One of the darkest episodes in Utah history, an 1873 lynching and subsequent coverup in the Mormon settlement of Logan, has resurfaced with the unearthing of bones in a remote corner of the Logan city cemetery.
It’s interesting that this stark case of frontier justice would come back to light right now when our nation is embroiled in so much debate and controversy involving the rule of law and fairness in the legal system. But don’t ghosts from the past often have impeccable timing?
Nobody was ever prosecuted for the lynching of suspected Logan murderer Charlie Benson, possibly due to intimidation of witnesses along with the turning of a blind eye toward the matter by officialdom—and those are subplots that also resonate strongly in the 2020s.
Benson, the eldest son of early-day Mormon apostle Ezra T. Benson, was pulled from a jail cell by armed and angry locals on a cold February day in 1873 and strung up, of all places, on the sign in front of the town’s courthouse. One of many stories handed down from that time suggest Benson, found fleeing on the outskirts of Logan, had surrendered to a posse on the condition he receive a fair trial.
But he was a notoriously rowdy and disliked local character, and after he shot and killed the sheriff’s brother following a night of drinking at a local establishment, his hot temper caught up with him in a big way. The morning he was arrested for the killing, an angry mob of locals formed outside the courthouse that doubled as a jail, and they had a rope.
As a long-time managing editor of the newspaper in Logan, I knew the Charlie Benson story well from history columns written by A.J. Simmonds, the now-deceased curator of Utah State University’s Department of Special Collections and Archives. Simmonds, a local legend in his own right, used a wide variety of contemporaneous accounts, diary entries, and other records to paint a detailed picture of that fateful time. His narratives were republished in a book produced by the newspaper titled In God’s Lap, borrowing a phrase the author often used to describe his beloved Cache Valley.
According to Simmons, one of several witnesses to the vigilante action was “beaten senseless and left in the snow” after loudly announcing he was going to summon the U.S. marshal in Salt Lake City to investigate Benson’s death. The man was also reportedly told there was room for more on the courthouse sign. A local coroner’s report, made out the afternoon of the lynching, noted Benson’s death at the hands of a mob but simply left it at that.
Though not investigated, word of the hanging traveled around the region, resulting in an editorial in the Salt Lake Daily Tribune warning against the institution of “lynch law” in the territory.
“The lynching of Charles A. Benson is an act to be deplored, no matter how deserving the criminal might have been,” the editorial stated. “Society must be made secure at any cost, and if lynching once be countenanced there is no knowing where it may end, at what moment a mob of irresponsible persons may pounce upon their victims, or how soon we may have in Utah a reign of terror.”
Benson’s remains wound up in an unmarked grave, but cemetery records giving the exact location inexplicably disappeared sometime after the sexton transferred ledger entries to a card-filing system in the 1930s. By that time, stories about the lynching and unceremonious burial were deeply imbedded in local lore, which makes one wonder if someone wanted history to forget the shameful events of 1873.
Still, present-day cemetery workers had good reason to believe Benson was buried in the largely vacant northeast corner of the grounds, and when a road-widening project began recently on the eastern boundary, they had a hunch something might turn up. They were right.
It’s uncertain the bones are Benson’s. That will require a determination by state anthropologists, who visited Logan in early June to gather the remains. Either way, the discovery has prompted an important revisitation of history at a curiously appropriate time.
Like so many judicial matters dividing Americans today, there were numerous religious, political, and cultural crosscurrents at play in early day Logan, not the least of which was the relation of the shooting victim to the sheriff. In a fair and just society, nothing of this sort should factor into the application of the law.
In his retelling of the Logan lynching, historian Simmonds noted that the shock of what happened that day in 1873 had a sobering effect on the populace. The suspects in subsequent killings, including that of a telegraph operator a short time later, were dealt with inside, not outside, the courthouse.
Simmonds, incidentally, died in a 1995 natural gas explosion at his ancestral Cache Valley home that police ruled a suicide. Among many things Simmonds was known for was his unwitting mentorship of one of America’s most notorious historic-document forgers, Mark Hoffman, who remains imprisoned for two murders carried out to cover his misdeeds. Simmonds, of course, had no idea what his intern in USU Special Collections and Archives was capable of or would go on to do, but friends say he never got over it.