Cheyenne Daily Leader, 15 March 1891, page 1: Vengeance: the killing of eleven prisoners in New Orleans

Front page of the Cheyenne Daily Leader, Sunday, 15 March 1891. The headline begins “Vengeance. Bloody Work in the City of New Orleans. Citizens Take the Law into Their Own Hands” and continues “Eleven of the Assassins of Chief of Police Hennessy Are Shot to Death in the Parish Prison.” The dispatch, datelined New Orleans, 14 March, describes a crowd that stormed the parish prison and killed eleven Italian-born prisoners who had been tried or indicted in the Hennessy case.

The page’s background section reports the outcome of the trial: that the jury had acquitted six of the defendants and returned a mistrial as to three. It adds, without proof on the page, that the jury had been bribed. The paper’s headline and text approve the killings and call the victims “assassins,” which is the paper’s characterization; the page itself reports the acquittals.

Hostile language about Italians on this page is not quoted here. The page is filed only as evidence of how the lynching was reported to a Wyoming readership. It is not a record of what happened in the prison. The Richmond Times and the Savannah Morning News of the same date are filed separately.