The Tansey Tragedy, 1872

Front Matter

This is As the Story Goes, a Green and White Media production. Each episode retells an account preserved in historical sources. Some transitions and reported speech may be reconstructed from those accounts. The language, assumptions, and judgments in the original story belong to its time and its tellers; they do not necessarily reflect the views or values of Green and White Media. After the story, we’ll explain where it came from, what other records support or challenge it, and what remains uncertain.

This episode includes the murder of adults and young children, coercion by repeated near-hanging, and a lynching. The account is unflinching but avoids graphic anatomical detail.

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Part One — The Wagon

By the time the wagon stopped beside Clear Creek, five people inside were already dead.

The man who brought it there needed a new neck-yoke. In town, he offered a story about spoiled beef and gave a name that was not his.

It was Tuesday, August twentieth, eighteen seventy-two. The covered wagon stood roughly four miles southeast of Clearmont, in Atchison Township. It could not move until someone replaced the broken piece that connected its team.

The man traveling with it went into town to find one.

People noticed him. The first newspaper report said he appeared intoxicated and behaved strangely. At one point, he gave a child five dollars to bring him water.

That was an astonishing payment for such a small errand. A county history published ten years later described a regional teamster earning forty-five dollars for an entire month’s work. The man in Clearmont had just handed a child more than a tenth of that amount for water.

People remembered it.

When someone asked about the odor from the wagon, he blamed spoiled beef.

He could explain the broken wagon. He could explain the smell.

For a little while, those explanations were enough to keep the cover closed.

The wagon remained near the Griffey family home.

Griffey and several others raised the cover.

Inside were two men, one woman, and two very young children. Bedding had been pulled over them. All five were dead.

The first report could describe them only by age and sex. It estimated that the younger child was about two months old. Their names had not yet reached the newspaper.

Their belongings still filled the wagon. A stove sat among the boxes and bedding. It was the ordinary cargo of a family on the road.

Nothing about those objects belonged to a mystery. They belonged to daily life on the road.

But the people who owned them could no longer speak.

Now the wagon held the first pieces of a question.

Who were these people? And how had one man come to possess everything they had been carrying?

Word reached Clearmont. A constable and a posse went after the man. They took him into custody while a local justice summoned a coroner’s jury to the wagon.

The prisoner called himself Osburn.

No one yet knew the names of the dead.

The coroner’s jury saw the bodies where they had been found. The wagon was moved a short distance by hand. Then the five travelers were buried as well as the moment allowed. Several days later, neighbors returned with boxes and clean sheets and buried them more deliberately.

They were given that care before the newspaper could tell its readers who they were.

Strangers handled their possessions and made their first grave. Somewhere behind them were people who did not yet know the journey had ended.

The prisoner was the only person who might explain what had happened on the road.

The people around him wanted that explanation immediately.

They did not wait for a courtroom.

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Part Two — The First Story

The first answer came from a rope.

The newspaper that appeared just two days later did not hide how the answer was obtained. It said Osburn spoke only after he felt his weight at the short end of a rope for the second time.

The county history that followed ten years later gave a fuller account. A rope was placed around the prisoner’s neck. He was suspended until he was nearly unconscious, lowered, and questioned. When he would not answer, it happened again. The history said the suspensions continued until he agreed to talk.

Then Osburn gave them a story.

He called the dead family Ormes. He named the other traveler Daniel Dickerson. He said none of them had been killed in Missouri.

The killer, he said, was Joseph Williams of Kansas. Williams had supposedly paid him seven hundred dollars to remove the bodies. Osburn said Williams had pursued the family because of a love affair. The killings had happened near Holton. He said he had driven east through White Cloud and Holt County before entering Nodaway County, searching for a place to hide the dead.

He said he had considered putting the bodies into the Missouri River. Instead, the wagon continued east.

In his account, every mile placed more distance between Osburn and the killings. He was not the murderer. He was the man paid to carry the evidence away.

It was specific enough to move people.

Sheriff Wray went to bring the prisoner to Maryville. Then he left for Kansas after a message was sent to Holton to arrest Williams.

