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Special Report
Hang 'Em High
I've recently read for the first time Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident (1940), a novel thought to be the first anti-Western, and one I'd never gotten around to reading. Upon finishing it, I thought it merited a piece for two reasons: First, it's Clark's centenary (August 3, 1909); and second, it's a book that spoke to both its own time and to ours.
Clark (1909-1971) was not a true son of the West, but close. He was born in East Orland, Maine, but when he was eight his family moved to Reno, where his father was president of the University of Nevada. The son followed in the father's academic footsteps, combining a subsequent teaching career with the publication of five books, The Ox-Bow Incident being first and foremost, and considered an American classic today.
The novel has a deceptively simple plot. The setting is Nevada -- 1885. Two cowboys, Art Croft (the narrator) and Gil Carter, get a break from the range for a couple of days and ride in to town, where they learn of the murder of a friend and fellow cowboy by cattle rustlers. They join an impromptu posse sanctioned by a corrupt judge named Tyler, and an unethical deputy sheriff named Butch Mapes, but not by the sheriff himself, a serious man named Risley, absent on official business.
The posse is a lynch mob in utero and as the novel progresses shows itself as an instrument bent on administering vigilante justice. It's initially led by the bad deputy Mapes, whose weak character early on defers to a demonic figure named Major Tetley (Clark doesn't give Judge Tyler, Mapes or Tetley proper Christian names), a rancher and ex-Confederate cavalry officer, who still wears remnants of his old uniform, and who takes charge and gives orders easily. Tetley has his son along, an emotionally unstable young man named Gerald, who detests his father, and is horrified by the posse's prospects. Roughly a score of named and well-developed characters take part, some in favor of bringing the perpetrators back to town for an official trial, others intent on a hanging.
Three men are captured with cattle bearing a particular brand, and for which they lack a bill of sale. One also has the dead cowboy's monogrammed six shooter, which he claims that he found on a road.
After a long cold night of existential terror on the part of the three captives, complete with cowboy versions of Dostoyevskyan (the book can be thought of as the American Crime and Punishment) insights in the pro and con arguments between accusers and accused, and amongst the accusers themselves, the three are "tried" by a jury-like vote, and hanged at dawn. As the final preparations are made, two become insane with fear, and a third -- Donald Martin -- is initially fearful, but calms himself and quietly accepts his fate. Earlier, he had been permitted to write a "beautiful" letter to be delivered to his wife and children.
At novel's end it turns out that the lynched men were innocent (mistaken circumstances cause the thought-to-be-murdered cowboy to appear; and the rancher who sold the cattle verified the transaction involving a bill of sale to be mailed later), and their inquisitors react to the foul deed in different ways. Two commit suicide: Gerald Tetley, who is traumatized; and his father Major Tetley after that, out of guilt. One man goes insane. The rest, including Art Croft and Gil Carter, stoically go on with their lives, knowing that someday they will answer for being a party to a great injustice. Clark's timeless message is that each human being is morally responsible for every act performed in the course of their life. And the book is certainly a primer on the machinations of mob rule.
Clark wrote most of The Ox-Bow Incident in 1937 and '38, as the political cauldron that was Europe was heating to the boiling point of World War ll. Upon its 1940 publication, some reviewers made the connection. In a letter to his friend, the writer Walter Prescott Webb, Clark writes: "I had the parallel in mind, all right, but what I was most afraid of was not the German Nazis, or even the Bund, but that ever-present element in any society which can always be led to act the same way….What I wanted to say was: It can happen here. It has happened here, in minor but sufficiently indicative ways, a great many times."
The Ox-Bow Incident is a strangely appropriate book for our time, just as it was when totalitarianism writ large ruled much of the world. Today, it speaks to a rampant McCarthyism of the Left that routinely practices character assassination on its political adversaries. As I read the story I couldn't help but reflect on the lynch mob mentality present in our contemporary public life, especially in the mainstream media. Its recent Sarah Palin smear campaign tells us who they are.
-- Then he [Donald Martin] got hold of himself and said to Tetley, more slowly, "Aren't you even going to tell us what we're accused of ?"
