|
|
|
Crime & Punishment
in Early Wyoming
ISBN: 9781466493742 Published 2011
Wyoming was a remote
wilderness of grazing land until the transcontinental
railroad arrived, and then gold was discovered and
overnight, it seemed, the area became a haven for every type
of outlaw.
Crimes committed and punishment exacted was one of the
defining characteristics of the old west. Twenty-eight times
a crime so outrage the community that citizens organized,
took the law into their own hands, and lynched forty-one men
and one woman. Murders were numerous and every killing was
"the most cold-blooded in the annals of the Territory," but
only nine men were legally hanged before the end of 1911.
After America's Territorial period ended nine more men were
hanged in Wyoming before lethal gas replaced the gallows.
The first prison built in Wyoming was situated outside
Laramie and between November 8, 1872 and January 190s, one
thousand five hundred eighty-seven prisoners served out
their sentences within the walls of this "Territorial
Prison."
During this period Wyoming also sent ninety-two men a
Nebraska prison and two hundred seventy-eight men to the
prison at Joliett, Illinois.
On December 12, 1901 the "Frontier Prison" at Rawlins
received the first fifty on one hundred ninety-seven
convicts transferred from Laramie, and during the next
decade one thousand one hundred twenty-four felons were
registered at the new facility. |
|
|
