‘Cool’ John Rooney, the first and last man to swing until dead at the North Dakota penitentiary

John Looney and Judge Charles A. Pollock art for first and last hanging at ND Penitentiery.jpg — A drawing of John Looney next to a photograph of Judge Charles A. Pollock published by The Forum in a 1950 article.

By C.S. Hagen

May 02, 2024 at 8:15 AM

BISMARCK — The only man to legally swing from the gallows at the North Dakota penitentiary was “the coolest man ever to be hanged,” according to multiple newspaper reports in 1905.

John Rooney, 32 years old when he was executed by the state, was a “thug and a robber,” a convicted killer. He was also a criminal who lived by a code who took his final steps to the gallows singing a self-made song.

“Goodby, gentlemen, goodby. Light is shut out forever and forever more,” were John Rooney’s last words as guards pulled the hood over his head and adjusted the noose at the North Dakota State Penitentiary early on Oct. 17, 1905, according to the Bismarck Tribune and a 1950 article in The Forum, which was known in those days as The Fargo Forum.

In the 1900s, the word “cool,” didn’t denote excellence. More in line with a Shakespearean definition of an emotional temperature, the word in 1905 implied calmness, according to Slate and Grammarphobia.

Records with the North Dakota Supreme Court indicated that Rooney was the first and only man to legally swing on the gallows under a 1903 law that dedicated all future executions to take place at the state penitentiary, which began in 1885.

Even before Rooney’s execution, few people — only seven — were legally executed in North Dakota, according to the North Dakota Supreme Court. Part of the reason for few death penalty sentences was that juries were responsible for deciding punishments of convicts.

“There seems no question that North Dakota juries found the death penalty so odious after 1903 that in nearly all cases a sentence of life imprisonment was considered preferable,” wrote historian and North Dakota's first State Archivist, Frank Vyzralek.

Rooney to hang The Fargo Forum and Daily Republican Nov. 17, 1905.jpg — Front page of The Forum on Oct. 16, 1905, the day before John Rooney, the only prisoner to be hanged at the North Dakota State Penitentiary, was to meet his fate.

‘Thug and a robber’

Rooney — the “thug and a robber” — was not so lucky to avoid the gallows for the August 1902 killing of a harvest hand who stole rides in freight cars.

The son of a New York saloonkeeper, Rooney was orphaned when he was a child. He was sent to an Iowa farmer’s home, but ran away when he turned 17 and “soon drifted into criminal habits,” The Forum reported.

For legitimate cash, he worked on North Dakota farms during springs and summers around Hankinson and Lidgerwood.

For his illegitimate means, he and his cohorts haunted trainyards, searching for easy prey.

“His chief victims were harvest hands who stole rides in freight cars,” The Forum reported.

Early on Aug. 26, 1902, Rooney and two others slipped masks over their faces and stalked three brothers as they were extinguishing a campfire and preparing to train hop a freight car near Fargo’s west side Milwaukee roundhouse.

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As the brothers, all surnamed Sweet, finished, Rooney and his accomplices made their move.

“Hands up,” one masked bandit said to the brothers, according to the 1950 article in the Forum Archives.

Two brothers ran. The third, Harold Sweet, grappled with Rooney.

While Rooney fought Harold, his accomplices caught the two that fled and robbed them of their cash and watches.

“The bandit fighting with H.C. Sweet, later identified as Rooney, apparently was getting the worst of the encounter,” The Forum reported.

“Two shots rang out and Sweet fell to the ground, mortally wounded,” The Forum reported.

Rooney’s accomplices ran, but the surviving Sweet brothers returned and subdued Rooney by choking him into submission.

The revolver, which Rooney had when he was overpowered, had two empty cartridges in it, which went far to prove his guilt during trial despite Rooney’s claim that it was one of his partners who fired the fatal shots.

A partner who Rooney refused to name.

The trial

Rooney went to trial in January 1903. A jury found him guilty and recommended the death penalty. Initially, Rooney was sentenced to be hanged on June 26, 1903, and was transported to Bismarck for safekeeping by Cass County Sheriff Treadwell Twichell .

Treadwell, also a politician and friend of President Theodore Roosevelt, is noted for saying once when cornered by farmers: “Let the farmers go home and slop their hogs and leave the lawmaking to us.”

Rooney’s execution was at first stayed by a technicality. A new law passed months prior to his conviction stating that convicted murderers must stay imprisoned no less than six months before hanging offered Rooney a glimmer of hope his sentence might change.

