"Mountain Common Law": The Extralegal Punishment of Seducers in Early Utah BY K E N N E T H L. C A N N O N II
V I O L E N C E AND EXTRALEGAL J U S T I C E were w i d e s p r e a d in nineteenth-century America. White caps, regulators, vigilantes, Ku Klux Klansmen, lynchers, and various other extralegal groups carried out their own distinctive brands of justice, generally through violent means, all around the country. Though older parts of the country were not unaffected by such movements, most of these extralegal justice groups appeared in frontier areas of America where legal justice systems were often ineffective. T h e West was especially affected by these movements. 1 Utah was an enigma in the nineteenth-century American West. It was settled largely by a closely knit religious group that frowned on lawlessness (as the group viewed it) and that put a high premium on living together peacefully. It thus differed markedly from most of the Old West. As late as 1868 George Q. Cannon, a Mormon apostle and editor of the Mormon newspaper, the Deseret Evening News, proudly reported that Utahns had not yet had to resort to vigilante justice. 2 Cannon's assertion that vigilantes never operated in Utah seems to be largely accurate in the sense that organized vigilance committees were not formed; there were, however, some lynchings in Utah during the last half of the nineteenth century and some other instances of extralegal "justice,"3 and Utah's Mormon majority condoned extralegal measures in at least one area: the punishment of seducers. Insights into the social and legal views of Mr. Cannon is an attorney in Salt Lake City and a member of the Advisory Board of Editors of Utah Historical Quarterly. 'Two analyses of lawlessness in the Old West are W. Eugene Hollon, Frontier Violence: Another Look (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), and Wayne Gard, Frontier Justice (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1949). On vigilantism, see Richard Maxwell Brown, "Historical Patterns of Violence in America," in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., The History of Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), pp. 45-83, and "Legal and Behavioral Perspectives on American Vigilantism," in Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, eds., Law in American History (Boston: Little, Brown 8c Co., 1971), pp. 95-144. 2 Deseret Evening News, January 22, 1868. 3 Larry R. Gerlach, "Ogden's 'Horrible Tragedy': T h e Lynching of George Segal," Utah Historical Quarterly 49 (1981): 157. Gerlach has found evidence of at least twelve lynchings in Utah.
