![]() ![]() ![]() 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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