Pictured: Milwaukee ’s first Courthouse, built in 1836. Milwaukee ’s first two murderers were imprisoned in a small shack to the rear of the building.
This November will mark the 180th anniversary of a somewhat dubious milestone in city history – Milwaukee ’s first recorded murder. It was 1836, the midst of a boomtown for the little lakefront settlement known as Milwaukee (or Milwaukie ). What had been, two years before, a collection of about 20 people, was now a veritable metropolis of 1,200. The rapid growth of the village brought men from many walks to the area – financiers with money to invest, laborers hoping for plentiful work, and more than a few rogues and crooks who saw the western outpost as a place where the law wouldn’t get in their way.
Two such men, “hardened cases,” per this 1883 history of Milwaukee, were Joseph Scott and Cornelius Bennett. The men ran a small rum-hole shanty (calling it as much as a saloon would be too generous) on North Water Street , near the corner of what is now Michigan Street . One November evening, a man known as Manitou – a member of one of the local Native American tribes – stopped in their place after having already indulged himself elsewhere. Accounts vary as to what happened next, but the proprietors of the house, upset either that Manitou was too drunk or had no money, threw him out. Headstrong, the young man reentered the place before being thrown out again.
Scott and Bennett, so enraged by Manitou’s persistence and likely offended in the way that white men often were in the era when a Native refused to play the role of a submissive, followed him into the muddy street. Manitou had barely made it across the street when the two men attacked him. He was stabbed several times and died in a heap in front of a store at the southeast corner of Michigan and Water – present day site of the Mitchell Building .
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Scott and Bennett were both quickly arrested for the crime. The arrest was a matter of public safety, but not over the threat that the two men posed. On the outskirts of village, some 300 Native Americans were camped. Relations between whites and the Natives were already strained, the settlers having averted armed hostilities just the year before after Byron Kilbourn had enraged the west-of-the-river tribes by jumping his lease on the land and evacuating them from the area a year ahead of schedule. City father Solomon Juneau himself delivered news of the murder to the camp and, according to pioneer historian James Buck, used his long-standing relationship with the tribe elders to avoid violent retaliation.
The office of County Clerk Albert Fowler, where the men were kept as the jail was built.
But the village had yet another problem. There was no jail in which to house their prize prisoners. A facility was, at the time, under construction, but not yet ready for occupancy. In the meantime, the two men were locked into the tiny office of Albert Fowler, who had recently become the first clerk of the newly-formed County of Milwaukee . After a few days in Fowler’s office, the new jail was completed and the men were transferred. The new jail was an “ill-constructed” log building to the rear of the courthouse with a pair of cells, one ten feet by ten, the other ten feet by four.
Scott and Bennett remained there for nearly six months until, in April 1937, they escaped. The pair had used tools smuggled to them to pry oak boards from the wall and then used these pieces of wood to jimmy the cell door from its fastenings. After making it out of their cell, their escape from the building was quite easy – they climbed through a hole in its unfinished roof. A posse took out to search for the men but found nothing. Buck also noted that Juneau was so worried about the Native tribes blaming him for the loss of the murderers that he took to keeping two bears in the yard of his home, chained to trees, for protection.
Scott resurfaced about a year later in Indiana , when he was hanged for the murder of his uncle. Bennett was never heard of again.
See the site of Milwaukee ’s first murder and a score of sites of strange and terrible city history aboard the MONDO MILWAUKEE boat tour – Wednesday June 1, at 8 pm. Get tickets HERE.
