican Americans across the American West.Footnote ⁴ Moreover, an understandable emphasis on the lynching of African Americans, the primary victims of collective murder in the American South, has clouded comprehension of the lynching of other victims of racially motivated violence, such as Hispanics and Native Americans, who were underrepresented and sometimes misrepresented or erased in the data collected by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anti-lynching activists focused on the lynching of Blacks in the South, not the mob violence directed against other racially marginalized groups elsewhere in the country. Finally, a significant number of lynchings of Native Americans occurred in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, as white settlers moved into areas of the developing Midwest and West and clashed with Native American communities, antedating the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries’ chronological focus of data collected by anti-lynching activists and the scholars who have built their studies upon such data.Footnote ⁵

Native Americans also fell out and still fall out of the picture due to yet other aspects of their liminal status that, ironically, also sometimes made them target of mobs of Indian-hating white settlers: subject to Anglo-American military conquest but separated and ostensibly protected from white settlers, at times not subject to territorial and state laws, wards of the federal government, and members of sovereign Native nations and participants in Native legal cultures.Footnote ⁶ While anti-Indian collective violence often took the form of state-sponsored warfare and massacre by the U.S. army, white settlers’ anti-Indian animus sometimes cascaded into genocidal massacre but sometimes also took the form of lynching, collective murder perpetrated by white settlers targeting individual Natives.Footnote ⁷ In short, while the lynching of Natives often occurred in contexts involving confusion or complexity of legal jurisdiction, the continuing dearth of scholarship on anti-Native mob violence stems from how anti-Indian violence has confused and confounded categories of geography, race, and even the very definitions of particular varieties of collective violence (for instance the difference between a massacre and a lynching) that have long bounded scholarship on American lynching.

In light of these factors that have shaped and constrained the fairly limited scholarship to emerge so far on the lynching of Native Americans (which I will assess below), Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr.’s magisterial 1996 case study Seminole Burning: A Story of Racial Vengeance remains a landmark of the field.Footnote ⁸ Littlefield richly mined an unusually dense federal court record documenting the mob immolation of two young Seminole men in Maud, Oklahoma Territory, just beyond the border with the Seminole Nation, Indian Territory, in January 1898. The mob murdered Lincoln McGeisey and Palmer Sampson, Seminole youths they erroneously accused of murdering Mary Leard, a white woman, in the Seminole Nation in December 1897. Aware that McGeisey and Sampson were in all likelihood innocent, Littlefield, Jr. convincingly argues, the mob executed them in an act of racial vengeance propelled by hatred of Indians. The extensive documentation of the case flowed from the ultimately successful federal prosecution of a number of the lynchers for crimes they committed in kidnapping the Natives in Indian Territory and removing them to Oklahoma Territory for the mob execution. Thus here the unique legal status of Natives—and the strong political interest in Congress in prosecuting the case in order to smooth the allotment of tribal lands and the absorption of the Indian Territory into Oklahoma Territory—created a federal interest in a lynching case that was almost unheard of in contemporaneous lynchings of African Americans. Littlefield benefited as well from how the unusual federal interest in the lynching of the Seminoles created an extensive archival record, a feature lacking in most lynchings of African Americans in or outside the South, where the archival record tends to be comparatively modest and problematically often involves records such as newspaper reports composed by whites sympathetic to lynchers.

