Death
Realizing that a lynching was imminent, Wesley removed his boot and with it, the shackle of the leg-iron with which he had been shackled to Brown. Brown tied the loose end of the leg-iron to his leg with his bandana allowing him to run unencumbered. Smith, handcuffed to Wheeler, was able to slip the handcuff over his small hand resulting, unknown to the gathering mob, in all four being free. When the lynch mob came at 9 pm and opened the door, Brown burst through the startled lynch mob to an alley alongside the jail. As he ran past, he was blasted with both barrels of a shotgun at almost point blank range. He died being nearly torn in half. Wheeler ran about 100 yards before being horribly wounded in a barrage of gunfire but lived long enough to hang with Smith and Wesley shortly afterwards when the three were hung on an elm tree by the mob.
Read more about this topic: Henry Newton Brown
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“We like the chase better than the quarry.... And those who philosophize on the matter, and who think men unreasonable for spending a whole day in chasing a hare which they would not have bought, scarce know our nature. The hare in itself would not screen us from the sight of death and calamities; but the chase, which turns away our attention from these, does screen us.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)