A man in another state now faced arrest because of words forced from a prisoner at the end of a rope.

Meanwhile, people in Missouri began checking the road.

They confirmed that Osburn had traded some of the livestock and sold other cattle. That connected him to property from the wagon. But the seven hundred dollars he claimed to have hidden was not where he said it would be.

The trades were real enough for people along the route to remember. The payment at the center of his story was not.

The road did not end at the wagon. It led back through the people who had seen the travelers pass.

About a mile and a half east of Burr Oak Grove, searchers found a campsite. In its follow-up, the newspaper described blood on the ground and grass, a set of artificial teeth, and other evidence.

Nearby families remembered three men, a woman, and children passing on Sunday evening. They remembered the group camping away from the nearest house.

That memory carried the search backward to a time when all five people from the wagon were still traveling in public view.

One witness remembered a man cutting a large club as the party passed through Burr Oak Grove. The searchers later connected a club in the wagon to that moment. A piece of cloth at the campsite reportedly matched an injured finger on the prisoner.

Each detail narrowed the distance between the camp and the wagon.

The family had passed Burr Oak Grove before searchers found the camp east of it. Afterward, witnesses connected Osburn to their property. The man calling himself Osburn drove the wagon onward alone.

The road had begun to answer the story Osburn told.

The evidence placed the traveling party in Missouri. After the camp, witnesses connected Osburn to their property. The searchers now had a location they believed was connected to the killings.

They stopped believing in the killer from Holton.

They began moving back toward Clearmont.

While they searched, guards hid the prisoner in the Nodaway River bottom. The history written ten years later says they kept him among the timber for most of two nights and one day. They moved him between bends in the river to keep a growing crowd from finding him.

The same community had produced both the rope and the men trying to protect its prisoner.

Rumors followed the guards into the timber. That same history says some people accused them of hiding Tansey because he was a Mason. The book rejected that accusation. But the rumor shows how quickly restraint itself became suspicious.

To the gathering crowd, delay looked like interference.

For the moment, Osburn was still the only name the public knew.

That was about to change.

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Part Three — The Second Story

By the time the next account appeared, nearly everything had changed.

The name at the bottom of a new confession was Alex W. Tansey.

The newspaper said the statement was made at one o’clock on August twenty-second. That was five or six hours before Tansey was killed. Part was reportedly written in his own hand. The rest was written at his request and dictation.

The county history places him upstairs in the home of William S. Lamme, writing while the search party returned from the road. Outside, hundreds of people were gathering.

Tansey’s second story began months earlier.

He said he was a cabinetmaker with a wife and child near Mount Ayr, Iowa. He had borrowed a relative’s horse and promised to return it within a week. Instead, he traded it away. Other trades followed until the value was gone. Then he took the name Osburn.

The false name, in this version, had not begun at the wagon. Tansey said it belonged to an earlier flight from home.

He was already moving under another name when he met the travelers.

In Kansas, he said, he joined a family traveling toward Iowa.

This time, he called the husband Arms, not Ormes. Another traveler named Dickerson was with them. Together they crossed the Missouri River at White Cloud and continued east until they camped west of Quitman, near Burr Oak Grove.

That route matched the one local witnesses had begun to reconstruct.

People had seen the party together and watched the wagon pass through Quitman. Later witnesses remembered the livestock changing hands.

The second story did not ask the road to believe in a hidden payment or a distant killer. It followed the evidence the search party believed it had found.

Then the confession reached Sunday night, August eighteenth.

Tansey said the travelers ate supper and settled down in and around the wagon. He said he took Dickerson’s revolver and shot him. Then he shot Arms. He said he killed Lucy Arms and the two children with edged weapons.

Afterward, he said, he put all five bodies in the wagon, tried to hide the blood at the campsite, and drove away with the family’s property.

Then the road continued.

The wagon passed other homes. Livestock was traded and sold. The broken neck-yoke finally stopped it near Clear Creek, with the bodies still inside.