Later, he was brought back to Fargo and re-sentenced to be hanged on Oct. 9, 1903. Rooney’s attorney, W.S. Stambaugh, once a marshal in Abilene, Kansas, “the toughest town in the United States,” fought the sentence by arguing two wrongs don’t make a right.

Stambaugh had a reputation for being a formidable lawyer, fighting for Rooney like he was still a marshal in the Wild West.

“The town's first marshal, Tom Smith, was killed in a fight in November of that year. The second marshal, ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok, lasted only eight months before he was given his walking papers. Finally, the town turned to the fearless young Stambaugh, hoping he could bring peace and stability,” The Forum reported about Stambaugh in 2010.

In 1898, Stambaugh moved to Fargo and became a law partner of Burleigh Spalding and Seth Newman. Working mostly pro bono on Rooney’s case, Stambaugh was optimistic about a sentence reduction for Rooney and fought the sentence to the state’s Supreme Court.

But he failed. Rooney was ordered to hang — again — on Oct. 17, 1905.

During most of his trips between his jail cell — separated from the prison's general population — and Fargo, Rooney behaved “as a gentleman,” with one exception when J.K. Bingham, a deputy sheriff, had to restrain him when he tried to leap over the banister on the second floor of Fargo’s district courthouse, the Bismarck Tribune reported in 1903.

Bingham also tried to catch Rooney’s accomplices, once waiting for 10 days outside of the post office in Chinook, Minnesota, but they were never caught.

Rooney rarely lost his composure except for once in 1903 after one of the death sentences was reaffirmed, the Bismarck Tribune reported he broke down in tears.

“The man who had calmly, even firmly, without a quiver and unfalteringly, stood before Judge (Charles) Pollock and listened to the reading of the death sentence on two occasions; the man who had once been practically under the shadow of the gallows, stood for a moment with a far away look in his eyes.

“A crimson cast supplanted the marble white that had mantled his cheek; there was a twitching of the muscles of his face, and he turned without saying a word, sank down in the coarse woollen (woolen) blankets that covered his iron couch and sobbed like a child,” the Bismarck Tribune reported.

Rooney pays the penalty Bismarck Tribune Oct. 17, 19905.jpg — Front page story in the Bismarck Tribune about John Rooney, sentenced for execution on Oct. 16, 1905. He was hanged early morning of Oct. 17, 1905.

‘Nerves of steel’

“John Rooney died game,” was the lead sentence in a story written by L.R. Marion, a staff correspondent for The Forum who attended Rooney’s execution.

“Protesting his innocence to the very last, he walked bravely onto the scaffold and sang a song of his own composition, while Warden (N.F.) Boucher adjusted the rope on his neck,” Marion wrote.

Biting an unlit cigar, Rooney paid little attention to the priest who accompanied him, but addressed the crowd that gathered to watch. He had just finished his last supper of fried duck, apples, bananas, grapes, celery, cake, bread, butter and a cup of coffee.

“This is the time for you to make any statement you may care to,” said Boucher, then warden of the state’s penitentiary.

“The Fargo Forum said I fired the fatal shot, but no man can honestly say I did,” Rooney said in his final address.

To his last breath, he lived by his criminal code.

“The names of my partners on the night of the murder, I never will tell,” Rooney said. “No man will ever say that John Rooney gave away a pal. I am willing to take the consequences, if by so doing I can free both of them. Before God in Heaven I committed the robbery, but I did not shoot,” Rooney said.

He then began to sing a song he wrote himself, which was adapted to a popular hymn's tune.

“There is a lonely spot on Missouri’s slope,” he sang, then cleared his throat as the note was too high. He excused himself repeatedly, and sang the wrong words.

“This was pathetic in the extreme and many of his auditors turned their heads away,” the Bismarck Tribune reported on Oct. 17, 1905.

He joked just before he willingly stepped onto the trap door that he wished he could talk for 24 hours, and then he might be a free man.

He spoke for about nine minutes, and then uttered his final words.

“The trap was sprung at 1:05 a.m. by the warden, and 11 minutes later surgeon Matchan pronounced life extinct. Rooney’s neck was broken and death resulted almost instantly, but the body was permitted to hang for a continued length of time,” Marion of The Forum wrote.

“The six-foot drop did its work mercifully. Death was instantaneous. There was not even a quiver as the spirit fled to meet the God it had shunned for 32 years,” the Bismarck Tribune reported.

“A man with nerves of steel had played with fortune and lost — lost like a man would do for a nobler cause,” the Bismarck Tribune reported.

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