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Anthony Amend is murdered by his son-in-law John Pierce
In
the pioneer western days of the 1870s, open carry of guns was not so controversial,
but the lesson is not so far away from the discussions of the present. In 1874
in Neosho Township, Labette County Kansas, Anthony Amend is shot by his son-in-law,
John Pierce, in a flash moment of temper, who meets his end on a rope, hanged
in vigilante retribution.
Today the town of Parsons, Kansas is a rather modest Midwestern burgh with one railroad track, but in the 1870s and 1880s it was a boom town of pioneer expansion. The city gets its name from Judge Levi Parsons, who in 1868 joined with fellow New Yorker, Colonel Robert Smith Stevens to form the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad, called the "Katy", in the race to build tracks through what was Indian Territory of Oklahoma. Originally chartered as the southern branch of the Union Pacific, the first track would run diagonally from Junction City Kansas to Chetopa, and Judge Parsons chose this spot near the Neosho River for the hub of his empire. By 1887 there were three rail lines which formed the junction in Parsons, one of them heading east through Neosho Township and one heading northeast through Neosho County and a small pioneer town called Jacksonville, which no longer exists today, one of thousands like it that have fallen to time, but with a unique history for some family tracing.
In 1854, the Kansas Territory was first organized, becoming the 34th U.S State in 1861. Neosho County was established along with its neighbor Labette County in the far southeast corner of the state, overlaying lands which were once the property of the Osage Indians and Cherokee. The first railroads came through Neosho in 1870 and with it the settlers. Among them were a family of German and English ancestry, one side who had come originally from the Rhine Palatine to Pennsylvania though Maryland and headed west, and the other side from Hertfordshire in England to Connecticut, then west.
Anthony Amend was born in the Ohio Territory in 1822. In August of 1850, when he was 28, he was in Wood County, Virginia (now Parkersburg West Virginia), with his wife Mary (Born Mary Hales in 1823) and three children Agnes, Jonathan and Levinia. Mary died, possibly in childbirth to son James Henry in July of 1850, and three years later in 1853, perhaps driven by the loss of his wife, Anthony was in Lee County, Iowa where he married Sarah Ann George.
In June 1860, Anthony and Sarah are in Sweet Home Township, Clark County, Missouri, just across the border from Iowa. They have been in Missouri since 1856, when their daughter Ann was born. They eventually have nine children. Anthony Amend is recorded in the census of 1860 as being a farmer with a personal estate valued at $1000, with no mention of real estate. By 1874, they are in Jacksonville, Neosho County, Kansas, and Ann Amend, age 22, has married John Pierce, a school teacher. Their son Franklin was two years old, and Elmer was just newborn when the following took place.
On March, 26. 1874, 52 year old Anthony Amend is shot dead by his son-on-law in an argument. A newspaper report in the Fort Scott Monitor reported ""A man named John R. Pearce and his father-in-law, Anthony Amend, met in McCaslin’s store. They shook hands and afterwards Pearce called Amend out of the store to talk to him. Pearce then asked Anthony Amend if he had been circulating reports that he abused his wife and child. Amend said that he had not, but that the same was true. Pearce told him to take the statement back, or “take that” presenting a revolver. Amend refused to retract, when Pearce discharged two barrels of the revolver, both balls hitting the breast near the heart. The first ball passed through Amend’s body and into the store. This was about two in the afternoon. Amend lingered in great agony for four or five hours, when he died."
John Pierce was reported as wearing his gun at all times, including in the classroom as he taught his students and described as of garrulous temperament. It was witnessed by a son, Homer Amend, who would have been about 16 years old at the time. John Pierce tried to escape but the Vigilance Committee, known locally as the "Wigglers", quickly heard of the shooting and formed a posse. They chased him into the woods along the Neosho River, apparently crossing several times before capturing him. John Pierce was taken back to his one room schoolhouse, where he was held as a makeshift jail, and soon fell victim to vigilante justice.
Here is an account of the lynching recorded in the history of the county.
"Late in the night, the lights suddenly went out in the building, and "many" men appeared on the scene. They put a rope around Pierce's neck, and drove him in a wagon under an oak tree with a projecting limb, about 12 feet from the ground, located on Hickory Creek, just to the west of town. They threw the rope over the limb, and drove the wagon from under him. He hung there all night, his feet almost touching the ground, until about ten o'clock the next day, when his father cut him down. John Pierce was buried in the Jacksonville cemetery (later moved). Several prominent men of Jacksonville were suspected of being "Wiggler" vigilantes and having been complicit in the lynching of John Pierce, but nothing was ever proven, though it is the general suspicion that some of the them went broke buying others silence in the case."
In 1880, after the death of her husband, Sarah Amend and her children are in still Neosho Township, Labette Co, Kansas and Ann is living with her, with her two boys. But in 1900, Sarah is recorded as farming in Osage Township, Crawford Co, Kansas, where she now owns her farm free and clear, with most of her children gone to other lives and Ann possibly remarried. Homer and his wife Lucy also live in Neosho Township, and have no children, but have taken in a ward, Nina Thompson, from Utah.
James Henry Amend, younger brother to Homer, met Florence Alice Sweet in Neosho and married her in 1873, with two children born there, then after the family tragedy, found work with the Frisco Railroad, apparently following where the work led, having 6 more children, 5 of them each born in a different town in Texas, Oklahoma (Indian Territory) and Kansas, wherever the railroads went, until he died in Salina, Kansas in 1922.
Sources: History of Neohso County, Katy Railroad History, Census, Wikipedia Commons
Additional Resources Cherokee Indians of Kansas