WRIGHT COUNTY, Minn. -- A mob had lynched a man, its ringleader sprung from custody at gunpoint, a local sheriff was complicit and a state official's life had been threatened.
The lawlessness had to stop. it was time to deploy the troops.
That was the belief of Gov. Henry H. Sibley in August 1959, facing down an insurrection in Wright County, Minnesota, an early test of the rule of law in the new state, founded just the previous year.
"For the first time in the history of Minnesota, it has become the stern but melancholy duty of the executive to employ a military force," he wrote in an Aug. 5 proclamation.
Sibley's declaration of an insurrection and his deployment of troops to Wright County to enforce law and order after a shocking lynching and prisoner rescue would gain the tongue-in-cheek title of "Wright County War."
Yet Sibley's military response showcased the state government's power and was an early test for militia units who would go on to earn glory as the 1st Minnesota Infantry Regiment in the Civil War, and later be considered the ancestors of today's Minnesota National Guard.
Still in those rainy late summer days of 1859, it was an open question: Could Minnesota enforce the law?
Sibley's extraordinary answer would come at gunpoint.
Wright County, located in east-central Minnesota, was largely a wooded area at the time, part of the "Big Woods" and a frontier area of the state. It would soon become obvious that some residents still believed rough and ready frontier justice was still the most effective law of the land.
A man named Oscar F. Jackson had been arrested in October 1858 on a charge of murdering his neighbor, one Henry A. Wallace, after Wallace was found in a field near his cabin beaten to death with an ax or something similar, near where he had last been seen working alongside Jackson. Jackson was acquitted by a local jury in April 1859, but that didn't settle the general feeling in Wright County that he was guilty.
Soon after the not-guilty verdict, Jackson fled to his father-in-law's house, where his wife Elizabeth awaited him. A mob followed and laid siege to the house, threatening to burn it down if Jackson didn't surrender. He finally gave himself up and the mob dragged him to Wallace's cabin near Rockford, Minnesota. There, they strung him up from the gable and hanged him.
It was the afternoon of April 25, 1859. The news rippled across the state, arriving in Minneapolis via a mail carrier from Monticello.
Sibley couldn't let this injustice stand. On April 29, he issued a reward for $500 (about $19,000 in 2025 dollars) for the apprehension and conviction of those responsible for Jackson's lynching, calling it a "high-handed outrage ... against the peace and dignity of the state."
Newspapers across the state denounced the lynching, Minnesota's second in several months.
"There is no excuse of sudden passion in this case -- no prompting of any powerful motive. It was simply the banding of human wolves in the hungry lust for blood," the Weekly Pioneer and Democrat opined on May 5. "This example of mob law has got to be the last in Minnesota. We have got to the end of that rope."
That's when Elizabeth Jackson had a stroke of luck. On July 25, two months to the day after her husband was hanged, she went with friends to visit Minnehaha Falls. There, amid a crowd of fellow visitors she spotted Moore, who she knew as one of the ringleaders of the murderous mob, and he was arrested by St. Paul police.
Sibley, eager for prompt and impartial justice, appointed Attorney General Charles H. Berry to prosecute Moore. His trial in Monticello kicked off on July 31, 1859. Jackson recounted her husband's final hours and Moore's culpability in his lynching.
Wright County Sheriff George Bertram admitted under oath that he had personally handed the surrendered Jackson to the mob, testimony so damning that as soon as he had finished testifying, Berry had him arrested as an accomplice to the murder.
That night, an armed group of nearly 100 men forced its way into the house where Moore was being held prisoner and freed him. Before leaving town, the men declared there would be no further arrests or prosecutions in the matter, and they issued threats against St. Paul police and Attorney General Berry.
Sibley had heard enough.
"For the first time in the history of Minnesota, it has become the stern but melancholy duty of the executive to employ a military force to suppress a combination against the law in one of the counties of the state," he wrote in an Aug. 5 proclamation published in newspapers. "In view of the fact that the civil officers of Wright County are utterly powerless to execute the laws, (I) do hereby declare the said county of Wright to be in a state of insurrection."
Sibley called up three militia units -- The Pioneer Guards, the Stillwater Guards and the St. Paul Guards -- and deployed them to Wright County.
County residents, including local officials, at first pleaded ignorance as to the whereabouts of those responsible for Jackson's lynching. But under mounting pressure, three of the mob's ringleaders, including Moore, were arrested, charged with murder and released on bond.
With little more to do, the militiamen marched home. The "Wright County War" had officially lasted nine days, and Sibley had made his point. The new Minnesota state government wouldn't tolerate the subversion of justice within its borders.
However, in October, a grand jury reviewed the charges against the lynch mob ringleaders. No indictments were necessary, it determined.
The men were free to go.