MUNICH, N.D. — In the portrait, 22-year-old Martin Tabert gazes outward with a stoic, serious expression, perhaps hoping to appear older than his years. Standing beside a chair, he’s dressed in a slightly oversized blue suit, complete with a crisp white detachable collar — evoking the style of silver-screen icons of the day Clark Gable and Douglas Fairbanks.

He looks every bit like a young man ready to leave behind his North Dakota farm for adventures unknown.

“He wanted to see the world,” nephew Clifford Tabert told a reporter in 2004 about his uncle. “He saw the bad part of it, I guess.”

Born on a 560-acre farm near Munich, North Dakota, in Cavalier County, Martin was the ninth of 12 children. Like some of his siblings before him, when he came of age and saved a few dollars, he left the farm in search of bigger and better things.

In the fall of 1921, he took a train south. His plan was to find work on farms along the way and learn about farming in other parts of the U.S. Everything was going well until December in Florida, when his luck and money ran out.

He took a chance and hitched a ride on a train near Tallahassee. But a deputy spotted him and arrested him for vagrancy. Because he didn’t have the money to pay the $25 fine, he was sentenced to 90 days in jail.

Tabert sent a telegram home to his parents, Benjamin and Katie.

“In trouble and need 50 dollars to pay fine.”

His father replied (misspellings in the original message):

“Dear Martin, Am sending you $75.00 so you can pay the $50.00 fine and have $25.00 so if you can’t git no work, then you will have some money to live on. We could not git no mony till now. Ma would like to have you come home. It’s to bad that it happent to you. Ma would like to know why you went down there, and how you are feeling. As this is all I can think of just now so I must close. We are all well and hope this will find you the same.”

But days later, on Dec. 21, the letter was returned to the Taberts unopened with the words:

“Returned by request of Sheriff. Party gone.”

His North Dakota family was relieved. They figured he had found another way out of his jam and would be home soon, maybe even in time to sit down for Katie’s Christmas dinner.

That didn’t happen. Christmas came and went without Martin. In January, Ben and Katie received a letter from Putnam Lumber Company informing them Martin died in one of the firm’s camps of “fever and other complications.”

Those “other complications” were about to set off a firestorm in Florida.

Shocked and saddened, Ben and Katie grieved the loss of their son. While they were a bit confused as to how he ended up with what was believed to be malaria at a lumber camp, they accepted the circumstances surrounding his death and were relieved when the company assured them Martin received “a proper Christian burial.”

That changed when the Taberts received a letter in July from Glen Thompson, who slept in the bunk beside Martin at Putnam.

According to historian Curt Eriksmoen, the letter was sent to the postmaster in Munich with these words:

“Please find out whether the parents or kinfolk of Martin Tabert know or care to know the particulars of Martin’s death. I was an eyewitness of the boy’s death and I am doubting whether any particulars were sent to the folks.”

The Taberts and Thompson corresponded for months. But they needed more information, so they eventually contacted Cavalier County State’s Attorney Gudmundur Grimson, who had begun his law career in Munich.

Grimson immigrated to North Dakota from Iceland as an infant. He grew up on a farm in Pembina County and worked as a teacher to earn the $150 tuition to the University of North Dakota, where he earned a law degree. While at UND, he shared a modest shack with another soon-to-be famous Icelandic immigrant, polar explorer

Vilhalmjer Steffanson.

Described in one Forum news story as possessing “personal grit and determination,” Grimson went to Florida and got to the bottom of Tabert’s death.

It turns out that after Tabert was sentenced to 90 days in jail, he was whisked off to the town of Clara, Florida, in Dixie County, 60 miles south of Tallahassee. He was assigned to work in the prison labor force at the Putnam Lumber Company.

Grimson learned it was part of an arrangement between the company and Sheriff J.R. Jones. Jones was promised around $20 for every man he could send to work for Putnam, earning him the nickname “The Slave Catcher.”

According to a 1923 story in The New York Age newspaper, Tabert and the other convicts were forced to work long days “waist-deep in swampy water” and “fed and housed in a way that no North Dakota farmer would feed and house his domestic animals.”

Tabert soon suffered from fever, headaches and open sores. When he couldn’t keep up with his work, Thompson and others said Putnam’s “whipping boss” Walter Higginbotham propped him up on his swollen feet and flogged him 50 times with “Black Aunty,” a 5-foot-long, 7.5-pound rawhide strap.

He then forced Tabert to the ground, stepped on his neck, and kept beating him. His fellow prisoners carried him back to his bunk, where he lay in excruciating pain before dying three days later.

When Grimson returned to Cavalier County and shared the news about Tabert, his fellow North Dakotans were outraged.

Local leaders set up a defense fund and distributed a pamphlet titled “Can America Stand For This?”

With residents of Cavalier County leading the way, people from all over the state contributed a total of $4,000 to help pay for the prosecution of individuals connected to Tabert’s death.

