Lynching of Robert S. Maynard

Robert S. Maynard was a 21-year-old man reportedly from Pike County, Illinois, who was active in the gold-mining camps of the Rogue River area of what is now Southern Oregon in 1852. He used the aliases "Jackson Maynard" and "John Brown," and multiple contemporaneous sources refer to him solely as "Brown." He was described by observers as a gambler.

Gold had been discovered in the area late in 1851, and the settlement of Jacksonville was founded in 1852, the same year as the killing. At the time, the region was still commonly known as Rogue River, and no courts of law had yet been established there.

According to the record, Maynard shot a man named J. C. Platt — also referred to in some accounts as John D. Platt or Samuel Potts — with a borrowed gun. The shooting occurred after Platt called Maynard a liar. Platt reportedly "made no attempt to assault" Maynard before being shot.

In the absence of any established judicial system, miners in the camp organized to hold Maynard and then hanged him. The California newspaper The Daily Alta California characterized the killing as a "lynching." Before his death, Maynard reportedly asked onlookers to mark his grave and say "there lies a man who would not be insulted."

Contemporary and later accounts differed in their characterization of the event. Press in New York at the time described the extrajudicial killing as "mob law" but also called it "necessary" given the absence of courts. The 1884 History of Southern Oregon described the hanging as an expression of "a law higher, stronger, more effective than written codes [...] administered by the people's court." A different perspective came from miner Herman F. Reinhart, who recalled some years later that "excited miners [...] worked up a prejudice against the gambler," noting that gamblers such as Maynard had become "very obnoxious to the miners, who had lost money" to them, and that as a result "miners were for lynching" Maynard immediately. Reinhart also recorded that the miners appointed "fifty men (Vigilantes)" to prevent Maynard's escape prior to the hanging. Fifty years later, in 1903, The Sunday Oregonian described the episode as reflecting the "swift and unerring justice of the miners."

This event is documented as the first recorded hanging and the first recorded lynching in Southern Oregon, occurring in a period and location where no organized courts had yet been appointed.