"Of course," Tetley said. "This isn't a mob. We'll make sure first."
Well, no they won't. Seventy years after its publication, Walter Van Tilburg Clark's novel is about life in the United States in 2009, as much as it is about Nevada in 1885 or Germany in 1938. The Ox-Bow Incident deserves its honored place in the American canon because it stands the test of time and tells us much about the state of our national character today.
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Interested Conservative| 7.21.09 @ 7:41AM
And a very good movie treatment as well, especially paired with High Noon, mob rule and mob cowardice being the twin indicators of democracy descending into tyranny.
Fed-up Conservative| 7.21.09 @ 8:17AM
"McCarthyism" as a negative was always a construct of the Left. McCarthy was one of the good guys.
Raoul Ortega| 7.21.09 @ 10:01AM
McCarthyism: The so-called Progressive Left has long had a habit of co-opting and distorting the meaning of common words and phrases. If we can't reclaim them outright, there's nothing wrong with applying those words back at them, and maybe doing our own distortion in the process.
Marc Jeric| 7.21.09 @ 11:35AM
Joe McCarthy did uncover hundreds of communists and Soviet spies in our government. Pity he should have drunk too much; also, he really did not know the true criminal nature of our far left and therefore did not take reasonable precautions against their attacks.
Old Texican| 7.21.09 @ 1:03PM
Mr. Croke
Thanks for the reminder...
The final thought I have plagerized here:
"Character matters!" Yes, it truly does.
Kitty| 7.21.09 @ 2:03PM
Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" and George Orwell's "1984" are mentioned often these days. Bill Croke once mentioned he's reading Arthur Koestler's "Darkness At Noon."
We are certainly living in interesting times. There must be a least a few future classics to be mined from this current administration. Which makes me wonder, How will this era be portrayed in literature, and who will be the writers?
...
Richard Baker| 7.21.09 @ 2:28PM
The movie with Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan is worth renting or viewing on cable. Good story about mob mentalities and personal responsibility. Still contains a timely message.
Tim | 7.21.09 @ 2:32PM
Sarah Palin?
Brian B| 7.21.09 @ 4:35PM
The movie version is excellent and faithful to the book.
High Noon on the other hand I have always found to be at odds with not only history but the pioneers.
The Ox Bow Incident places us believably amongst pioneers and cowboys who are too easily led to excess.
High Noon would have us believe an entire town full of men and women who had just a few years before left everything they knew and braved the wilderness and Indians to carve a town out of nothing would be cowed by three or four bandits. Even disregarding High Noon's marxist anti McCarthy roots it had a false and fabricated feel to it, precisely the opposite of the Ox Bow Incident. John Wayne despised it as antithetical to the Western ethos.
Michael Skaggs| 7.21.09 @ 6:32PM
First, I always believed Major Tetley committed suicide not out of guilt, but to avoid his own hanging for the murder of the three men. Second, it was for the reasons Brian B. mentioned that John Wayne and Howard Hawks made "Rio Bravo". They both hated "High Noon", except for the fact it won their friend and co-worker, Gary Cooper, his second Oscar. Third, 80 percent of the people out west fought for the North, or the South, or against the Indians, and almost all of them had to hunt for their dinner at one time or another. Those three or four outlaws would not have lasted very long.
Jeff | 7.21.09 @ 7:55PM
The Ox-Bow Incident is an anti-vigilante movie, written by a New Englander. New Englanders are anti-vigilante by nature, believers in institutions, commissions, credentials, and proper procedures and proper paperwork. But vigilantism was sometimes necessary for survival in frontier communities.
Sometimes the vigilantes made mistakes. Sometimes, even today, modern state-financed, procedure-bound law enforcement makes mistakes.
William Hamblen| 7.22.09 @ 11:51PM
The historic 1876 Northfield, Minnesota, raid refutes the premise of High Noon.
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Yall conservative had this OX BOW mentiality when Obama started to run. You had Sean Hannity calling or suggesting Obama is racist because of Jerry Wright, but none of you question Hannity's friendship with Neo-Nazi Hal Turner.
Talk about those glass houses.
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