HORATIO McCLEAN JONES
COMMEMORATION OF FIRST PRESIDING JUDGE OF THE DISTRICT COURT FOR LYON COUNTY
November 14, 2013
Accepting the plaque on behalf of Lyon County is Judge Leon A. Aberasturi.
First portion, proposed for delivery by Justice James Hardesty:
The Nevada Judicial Historical Society is commemorating the first Nevada judge to preside over the District Court located in Lyon County. That judge was Supreme Court Associate Justice HORATIO McCLEAN JONES.
The District Court for Lyon County was created by the Nevada Territorial Legislature at its first regular session. The law establishing the Territorial District Court system was adopted on November 29, 1861. This law divided the Territory of Nevada into judicial districts and assigned a judge to preside over each district.
The 9 counties of the Nevada Territory were allocated to one of three judicial districts. Washoe County was placed in the First Judicial District, along with Storey and Lake Counties. The original Second Judicial District was comprised of Ormsby, Douglas and Esmeralda Counties. Lyon, Churchill and Humboldt Counties formed the Third Judicial District.
The pending civil cases in the Territory were transferred to the various district courts based on the county in which the case originated. The criminal cases, however, received different treatment. For some reason, the law transferred all pending criminal actions to Ormsby County rather than allocating them to the county in which the offense occurred.
The law also required that the terms of the district courts be held at the county seats of the various counties and established the location of each county seat. The county seat for Lyon County was located at Dayton. The county's district court sessions were held in Dayton for about 48 years, until the county seat was officially moved to Yerington in 1911.
One thing that the 1861 Act did not do was to create the office of District Court Judge. Instead, the three justices of the Territorial Supreme Court were assigned to preside in the district courts. The justices had been appointed to the Territorial Supreme Court 6 months earlier on March 27, 1861, by President Lincoln. The new Territorial Law creating the judicial districts required the justices to “ride the circuits” and sit in each of the county seats during the year. This created a curious situation in which the trial judges also made up the court of appeals for disputed cases.
Each justice presided over the three county courts in one of the three judicial districts. The Chief Justice, George Turner, was assigned to the Second Judicial District and Associate Justice Horatio Jones to the Third. Justice Gordon N. Mott was assigned to the First Judicial District.
The Nevada Judicial Historical Society has asked me to present a plaque to Lyon County commemorating the Honorable HORATIO McCLEAN JONES, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the Nevada Territory, as Nevada's first Presiding Judge of the District Court for Lyon County.
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Good morning - I am Peter Smith, I am speaking today for the Nevada Judicial Historical Society.
Horatio McClean Jones was the first Nevada territorial judge for Lyon County, but there were Utah Territorial judges before him. The western part of the Utah Territory was called Carson County but the oldest records in the Lyon County Court start in 1859 in books clearly marked Lyon County. Unfortunately we do not have the names of the people who served as judges in Lyon County before Justice Jones.
Judge Child was the Utah Territorial Judge sitting in Carson City and Genoa, he or someone appointed by him may have heard cases coming from what is now Lyon County.
Those earliest Lyon County Court records are here. They are only the indexes for case files that appear to have been lost. In 1909 the Dayton courthouse burnt down and perhaps the actual case files were lost at that time. The county seat was moved to Yerington after this fire and a new courthouse was built in 1911.
In the records of the Territorial Supreme Court we found 8 cases that were appealed from Lyon County. We found the dates they were filed and case numbers for five of them in these Lyon County indexes, but no other documents from this early period. In these records we found a variety of familiar names among the litigants, including probates for William Ormsby and Ernie Comstock and adversarial matters involving John Cradlebaugh, John D. Winters, and Mr. Sutro. One case, Perigrerre v. Allen was appealed to the Territorial Supreme Court and affirmed. That may be a distant relative of Justice Ron Parraguirre, depending on which part of the family used what spelling of their name.
It seems unusual today that an appellate court would hear an appeal from a case that had been decided by one of the appeals court judges acting as the trial judge for a county court. The decisions that we were able to find in the Supreme Court records, for cases that were appealed from Lyon County, seem to have been upheld or overturned by the other two justices on the Supreme Court and Justice Jones appears not to have voted on those decisions. I could not tell if this was a standard practice or just coincidence, we would have to examine all the appeals and sort out which Justices had been the trial court judges on each.
