Four men stumbled drunkenly through the darkness, their path lit by flashes from a lantern. When they reached the Thomas Mortensen farm outside of Monroe, Utah, they paused to tie handkerchiefs across their faces, then loudly called for William Birdsall.
Birdsall, 23, stepped out of the barn where he had been finishing late chores. The masked men seized him and slipped a rope around his neck. They beat his face and threw him to the ground. Hearing the commotion, Sarah Ann Mortensen, 26, stepped onto her porch and screamed.
One of the men, his voice slurred, told her to go back to her children "and be a true woman." Then they pulled Birdsall to his feet and began running. He had no choice but to run as well, lest he be choked by the rope around his neck.
Birdsall, born in Nebraska to a Quaker father and German mother, had been only 5 the summer his family joined friends for a tour of the West. Although the railroad had been completed years before, their group traveled leisurely by covered wagon. When they reached Utah, the Birdsalls wanted to call on a cousin before traveling on to California. By the time the Birdsalls found their cousin in Sevier County, it was too late to travel west that year.
The Birdsalls stayed in Utah, eventually converting to Mormonism and taking up a farm in Monroe. By 1893 they were well integrated into the community. One daughter married the Mormon presiding elder in nearby Marysvale. Another daughter served as a counselor in the Monroe Relief Society. And when Thomas Mortensen went to work in Nevada's De La Mar mines, it was William Birdsall whom he asked to live in his barn, do his chores, and watch his wife and daughters.
For unknown reasons, however, some in the community disliked the young man. Monroe Town Marshal Lyman Collings, 37, was especially antagonistic, spreading gossip that Birdsall took liberties with Mrs. Mortensen, making her chop her own stove wood while he, Birdsall, took money sent by her husband to buy whiskey and dance tickets.
On the evening of Feb. 25, 1898, some of Monroe's men gathered at the saloon after a town social. As the drinking progressed, talk turned to Birdsall. Collings said someone should drive him out of town; when others agreed, Collings urged them to follow through with what may at first have been idle talk. Ben Hoopes, Ammon Hunt, Al Winn and Andrew Brown collected a rope and lantern from Hoopes' barbershop, then headed toward the Mortensen farm.
Birdsall struggled to stay on his feet as he was jerked across fields and through a canal. When he stumbled, his attackers dragged him until he was choked nearly to unconsciousness, then pulled him upright and ran again, all the while cursing and telling him to leave Monroe or be hanged. Finally they released him, his neck raw and swollen, his eyes blackened. Birdsall headed over the mountain that night to find refuge with his sister in Marysvale.
Word of the "whitecapping" (think Klu Klux Klan or armed vigilantes) spread quickly, but no action was taken for weeks. Eventually, citizens who believed Birdsall was a moral, industrious young man prevailed upon law officers to investigate.
Hoopes, Hunt, Winn, Brown and one other were indicted for rioting and maintaining an unlawful assemblage, and they went to trial in May. The jury found the four men guilty, acquitting the fifth. Before passing sentence, Judge Homer McCarty lectured the men concerning their crime and for calling their wives to perjure themselves by providing false alibis. He called Collings "the real criminal," and said he "should be wearing stripes in the penitentiary."
McCarty, who had known the defendants since childhood, imposed as severe a penalty as the law allowed: a $50 fine ($25 for Hoopes, who had not perjured his wife), but no jail time.
Birdsall, however, had had enough of Monroe and never returned.
