John Day Smith, Albert Bulow and the St Cloud Journal Press

In 1888, a farmer from Buckman* was murdered on his way home from Royalton.  The murderer, one Albert Bulow, was found, tried and hanged in Little Falls in July 1889.  It was the only hanging in Little Falls history, and created a circus atmosphere there.  More about that HERE.

"Public, daytime hangings were the rule for capital offenders in the territorial and early statehood days of Minnesota. However, community leaders came to realize that crowds attended executions primarily for their entertainment value, with the consumption of alcohol and ensuing violent acts a common occurrence. In 1889 the Minnesota legislature passed the John Day Smith law, frequently called the “midnight assassination law,” that required the private, nighttime execution of prisoners facing a death sentence. Although Minnesota today no longer has capital punishment, the John Day Smith law opened a new frontier in the public policy debate over capital punishment. It also led to the passage of similar laws in other states that are still in effect today".

From THIS  PAGE.


Anyway, this morning, Larry showed me an online site with a new assortment of digitized newspapers, and one that came up from Minnesota was an article concerning the  The John Day Smith law and how newspapers perceived their rights regarding hangings, especially the Bulow case.
I got that much, and that one paper was being snarky about what another paper published, but it STILL didn't compute, so I tried diagramming it.

I don't think it helps, but I did get to use Mason's cute little face. ("A little cheeky" !) lol

So, its a St Paul paper running an article found in the St Cloud paper about a complaint by the Little Falls paper that "nobody complained" about the over-publicity by "the Twin Cities Dailies" of the Bulow trial and hanging.  Here's one page of what they meant: its the Library of Congress site / St Paul Daily Globe front page from July 19, 1889.  Whew!

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More about Bulow / John Day Smith's law: 

Papers from around the nation were quick to report their Minnesota colleagues' transgressions, but they might have seen it as a trend--how do you sell papers without describing horrors?

(Ft. Worth, Pittsburg and Sacramento).

Added much later: Plat maps from right around 1900 show the *Franklin Eich farm was across the road and south of Joe Janson's farm (mom's homeplace).  Yup, what we know as the Roman and Emily Dehler farm.