Bullies and misfits usually end up getting what’s coming to them, and when it happens, ‘poetic justice’ has certainly prevailed.
By David A. Kulczyk
By the early 1880s, Chico was a bustling city of dirt streets and wooden buildings, a citadel of commerce at the northern edge of the Sacramento Valley. Jack Crum was a pioneer in the area and was well known and well-liked by the citizens of Butte County.
Crum was once a rich farmer who owned one of the most beautiful spreads in the Sacramento Valley. It included farmland, orchards, forests, and a picturesque creek that wandered past his large two-story home. Crum had many friends in Northern California, and his home was a popular stopping-off place for travelers on the road down the valley.
Eventually, silt and mining waste from the Cherokee hydraulic mine poured down the creek and ruined Crum’s property. The mining company paid off a judge or politician and so only had to reimburse Crum pennies on the dollar for the damage to his spread, leaving the old pioneer a financially broken man. Crum left his beloved property and moved into Chico.
Tom Noacks was a big, double-fisted bully who liked to punch out oxen, just like Mongo in the Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles. On August 7, 1881, the moronic Noacks got into a quarrel with the feeble, tottering Crum. Noacks knocked Crum down with his fists and then stomped him to death with his heavy boots.
Noacks was quickly arrested and jailed, but as word went out that the youthful town bully had killed the old and feeble pioneer, the citizens of the northern Sacramento Valley started talking about a necktie party. The police soon got word about the general public’s feelings about old man Crum’s murder and knew that, in addition to being a man with many friends, Crum was also a Mason. They secretly spirited Noacks to the more secure county jail in Oroville.
Nothing is a secret for long in a small town. Friends of Crum gathered quickly and quietly in preparation for Noacks’ lynching. In the late summer moonlight, men could be seen carrying axes, ropes and sledgehammers all over the environs of Chico. Butte County Sheriff Sprague was in Chico, but by the time he became aware of the plot, there was little he could do. He sent a telegram to Oroville to warn the jailers about the advancing mob. Mysteriously, the sheriff’s cable was never received.
The friends of Jack Crum quietly entered Oroville, posting men strategically to prevent any word getting out to potential rescuers. A group of men walked to the jail and knocked on the door, where they informed the jailers that they had a prisoner from the town of Biggs. When the iron door was opened, the mob rushed into the jail, overpowering the startled jailers.
Big Tom Noacks cried for mercy and let out pitiful yells as the lynch mob approached his jail cell. The sledgehammers made quick work of Noacks’ cell door and in no time he was dragged from the jail and thrown into a waiting wagon. The mob rode in procession to Crum’s old ranch, where a noose was thrown over an old cottonwood tree and Noacks danced the hangman’s jig. It was reported that Noacks bellowed like a calf from the time he left the jail until the noose cut off his wind.
Noacks was a big intimidating man in life, but there was never a bigger coward in Butte County to die with his boots on.
Jack Crum suffered calamity during his life, and his murder, at the hands of a brazen bully, was an obscenity. While morally and legally reprehensible, the lynching of Tom Noacks, sniveling coward that he proved to be, brought the curtain down on an early California Greek tragedy.
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