The North Dakota Legislature also passed a resolution demanding the Florida Legislature investigate the matter.

Eriksmoen said newspapers in the Sunshine State didn’t take the criticism lying down.

“When the Florida newspapers learned of the demands from North Dakota, they stirred up their readers by writing that these impertinent farmers should ‘go back home and slop their hogs,’ ” he wrote.

Grimson urged major national newspapers to cover Martin Tabert’s story, and they did. By July 1923, more than 50 papers worldwide had covered the flogging. Renowned author Marjory Stoneman Douglas penned a poignant poem about Tabert, set to music in a minor key and sung by schoolchildren across Florida. The story even inspired a film, “The Whipping Boss.”

It’s important to note that despite the publicity exploding around the case, Martin Tabert was hardly the first man fatally beaten in a prison camp. But sadly, people and the press paid attention, partly because he was white, well-educated, and came from a family with the ability to pay his fine and a community willing to finance a fight.

The majority of the convicts killed previously were either Black or poor whites who didn’t have the means to fight the system.

The New York Age noted in 1923, “The case of Tabert, as terrible as it is, could be matched and outmatched by the cases of thousands of Negroes who have suffered and died under the systems of convict leasing and peonage.”

Whether embarrassed by the publicity or not, the Florida Legislature eventually agreed with North Dakota’s position and passed a resolution thanking the state for bringing the Tabert incident to their attention. Meanwhile, fearing the matter would hurt tourism, Florida’s governor, Cary Hardee, ordered Higginbotham to be arrested.

The trial took place in Columbia County, 150 miles from Putnam’s lumber camp. Higginbotham faced first-degree murder charges. He claimed he only “lightly beat” Tabert for neglecting his duties.

Sixteen witnesses testified. Most of them disputed Higginbotham’s story.

One of them, John T. Gardner, a one-time U.S. Army private who was in the camp, testified to the brutality Higginbotham inflicted upon Tabert despite Tabert screaming and begging for mercy.

“I’ve seen Higginbotham beat five or six men in one night,” Gardner testified. “Seems like when he got started, he wouldn’t know when to quit.”

On July 8, 1923, Higginbotham was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Gudmundur Grimson received a letter of thanks and congratulations from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, commending him and the State of North Dakota for the conviction, calling it “an accomplishment of the greatest public importance and a godsend to the future protection of the American people.”

However, the conviction didn’t stand. The Supreme Court of Florida overturned it, ruling that while there was enough evidence to support the guilty verdict, it would be necessary to retry the case in Dixie County because of legal technicalities.

After two years, a trial was held in Dixie County. But getting a conviction again would be an uphill battle.

Irving Wallace, author of “The Last of the Whipping Bosses,” said the Putnam Lumber Company owned 75% of the land in Dixie County, and most residents were dependent on it for their livelihood.

Additionally, Wallace said the county sheriff was the brother-in-law of Higginbotham’s attorney and a member of the Board of Commissioners whose job was to select juries.

“The drawing had not been properly done, and the court had been having the sheriff select the jurors,” Wallace wrote.

Higginbotham was found not guilty.

Despite Higginbotham’s release from prison, the Tabert case led to change throughout the South. In 1924, Florida abolished the convict leasing system and corporal punishment for prisoners and revised other penal laws. Other Southern states followed.

The New York World won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1924 for its coverage of the Tabert case and for raising awareness about the abuses in Southern states surrounding the leasing of convicts for forced penal labor.

After he was acquitted in the Tabert case, Higginbotham faced charges of beating another inmate. However, before that trial started, he was seriously injured in a car accident and excused from the proceedings. He kept a low profile after that.

Other men connected to the Tabert case also faced consequences. Martin’s sentencing judge, Ben Willis, and Sheriff Jones were removed from office, the prison supervisor resigned, and Dr. T. Caper Jones, the Putnam physician who failed to tend to Martin’s needs, was condemned by the legislature as “a disgrace to his profession.”

Gudmundur Grimson eventually climbed the ladder in the North Dakota court system, becoming the chief justice of the North Dakota Supreme Court from 1957 to 1959. The Tabert case was a highlight of his career.

In a 1953 letter to the editor of The Forum, he expressed gratitude for the changes made in the penal system.

“That result could never have been accomplished except for the support and encouragement of friends and newspapers in North Dakota and all over the United States.”

Grimson died in 1965 at the age of 86.

Putnam Lumber paid the Tabert family $20,000 in damages for the death of their son.

Martin Tabert’s body was never returned to North Dakota, where his family longed to lay him to rest in their family plot.

The fate of his remains is unknown. The lumber company lied when it said Martin received “a proper Christian burial.” By most accounts, he was thrown into a swamp.

Yet, despite this tragic loss, Martin Tabert’s legacy endures.

The farm kid who left home in ‘21 to make a name for himself did that, forever becoming synonymous with efforts to improve America’s penal system.