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:
“The dignity to be sought in death is the appreciation by others of what one has been in life,... that proceeds from a life well lived and from the acceptance of one’s own death as a necessary process of nature.... It is also the recognition that the real event taking place at the end of our life is our death, not the attempts to prevent it.”
—Sherwin B. Nuland (b. 1930)
“Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou mightst him yet recover.”
—Michael Drayton (1563–1631)
“In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life.”
—Joseph De Maistre (1753–1821)