The follow-up report added details that could be checked. It described the campsite and identified people who had seen the wagon along the route. It also traced some of the livestock transactions that followed.

They could not tell anyone exactly what happened during the night.

Tansey denied having an accomplice. Joseph Williams disappeared from his account as quickly as he had entered it.

He also denied being intoxicated when the killings happened. He said he had taken one drink about an hour earlier. That was his description of his condition.

His explanation of motive was also his own. He spoke of money, the family he had left, and the horse he had traded away. Those were words attributed to Tansey, not a view into his private mind.

The follow-up newspaper also restored names to the people in the wagon.

It identified Nelson E. Arms and Lucy M. Arms. Their older son, Edgar D. Manford Arms, was not yet two. Thomas E. Cosby Arms had been born that February. The other traveler was identified as David F. Dickenson. A letter reportedly connected him to Howard City, Kansas.

Nelson and Lucy had reportedly married in Jackson County, Minnesota, two and a half years earlier. Their two boys had been born during that marriage.

The names changed what listeners in eighteen seventy-two could understand.

Nelson and Lucy were not simply the man and woman beneath the bedding. Edgar and Thomas were not simply the older child and the infant. David Dickenson was not simply the second adult man.

They had names. They had places behind them. Their journey had begun somewhere other than the road where it ended.

The first report had offered a wagon full of strangers and a killer in Kansas.

The second offered a young family, another traveler, and a prisoner who said he alone had killed them.

The searchers believed the second story.

It fit more of what they believed the road had shown them. It also came from a man who had already been tortured and was surrounded by an angry crowd.

No jury would ever hear it.

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Part Four — The Crowd

By Thursday, people had arrived from across the surrounding country.

The newspaper estimated about five hundred by evening. The county history put three or four hundred outside William Lamme’s house earlier in the day.

Inside was one prisoner.

The county history says Tansey’s wife had been summoned from near Mount Ayr. He reportedly wanted to see her before he died. She had not arrived.

The same account says she reached Clearmont several days after the lynching. By then, there was no prisoner to visit and no testimony left to preserve.

The crowd would not give him the time.

The county history fills the scene with threats, curses, guarded doors, and a prisoner brought out to speak. It does not identify the witnesses behind those details.

But the contemporary newspaper and the later book agree on the movement that followed.

Tansey was alive and in custody.

Township officers took charge of him and started toward Maryville.

He never arrived.

Near Clearmont, a crowd took Tansey from the officers. The newspaper says those present voted on whether to kill him. Scarcely more than one or two people dissented.

Hundreds of people did not become a jury because they raised their hands together.

At about dark, they carried him to a walnut tree near Wallace’s bridge on Clear Creek.

Then they hanged him.

The vote did not make the crowd a court.

There had been no trial. A lawyer never challenged either confession, and the witnesses were never cross-examined. No jury considered what the road proved or what it did not.

The first story had sent a sheriff toward an accused man in Kansas. The second had named the prisoner as the only killer. A court could have tested that change.

The crowd made sure no court ever would.

Tansey was a prisoner taken from officers and killed outside the law.

It was a lynching.

The newspaper said it opposed mob law. Then it argued that almost any American community would have done the same thing. Ten years later, the county history called the killing swift justice.

On the same front page, the newspaper praised the neighbors who returned to bury the victims with clean sheets. It also defended the crowd that killed a prisoner before trial.

Care for the dead and participation in a lynching occupied the same community.

Those judgments belonged to the publishers.

They do not belong to us.

The Arms family and David Dickenson remained in Atchison Township. Neighbors returned with boxes and clean sheets. They buried the family together and Dickenson separately, in a graveyard reported to be near a Mister Morris.

The county history also says public contributions paid for a marker. Its location has not been confirmed.

Alexander Worth Tansey was buried near the place where the crowd killed him.

The road had carried six people into Nodaway County whose lives would end there.

Five arrived in a wagon.

The sixth arrived under guard.

None left a courtroom record of what happened.

The story ends at the tree beside Clear Creek. The accounting begins after it.