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On a wall inside the Yorba-Slaughter Adobe in an oval frame is a rather ordinary picture from more than a century ago of three people sitting on a porch.
It's really not much different from any of the other fading historical pictures on walls in the county historical site near Prado Dam south of Chino.
But if you really look closely at it, you can see a couple of very odd things.
In front of the three people in the photograph is an empty chair - a very crudely drawn chair - while a porch support on the right also appears to have been redrawn.
It's like someone purposely doctored the photo to eliminate something or someone distasteful in the foreground.
Which, of course, is exactly what one member of the Slaughter family did many years ago before framing it. So who were these terrible people that they should be exorcised from the Slaughters' living room?
One of them was an Indian servant named Isadora. The other? It was none other than Henry Cline, a neighbor of the Slaughters - and the hangman.
Cline, one of the early inhabitants of the Chino area, held a special role in the 1860s and 1870s as hangman for hire for several Southern California counties. This was a time when counties still did their own executions, and very publicly. It's said Cline conducted as many as 17 hangings. He was apparently pretty good at it.
"Mr. Cline took a peculiar pride in the neatness and painlessness of his hangings," praised a Redlands newspaper in January 1902 shortly after his death. He "always used a scaffold of his own design and make."
Even with that kind of pride of workmanship, Cline soon found himself out of his lurid job when the state decided to handle all of its executions at a central location, San Quentin, beginning in 1893.
Cline, an apparently rough and profane kind of man, became a rancher and pretty much faded away - notice of his death in local papers scarcely filled a sentence.
So why the interest in the gallows of yesteryear? It all comes from a conversation I had recently with an energetic amateur historian from Upland named Terry Kuntz.
A seamstress by trade, she began to research Cline for the mother of a close friend writing an article about Cline, who she thinks might be a distant relative.
For that reason, Kuntz has been running from Corona to Redlands to chase down details about this obscure character of Inland Valley history.
Kuntz said Cline and his father, Daniel, came to the area from Pennsylvania, via Illinois and the gold rush. She believes Henry Cline probably learned his trade from his work with the so-called vigilance committees, groups of anonymous men who took the law, and executions, into their own hands in the Northern California gold fields.
After this on-the-job training, he moved down south apparently just ahead of the law, which was not quite so appreciative of his skills with a rope.
For a while, the Clines lived in the community of Rincon, a small town that disappeared below the water and swampland behind Prado Dam when the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Santa Ana River earlier this century.
From 1870 to 1874, during slow periods for his given profession, Henry, with his father, also served as postmaster of the small post office at what was then the Slaughter ranch, which was on one of the main stagelines from the south and east.
Henry's sister, Martha Jane, married Willie Hobbs, who had met the Clines in the gold fields and later worked on their ranch. The Hobbses moved to San Bernardino in 1881, opened a well-known boarding house and became fairly wealthy as result of some shrewd land dealings.
And perhaps their move east, away from the family ranch, had something to do with her brother's profession.
Kuntz said Cline really was a full-service hangman, usually bringing his mobile scaffold with him.
"He had ordered a specialty wagon from his uncle's shop in the East that had huge wheels that he could bring to the site of hanging," she said.
"This enabled the top of the wagon to be high enough for most hangings."
But his creativity couldn't stop the march of civilization, which ultimately dictated executions not be conducted in a public arena, disappointing many who enjoyed such goings-on as Los Angeles' first spectator sport.
"He simply became a 'gentleman farmer,' " she said, smiling.
"Actually from all that I can read, he was a grubby old man who just wasn't very nice at all and sometimes didn't get along with anybody."
He grew feed corn and other grains on a ranch along Pine Street near what is now Prado Regional Park during his latter years, Kuntz said.
Just before Christmas 1901, Cline attended a party in Upland and took in a little too much holiday cheer.
As he was returning home, his wagon hit a slick spot on the road, overturned, and he lay badly injured in a ditch before being discovered sometime after dawn the next day.
He died a few days later and was buried in the family plot in Pioneer Cemetery in San Bernardino.
And there he lies today, his only mark in life an empty spot on an old photograph.q Joe Blackstock writes on Inland Valley history every other Monday.
He can be contacted by phone at (909) 946-9382 or by e-mail at j_blackstock@dailybulletin.com
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