Barking up the wrong tree? The reaction to the lynching

Lynching has been a hot topic around
Sonoma County for 65 years now. And
the "confession" of a member of the 1920 vigi-
lante group that lynched three men in Santa
Rosa has heaped fuel on old fires.

It's been almost a month since the elderly
rancher came forward to tell the whole story
of the hanging and to lay to rest a number of
misconceptions, some casual, some purpose-
ful, about the perpetrators and the event.

His account. although necessarily anony-
mous, occasioned considerable speculation
among old-timers and resulted in a file folder
full of mail on the subject.

The public reaction has been interesting.
The crux of the debate is not, as one would an-
ticipate, the act of killing or the morality of
vigilante action. The burning isue is: what
kind of tree did they hang them from.

The anonymous member of the
lynching party, who was in his early
20s when he joined the group of 30 Healds-
burg men who drilled for three days in prepa-
ration to avenge the killing of their friend and
neighbor Sheriff Jim Petray, says the tree was
an oak tree. The newspaper reports of the
time describe the tree as a "giant old oak."
Ransom Petray, the son of the murdered
sheriff, who was a high school student at the
time remembers the tree well, even photo-
graphed it the following day. He says it was an
oak tree. 

But the tree in the photograph taken that
night by Santa Rosa photographer Oscar Swa
nets, showing the three men in union suits
hanging from a single limb, is a locust
tree.The bark on the trunk and the seed pods
on the bare December limbs show this clear-
ly. And, by spring of the following year, news-
paper articles referring to the incident had
changed the species of the tree from oak to lo-
cust. A phalanx of Santa Rosa seniors, led by
Ed Lindsay, whose family lived across the
street, and George Greeott, who "drove by the
tree every day and watched it grow again,"
point to an existing locust tree in the Rural
Cemetery and swear that it grew from the
stump of the "Hanging Tree."

The locust tree which grew from the four-
foot stump is almost as large as the original
tree, with a branch bearing an uncanny simi-
larity to the one from which the men were
hung. Assuming that it is no longer the focus
of souvenir hunters like the ones that hacked
the old tree to pieces, it can be located by us-
ing the GAR monument, once surrounded by
cannonballs, now ringed with a concrete bor-
der, just inside the big gates to the Rural Cem-
etery on Franklin Ave. The tree, its stump vis-
ible from its east side is due east of the
southeastern corner of the monument plot.

ED LINDSAY is the final authority on
that tree. Now 82 years old, he was l7
when the lynching occurred and remembers
the night well. He was the youngest of a fami-
ly of eight who lived in a big house on Frank-
lin at the end of Carr Avenue. From his van-
tage point across the street, Ed Lindsay saw
what happened to the "Hanging Tree." He
saw it being hacked to pieces by citizens who
wanted "rememberances" of the event (sev-
eral still have theirs, chunks of locust wood
with the date carefully etched on one side).
He watched as the damaged tree began die
and was still there to see it removed, before
Memorial Day of 1921, by the sexton of he
cemetery, on orders from the cemetery
board.

He was there, too, when they came to
hang the men. On the night of the "little par-
ty." as he puts it, they heard the cars coming
down Franklin which was a dirt road at the
time.

"My father, who was a pretty smart man,
turned out the lights and issued the order that
no one was to leave the house. 'They’ve got a
job to do.' he told us, ‘and we‘re not going to
interfere.' They were quiet. Only the lead car
had lights as they approached. Several of the
neighbors slept through it. When they were
through, they dispersed and went north. Busy-
bodies trom downtown and the curious start-
ed coming out a car or two at time. They left
them hanging there, because the county coro-
ner was a man named Phillips from Petaluma
and it took an hour or two to get the message
to him."

In that hour after the hanging, photogra-
pher Swanets, who lived nearby and owned a
studio downtown, came out and made the
gruesome photograph that was circulated
throught the state and can still be seen in
wild west style barrooms as far away as Mar-
ysville.

There may have been other photographs
of the lynching since Press Democrat editor
Ernest Finley, confronted with a man with a
rifle who told him gently, "Go on back to your
office, Ernest. We've got business here and
you’d better just go back to work," dispatched
another photographer, Ted Nelson, to the
scene. His photographs of the lynching have
apparently been lost.

LOTS OF INFORMATION that has 
been "lost" for 65 years has come to
light since the 65-year silence about the care-
fully-p1anned incident was broken last month.
One woman began her ietter with "Well, final-
ly your account of the lynching reads more
like the story my father told me!"

Her father was the deputy sheriff who
handed the keys to the men as they came into
the jail. "He was at the jail that night specifi-
cally for his part in the operation. His account
was not a boastful tale, but a simple telling of
vigilante justice. I don’t know it he ever re-
gretted or questioned the morality of his in-
volvement, but doubt very much that he did."
Another corroboration. for the vigilante’s tale
came from Forestville where lives the young
boy, now 78 years old, who ran alongide the
lynchers. The old rancher’s story of a boy's
exuberance~turned-to~fear at the sight of the
guns, amused family and friends of the Fo-
restville man. They have heard him tell the
story often through the years - how he tried
to follow but got scared and ran, how he ran
so far and was so frightened that he became
lost. He was 13 years old.

MOST OF the response to the story
about the ynlching has come from
those who are nearing or past 80, who are anx-
ious to have everyone understand the lynch-
ing in the light of the times.

"Sonoma Couty was like a family in those
days," said one m an. "When Jim Petray was
killed it was as if they had killed a member of
your family. It wasn't so much that they were
afraid that justice wouldn't be done. It was
simply that they wanted to do it themselves.
They wanted to kill the men who killed Jim."

Last summer, a history magazine pub-
lished in San Francisco called "The Califor- 
nians" did a piece thee Howard Street Gang
and the Santa Rosa lynching. The author, Jim
Kline, wrote that "the entire episode became
a curious source of civic pride."

There's been nothing in my mail to dis-
pute his conclusion.