100 years ago in North Idaho: A sheriff’s posse staged a lynching to scare one of the suspects in the poolhall killing into talking

The reason that suspect Robert Ford cooperated with Sandpoint police in the Hope, Idaho, murder case, was because a sheriff’s posse started to lynch the Black man to get him to talk.

Ford was one of two fugitives in the case, and he had been arrested earlier. He was coerced into taking the sheriff to the area where the other fugitive, believed to be Mike Donnelly, was hiding.

The Spokesman-Review reported that the sheriff took Ford to a ranch where he was “given the third degree” by about 50 men, who “took him from the sheriff, placed a noose around his neck and suspended him from a pole for a few seconds.”

After this scare, Ford took the sheriff and the men to a shack where he said Donnelly had been the night before.

The area was now cordoned off, and police officers from as far away as Spokane were converging on the scene in an attempt to prevent Donnelly’s escape.

Once again, authorities predicted that Donnelly’s capture was “thought to be a matter of hours” and that “a crisis is close to hand.”

Also on this day

(From onthisday.com)

1898: The U.S. Army occupies Ponce, Puerto Rico, and declares victory in Puerto Rico over Spanish forces during the Spanish American War.

1917: The Silent Parade, organized by James Weldon Johnson and comprising 10,000 Black Americans, marches on Fifth Avenue in New York City to protest against lynching.

1945: Physicist Raemer Schreiber and Lieutenant Colonel Peer de Silva arrive on the Pacific island of Tinian with the plutonium core used to assemble the Fat Man bomb used in the bombing of Nagasaki on Aug. 9.