American Violence: Western Mythologies

Last updated on: March 31, 2017 at 1:33 am by Philip Jenkins

American Violence: Western Mythologies 2017-03-29T20:18:14-04:00 Philip Jenkins

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I posted on the extreme violence that characterized the United States around the turn of the twentieth century. Many of the examples we might think of from that era concern the so-called Wild West, but we should be very careful in applying that label. Often, those conflicts mimicked exactly the same kind of ethnic and partisan battles then raging in the industrial East and the post-Reconstruction South. They pitted Republicans against Democrats, Irish against Nativists, and often, the struggles harked back to old civil war allegiances. The West was an integral part of Gilded Age America.

Battles associated with legendary names like Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp were essentially the same sort of factional struggles for economic or political power that also marked the elections in contemporary New York City or Philadelphia, or the industrial battles between eastern railroad corporations or canal firms. The much-filmed gunfight at the OK Corral, which took place in 1881, was an incident in a continuing struggle between the Republican businessmen of Tombstone and the Democratic cattlemen. The Earp brothers served as the hired assassins of the former, much as the political machines of the east enforced their will through street gangs and organized crime.

Western history is littered with local range wars, feuds between rival families and factions, which led to multiple assassinations and murders, lynchings, and sometimes full scale firefights. Notorious examples included the Lincoln County War (New Mexico, 1878), the Pleasant Valley War (Arizona, 1882-92), and the Johnson County War (Wyoming, 1889-93). Both the latter claimed anywhere up to fifty dead apiece. But these were by no means the only such events, and Wikipedia’s launch page on Range wars and feuds of the American Old West includes thirty entries. So severe were such wars, and so frequent, that they provided enough business for full time wandering mercenaries who could be recruited for one side or another.

Violence and assassination were particularly common in New Mexico. From the 1870s, the state was dominated by the (Republican) Santa Fe ring, which was a close Western parallel to the Democratic Tammany Hall in New York City. In 1899, there were even (questionable) stories that leading New Mexico Republican Thomas B. Catron had conspired to poison a dinner with the goal of eliminating the governor and several other key Democratic officials, in the so-called penitentiary plot. Historian Richard Maxwell Brown referred to New Mexico as “apparently the only place where assassination became an integral part of the political system.”

That lethal New Mexico subculture even had national implications. Look especially at the career of the key lawyer and political leader Albert B. Fall. Fall was closely associated with a deeply criminal neighbor named Oliver Lee, and the (Democratic) Fall-Lee faction was a frightening power in the state. Fall defended Lee when he was implicated in the 1896 murders of a Republican rival, Albert Jennings Fountain, and his small son, whose bodies were never recovered. The trial, in 1899, attracted national headlines. One of the men who investigated the Fountain case was Pat Garrett, who in 1881 had killed Billy the Kid, and who was himself assassinated in 1908. Fall, in turn, successfully defended the accused killer in that case.

Reading the evidence in such trials, incidentally, there was obviously a common expectation that people arrested in sensitive cases stood a very real chance of being “shot while trying to escape.” Through these years, the lines separating regular politics and law enforcement, political corruption, and organized crime activity were thin to the point of vanishing.

Fall later converted to join the Republican Party, and in 1912 he and Catron became the state’s first US Senators when New Mexico achieved statehood. If Fall’s name rings any bells today, it is because he became Interior Secretary under Warren Harding, and as such, he was at the heart of the vast Teapot Dome scandal that ruined the Harding administration in the early 1920s. (I should say that virtually every fact in these various cases is controversial and disputed, and the word “alleged” belongs in every sentence).

But as the Kentucky case shows, such horrors were not confined to the West. Union-Confederate memories shaped the lengthy feud of the 1870s and 1880s between the Appalachian clans of the Hatfields and the McCoys.

Was the West really that much Wilder than the North, East or South?

A quick note on sources, mainly about New Mexico affairs. One useful book on this world is David L. Caffey’s myth-busting Chasing the Santa Fe Ring: Power and Privilege in Territorial New Mexico (University of New Mexico Press, 2014). Corey Recko also has a good account of the Fountain case in Murder on the White Sands (University of North Texas Press, 2007). More generally, my account of Western conflicts and feuds draws on Richard Maxwell Brown’s 1991 quirky but valuable book No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society.

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