May 14, 2020
Volume 50 - No. 20
ing part of the execution of legislator and judge H. Tator was its location.
The judge was hanged not on court grounds, but at the scene of the murder, on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River in what would become north Omaha.
Compiled by lyle e davis
To date, Nebraska has executed 23 men. The above accouns of two separae executions were compiled by reviewing dispatches and Special Reports to the Omaha World Herald and the Omaha Republican.
In 1863, the muddy little town of Omaha hanged a Kansas legislator convicted of robbing and killing his business partner.
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Thousands gathered for the event, perhaps more people than Omaha’s population at the time. Crowds swelled so large that 40 cavalry troops from Iowa escorted the prisoner to the gallows.
It was the young Nebraska Territory’s first legal execution and, according to several historians, a sign that — at least in Omaha — vigilante justice soon would be ending. But perhaps the most interest-
“That usually would go along with lynch law, not a legal proceeding,” said Ryan Roenfeld, former president of the Historical Society of Pottawattamie County. “Omaha was trying to become a real city (with) some sense of law and order. Some sense, anyway.”
Word of Isaac H. Neff’s murder at the hands of the honorable Cyrus H. Tator circulated in newspapers throughout the region, even appearing in the New York Times. It had a place in many of Omaha’s early historical accounts, but over time, the story was omitted from most modern tales of Omaha’s pioneer past, perhaps overshadowed by far nastier lynchings that followed.
Twenty-three people been put to death by the of Nebraska since the took over the task from vidual counties in 1903.
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“It’s definitely forgotten history,” said north Omaha amateur historian Adam Fletcher Sasse. “At some point, it just kind of fell off the radar.”
Accounts of the day varied, and some details might never be confirmed, but here’s a general consensus of what happened:
A boy named Horace Wilson was gathering driftwood along the western shore of the Missouri River in June 1863 near Saratoga, an area also known as Sulphur Springs. That westward bend of the river was later cut off during a flood, and it became Carter Lake. The boy found a body wrapped in heavy chains around the neck, shoulders and legs. It took days, but the body was eventually identified as that of Neff, an immigrant who
Nebraska Hangs Kansas Legislator See Page 2