Today’s Party-Pooping Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
During the frontier days in California, a wedding was one of the biggest events that a muddy little town like Sanel (in Mendocino County) could experience. In the last quarter of 1875, the first generation of California-born Caucasian females were reaching marrying ages. Thomas Flanagan and Mary Pina tied the knot on December 20, 1875, and everyone from miles around attended the wedding. The Christmas season was in high gear, and the harvest-weary farmers were ready to kick back and have a good time. The Flanagan/Pina wedding was a good excuse to dress up and visit with friends and neighbors, and maybe even get a bit of Christmas shopping done between the service and the reception.
The reception dance was held at Pina’s aunt’s home, where the merrymakers danced to a band into the early morning hours. Well into the celebration, William Granjean stood up on a table to cheer on the dancing guests. Outside the house, lurking in the shadows, was a man named Jose Antonio Ygarra. Ygarra was out on bail awaiting trial for horse theft, and Grandjean was to be the main witness against him. He could see Granjean standing on the table with his back to a window, waving his arms and doing a jig. Ygarra pulled out his pistol, walked towards the window, and shot Granjean in the back of the head. Then, Jose Ygarra ran away as fast as he could run.
The report of the pistol and a blood-spouting corpse put an end to the party. Granjean was dead before he hit the floor; the bullet had pierced his skull, gone through his brain, and smashed against the inside of his frontal bones. He was shot at such close range that there were powder burns on the outside windowpane.
Wedding guest Weaver Andrews told the shocked gathering that he had encountered Jose Antonio Ygarra outside of the house and that Ygarra had asked him if Granjean was attending the reception. Ygarra was tracked down and arrested two days later, on December 22. Nearly every man and boy in the valley turned out for the inquiry hearing, over which Justice Dooly of Sanel presided. Most of the men were armed and agitated, and there were whispers of a lynching.
At six in the evening, a group of twenty men took the prisoner from the courtroom and led him off into the darkness. When the men returned, they reported that the prisoner had escaped.
The next morning Ygarra’s corpse was found hanging from a live oak tree a few miles down the road outside of Hopland, near the Russian River.
Culled from: Death In California by David Kulczyk
The Empress lives in Mendocino, but she has not heard of Sanel. Perhaps she will make a pilgrimage there.