page_title: Lynching in the United States
section_title: The West
hierarchical_section_title: Lynching in the United States / The West
caption_attribution_description: English: Cartoon of a lynching on January 18, 1882 of James Sullivan, William Howard and Benjamin Payne by a mob in Seattle, Washington drawn by baker and socialist Seattle City Council member A. W. Piper
context_page_description: Lynching is premeditated murder committed by a group of people by extrajudicial action. Lynchings in the United States first became common in the Southern United States in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, at which time most of the victims were white men. Lynchings of black people rose in number after the American Civil War during Reconstruction; they declined in the 1930s. Most lynchings were of African-American men in the Southern United States, but women and non-blacks were also lynched, not always in the South. White lynchings of black people also occurred in the Midwestern United States and the border states, especially during the 20th-century Great Migration of black people out of the Southern United States. The purpose was to enforce white supremacy and intimidate black people through racial terrorism. According to Ida B. Wells and Tuskegee University, most lynching victims were accused of murder or attempted murder. Rape or attempted rape was the second most common accusation; such accusations were often pretexts for lynching black people who violated Jim Crow etiquette or engaged in economic competition with whites. Sociologist Arthur F.
context_section_description: Historians have debated the history of lynchings on the western frontier, which has been obscured by the mythology of the American Old West. In unorganized territories or sparsely settled states, law enforcement was limited, often provided only by a U.S. Marshal who might, despite the appointment of deputies, be hours, or days, away by horseback.
  People often carried out lynchings in the Old West against accused criminals in custody. Lynching did not so much substitute for an absent legal system as constitute an alternative system dominated by a particular social class or racial group. Historian Michael J. Pfeifer writes, "Contrary to the popular understanding, early territorial lynching did not flow from an absence or distance of law enforcement but rather from the social instability of early communities and their contest for property, status, and the definition of social order."
  It is not known the exact number of people in the Western states/territories killed by lynching during the times of their occurrences. For Mexicans, there are, however, estimates of thousands of deaths that have gone undocumented and peaked in the 1850s and 1870s, then again in the 1910s, most likely due to the Mexican Revolution. The most recorded deaths were in Texas, with up to 232 killings, then followed by California (143 deaths), New Mexico (87 deaths), and Arizona (48 deaths). Lynch mobs killed Mexicans for a variety of reasons, with the most common being accusations of murder and robbery.
caption: Illustration drawn by A. W. Piper depicting the January 18, 1882 lynching of James Sullivan, William Howard, and Benjamin Payne in Seattle, Washington
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