W. Fitzhugh Brundage’s pioneering taxonomizing in Lynching in the New South of Southern lynch mobs into the categories of mass mobs, private mobs, terrorist mobs, and posses is Brundage’s clearest influence on Littlefield’s analysis in Seminole Burning.Footnote ⁹ Skillfully reconstructing the social relations of the lynch mob as footloose white working-class renters and “intruders” in the Indian Territory and their relatives from Oklahoma Territory and neighboring states, Littlefield persuasively argues that the mob murder of McGeisey and Sampson was in fact the act of a private mob “made up of relatives, friends and neighbors of the victim to be avenged, ‘bound together by a shared sense of private injury.’”Footnote ¹⁰ Yet the lynchers at Maud sought vindication and white communal support in Oklahoma Territory by instead seeking to represent their actions as those of a mass mob, most significantly by inventing an allegation that Mary Leard had been raped by her Native assailant(s) before she was murdered and also by circulating news for days of an impending burning of Natives to attract white participants from the surrounding region to the lynching. Thus the Oklahoma Territory lynchers of Natives consciously imitated Southern lynchers of African Americans and sought to deploy arguments white Southerners often used to defend the actions of mass mobs; indeed one of the ringleaders in the lynching, Samuel V. Pryor, an extended kinsman of the murdered woman, argued that he had expertise in lynching African Americans, as he had supposedly participated in the lynching by immolation of an African American in Texas.Footnote ¹¹

Assessing the field of lynching studies some twenty-five years after Brundage’s Lynching in the New South and twenty-two years after the publication of Seminole Burning, Littlefield’s book remains the most significant monograph on the lynching of Native Americans. Beyond his deeply etched reconstruction of the racially motivated mob murders of the young Seminole men, Littlefield’s strong familiarity with both Native and American legal cultures and sources enabled him to deftly interpret the legal ambiguities and the complex texture of Native-white relations on the periphery of Indian Territory that informed the mob murders of McGeisey and Sampson. Moreover, he powerfully charted the ways in which an inaccurate, self-serving rendering of the lynching took root in white oral histories and in the initial efforts of white scholars to write about the mob executions at Maud.Footnote ¹² Crucially, Littlefield also uncovered a record of lynchings of Natives in Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory that extended well beyond the burning of McGeisey and Sampson.Footnote ¹³ While few authors today would describe the rural white working class so generally and pejoratively as “shiftless,” and Littlefield may overreach in distinguishing the actions of the Maud lynchers from the actions of other white lynch mobs that lynched African Americans in the late nineteenth century (some white-on-Black mobs may also have born dual, hybrid characteristics as private mobs and mass mobs, to use Brundage’s taxonomy), Littlefield’s larger contribution in Seminole Burning is impeccable. Moreover, beyond the book’s value in interpreting the lynching of Native Americans, it is arguably one of the best researched and argued case studies of any lynching.Footnote ¹⁴

Alas, few subsequent lynching scholars have built on Littlefield’s work to carefully study the mob violence that sometimes involved white and Native communities. William D. Carrigan’s 2004 book The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916 is an important exception. In a chapter exploring violence between American settlers and Indians of the Texas prairie in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Carrigan crucially noted that the cultural precedent of anti-Native violence would undergird lynching violence in the decades that followed. “The characters of many bands of Indian fighters paralleled the organization and structure of vigilante mobs,” Carrigan argued. “In the years that followed, central Texans interested in orchestrating mob violence against whites, blacks, and Mexicans could justify their actions as essentially similar to the work of revered Indian fighters.”Footnote ¹⁵

In another useful contribution, Canadian scholar Keith Thor Carlson in 1996 documented the lynching in British Columbia’s Frasier Valley of a fifteen-year-old Stó:lō youth, Louie Sam, by white Americans who had crossed the border from Nooksack, Washington Territory, in February 1884. The Washington Territory lynchers erroneously accused Louie Sam of murdering a Nooksack shopkeeper, James Bell.Footnote ¹⁶ Carlson aptly summed up the clash of three legal cultures, American, Canadian, and Native in the episode: “We witness American racism and ethnocentrism in its most base form—the lynch mob—as American settlers were apparently manipulated by members of their own community into murdering an innocent Aboriginal boy; we witness a Canadian government preoccupied with preventing an open cross-border Indian war and unwilling to upset its southern neighbour over the wrongful death of an ‘Indian’; and we witness a Stó:lō society concerned with maintaining a ‘blood balance’ and determined to do so in a manner which is in their long-term best interest.”Footnote ¹⁷ Carlson’s scholarship eventually attracted significant notice in the Canadian media, inspiring a documentary film, a historical novel for teens, and a successful effort by British Columbia officials to press the Washington state legislature to express official regret for the episode in a series of resolutions adopted in February 2006. Unfortunately, though, some of the Canadian interest in the lynching seemed as much or more driven by the mob execution’s violation of Canadian sovereignty as the harm it caused to the Native community. Some Canadian commentators also inaccurately labeled the episode the sole lynching in Canada’s history, albeit one perpetrated by Americans, although a more accurate reading of the historical record finds that Canadians in fact perpetrated a small number of mob executions and many acts of nonlethal mob violence, a not insignificant number of them motivated by racial animus.Footnote ¹⁸

