The pastor of the town’s only church lectures his fellow citizens, “Let us not act hastily let us not do what we will later regret.” When none are persuaded, he retreats into piety, saying, “I am sorry for you, all of you.” Due to the temporary absence of the sheriff, the local judge appeals for restraint, threatening to try those who go ahead-but the lynch mob, already impatient with the law’s slow working, feels the judge will not follow through. I found myself fascinated by the efforts of a few of the characters to persuade the others to stop and think.
If we do this job ourselves, and now, it will be one that won’t have to be done again. Maybe if we do one job with our own hands, the law will get a move on. Are we going to slink on our own range like a pack of sniveling boys, and wait till we can’t buy the boots for our own feet, before we do anything?.
If we wait, I tell you, there won’t be one head of anybody’s cattle left in the meadow by the time we get justice. Yet they are quickly persuaded by the speech of one who asks: Few in the mob have much of their own to protect: they are mostly single ranch hands working for others, subsisting on minimal wages between payday binges at the foothill town’s saloon.
Others in the mob seem to fear the same, or fear to be thought cowards. Part of what draws the cowboys to join in the lynch mob is their uneasy feeling that the men in town suspect them as the rustlers. Clark shows the iconic individualist-the cowboy-irresistibly drawn into colluding with other supposed individualists who are convinced their independent way of life is threatened. They get drawn into a vigilante action to find and hang men suspected of murdering a ranch hand while rustling cattle. Set in 1880s Nevada, the story opens as two cowboys ride into a foothill town, looking for a little R & R after roundup season. I recently read his novel The Ox-Bow Incident (1940). Among the first to comment on this tradition was the author Walter Van Tilburg Clark. The American west, however, was also the scene of vigilantism. The standard western is a morality play showing rugged individualists uniting in allegiance to a system of just laws. When the man who fights for others’ rights wins-whether on his own or with a secret hand up from John Wayne-other characters in the story consent to his right to rule as sheriff or Senator.
In this situation, might prevails over right until one courageous man stands up and defends the threatened life, liberty, property-or woman-of another. The western depicts wary cowboys, farmers and ranchers trying their luck on a frontier where law does not yet fully exist. The American “western,” in the novels of Owen Wister, the stories of Zane Grey, and numerous films of the 1950s and early 1960s, enshrines an American folk understanding of the way political life arises from a state of nature.
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