Lynchings: Frontier justice or simply vigilante murder?

In a day and age of political correctness, where cries for justice ring in every ear, it is hard to imagine an era when citizens took the law into their own hands. Frontier justice, when townsfolk broke in to the tiny town jail and wrestled the bad guys to the nearest tree for swift judgement at the end of a rope, seems like a dramatic scene from a Hollywood western. Fact, as they say, is stranger than fiction, and two such cases happened in Whitman County at Colfax, Wash.

The first case of frontier justice took place June 1, 1894.

George F. Parker was being held in the Whitman County jail in...