Perhaps due to how the lynching of Natives has crossed boundaries and confounded the categories of conventional lynching historiography, few other scholars of American mob violence have considered the topic carefully or indeed at all. Ken Gonzales-Day’s pioneering 2006 book Lynching in the West: 1850–1935, pivotal in its excavation of the lynching of persons of Mexican descent, also documented the lynching of a number of Native Americans in California, but violence against Natives is somewhat tangential to Gonzales-Day’s larger analysis, which is focused on Mexican Americans.Footnote ¹⁹ Important state studies of western lynching by Stephen J. Leonard on Colorado and Brent M.S. Campney on Kansas would have been strengthened by greater attention to violence against Native Americans.Footnote ²⁰ And Manfred Berg’s otherwise superb 2011 synthesis Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America overstates but qualifies its case in asserting that “Native Americans seldom fell victim to individual lynchings as punishment for crime … Still, future research may uncover more lynchings of Indians than have been acknowledged so far.”Footnote ²¹

To conclude, much remains to be done in researching the lynching of Native Americans and to carry forth the research agenda that Daniel L. Littlefield Jr. initiated so brilliantly in Seminole Burning. We need state studies that incorporate lynching violence versus Natives, perhaps most egregiously so in OklahomaFootnote ²² and Texas, where there was a significant history of lynching of Natives, but also in many midwestern and western states such as Minnesota, California, Washington state, Arizona, and Nevada, where a number of lynchings of Natives also occurred. Historians might also pore over the archival record as well as the oral histories of Native communities to uncover historical acts of Indian-hating violence that have so far eluded historians who have spent little time looking for them.Footnote ²³ We also need further case studies of lynchings of Natives. For example, in November 1897, a mob of white settlers in Williamsport in western North Dakota lynched three members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Philip Ireland, Alex Coudot, and thirteen-year-old Paul Holy Track, who were accused of murdering the Thomas Spicer family. The lynching was inspired by white settlers’ tense relationship with the nearby reservation and by the frustrations of due process, as the trial of one of the Native defendants had ended in a hung jury and the conviction of another had been reversed when the state supreme court threw out the testimony of two of the Native defendants and ordered a new trial. While Louise Erdrich’s 2008 novel A Plague of Doves powerfully used the 1897 Williamsport lynching to reflect on the collective memory of anti-Native violence and the complex relationships between Indians and whites in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century North Dakota, a scholarly treatment of the lynching might shed meaningful analytical light on this tragic and neglected episode in North Dakota history.Footnote ²⁴ Additional state and case studies could then enable further research queries, perhaps inspired by Daniel Littlefield Jr.’s analysis in Seminole Burning. For instance, how similar and different were the lynchings directed against Native Americans and those directed against African Americans and persons of Mexican descent? How might a more comprehensive understanding of Native and American legal cultures help us to understand violence among white and Native communities? How were memories of anti-Native violence embedded in Native and white communities and what were the legacies of these memories for communal interactions, criminal justice, and individual lives? Future scholars of American mob violence might fruitfully pursue these and other questions in the history of the lynching of Natives.