Judge Jones had a secretary, Alfred James, who had previously been the editor of the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City. The District Attorney at that time was E.B. Zabriski, the father of the borax miner who operated in Death Valley and for whom Zabriski Point was named.
According to an essay in the Online Nevada Encyclopedia, written by Jeff Kintop, the Nevada State Archivist:
Horatio McLean Jones was born in Howellsville, Pennsylvania, in 1826. Jones graduated from Oberlin College where he met his wife America Strong, they graduated in 1849 and Jones graduated from Harvard Law School in 1853. He then practiced law in St. Louis and the Missouri Supreme Court appointed him Court Reporter in 1856. Missouri was a slave state, but it remained in the Union when the Confederacy was formed in 1861.
In 1861, President Lincoln appointed Jones to be an Associate Justice for the Nevada Territory. Jones was then assigned to be the Judge for the Third District, which included Lyon, Churchill, and Humboldt Counties.
In 1862, after an unpopular jury decision in the single ledge case which determined the ownership of the Comstock Lode, the territorial legislature tried to switch the districts held by Jones and Justice Gordon Mott. When the bill came back from the Judiciary Committee, the council erupted in heated discussion. Neither Mott nor Jones wanted to exchange districts, though Mott apparently wasn't greatly bothered by the decision since he had been recently elected representative to Congress and would be leaving soon.
The minutes from the Territorial Legislature for December 4, 1862, report Senator Thomas Hannah saying that Justice Mott "was pure, and he was opposed to having the judicial ermine dabbled in filthy pool of politics" . By contrast "He asserted that Jones had been lobbying and log rolling with members in a very unjudicial and injudicious manner" and had "dragged his judicial ermine in the filthy pool of politics" .
The minutes continue with counter arguments and statements by Jones' supporters and the report in the newspapers concluded that:
"such charges are absurd, when you reflect that every member of the Legislature is of the purest and most unsullied moral character - in fact, all church members and Sons of Temperance, in excellent standing!"
Justice Jones accused Senator Hannah of improperly handling the bill in the Senate, and Hannah challenged Jones to a duel. Jones refused, then said he would not practice the kind of law the attorneys of the First District practiced. Jones walked out of his court and would not hear any more cases during the May term of 1863.
We might base some opinion about Justice Jones from his choice of colleges. Of all the colleges in the US when he was young, Oberlin was unique. It had been founded in Ohio by Presbyterians; it was the first college to regularly admit black students, starting in 1835, and it was the first coeducational college, admitting women starting in 1837. Oberlin college and the town were a major point on the underground railroad for slaves escaping from the south.
1861 to 1863 were the first years of the Civil War. In March of 1863 the war was not favoring the North, the draft was started, draft riots broke out in New York, and Justice Jones was in the middle of Comstock politics being threatened with a duel over a decision he made on the court.
On July 30, 1863 Justice Jones resigned, tired of the plots and intrigues of the Storey County Bar. He left the bench and went to Austin to practice law. When the Constitution of the State of Nevada was up for a vote in 1864, Justice Jones gave many speeches supporting it. He practiced law in Austin until 1868. Jones lived for a while in California, and then returned to St. Louis, where he served as a district court judge from 1871 to 1877. Later he went to Vermontville, Michigan, where he died on June 10, 1906.
We are here today to recognize the first Nevada Judge to preside in the Lyon County District Court. There is little record of his passage here, he handled the cases that were presented to him and he worked under extreme conditions in a new land during the darkest years of our nation's history.
Lyon County's first courthouse was not built until 1864, after Justice Jones had left the bench. The Court he left was not a building, it was a Court built only on the foundations of the rule of law in an untested and sometimes hostile country.
Nevada calls itself the "Battle Born" state. This is more than a football cheer. In 1863 1,000s of troops were dying in battles and from disease, miners in Virginia City were working hundreds of feet below ground in hot, putrid dark tunnels while politicians on the surface threatened to shoot men like Justice Jones for trying to impose some rule of law to their society.
We thank the men and women of this county and the judiciary that serves them for continuing to uphold these principles now and into the future.
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