When comparing the characters we meet in The Oxbow Incident with Erik Baard's list on attributes a cowboy should possess, we find out that there are quite a few discrepancies. The novel as a whole is the story of a group of men who decided to form a lynch mob and go after a group of men who are responsible for murdering a townsman and for apparently stealing cattle from Drew's ranch. The lynch mob sets and tries to track the rebels who are responsible, they come across three men who they have decided are the trouble makers and all in all they decide to hang them men. At the end of the novel we find out that these three men were not the rebels, in fact they were wrongly accused by the mob, and now the mob were murdered because they did kill them wrongfully. The story is full of contradictions on what a cowboy should be, when it is being compared to Baard's list. In Baard's article he had a quote from Bonnie Wheeler who stated, "The idea of the American cowboy is the direct lineal descendant of the chivalric knight." While we could argue that the mob traveling out to find the rebels was brave, it did not make up for them acting as if they were the final law and judgment instead.
While the lynch mob is being organized, we are introduced to Tetley. The man who ends up being the leader of the mob. The town's judge, Judge Tyler tells Tetley if he finds the rebels who are involved in the murder and theft, he is to bring them back into town so they can stand on trial. Unfortunately Tetley has a completely different plan in mind, he believes that his son, Gerald is too feminine and would like to make him kill one of the rebels in order to make him more like a man. Baard's tells us that a cowboy should never shoot first, hit a smaller man,...
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...that he asks Drew to deliver the letter to Martin's wife. This is Davies going back on his word once again since he promised Martin he would be the one to give the news to his wife. When the men continued to talk about Tetley, Davies spoke up and said "Yes, he loved it, he extracted pleasure from every morsel of suffering. He protracted it as long as he could. It was all one to him, the boy's mental torment, the old man's animal fear, the Mex taking that bullet out of his leg. Did you see his face when the Mex was taking that bullet out of his leg?" (pg.225). When talking about these three men we see that Tetley was not helping someone in distress, he refrained from keeping himself clean in thought and action, he disrespected the laws of his nation and he failed to be a patriot. However, the rest of the men in the mob all failed in the categories presented by Baard.
Interestingly, the book does not focus solely on the Georgia lynching, but delves into the actual study of the word lynching which was coined by legendary judge Charles B Lynch of Virginia to indicate extra-legal justice meted out to those in the frontier where the rule of law was largely absent. In fact, Wexler continues to analyse how the term lynching began to be used to describe mob violence in the 19th century, when the victim was deemed to have been guilty before being tried by due process in a court of law.
Wexler, Laura. 2003. Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America. Scribner; 2004. Print
On July 25, 1946, two young black couples- Roger and Dorothy Malcom, George and Mae Murray Dorsey-were killed by a lynch mob at the Moore's Ford Bridge over the Appalachee River connecting Walton and Oconee Counties (Brooks, 1). The four victims were tied up and shot hundreds of times in broad daylight by a mob of unmasked men; murder weapons included rifles, shotguns, pistols, and a machine gun. "Shooting a black person was like shooting a deer," George Dorsey's nephew, George Washington Dorsey said (Suggs C1). It has been over fifty years and this case is still unsolved by police investigators. It is known that there were atleast a dozen men involved in these killings. Included in the four that were known by name was Loy Harrison. Loy Harrison may not have been an obvious suspect to the investigators, but Harrison was the sole perpetrator in the unsolved Moore's Ford Lynching case. The motive appeared to be hatred and the crime hurt the image of the state leaving the town in an outrage due to the injustice that left the victims in unmarked graves (Jordon,31).
Mapes, the white sheriff who traditionally dealt with the black people by the use of intimidation and force, finds himself in a frustrating situation of having to deal with a group of black men, each carrying a shotgun and claiming that he shot Beau Boutan. In addition, Candy Marshall, the young white woman whose family owns the plantation, claims that she did it. As each person tells the story, he takes the blame and, with it the glory.
The plot of this movie is about the struggle between the farmers and the cowboys. The farmers all want to start up crops, but the cowboys want to run their cattle through the open space so they can feed. Obviously, the two sides don’t agree. The cowboys end up attempting to use strong-arm tactics to get their way. They even try to scare the farmers off the land by burning down one of the homes of the farmers. Eventually, Shane, a former gunfight, realizes what he must do. He rides into town and kills all of the cowboys, including Wilson, the hired gun.
Somewhere out in the Old West wind kicks up dust off a lone road through a lawless town, a road once dominated by men with gun belts attached at the hip, boots upon their feet and spurs that clanged as they traversed the dusty road. The gunslinger hero, a man with a violent past and present, a man who eventually would succumb to the progress of the frontier, he is the embodiment of the values of freedom and the land the he defends with his gun. Inseparable is the iconography of the West in the imagination of Americans, the figure of the gunslinger is part of this iconography, his law was through the gun and his boots with spurs signaled his arrival, commanding order by way of violent intentions. The Western also had other iconic figures that populated the Old West, the lawman, in contrast to the gunslinger, had a different weapon to yield, the law. In the frontier, his belief in law and order as well as knowledge and education, brought civility to the untamed frontier. The Western was and still is the “essential American film genre, the cornerstone of American identity.” (Holtz p. 111) There is a strong link between America’s past and the Western film genre, documenting and reflecting the nations changes through conflict in the construction of an expanding nation. Taking the genres classical conventions, such as the gunslinger, and interpret them into the ideology of America. Thus The Western’s classical gunslinger, the personification of America’s violent past to protect the freedoms of a nation, the Modernist takes the familiar convention and buries him to signify that societies attitude has change towards the use of diplomacy, by way of outmoding the gunslinger in favor of the lawman, taming the frontier with civility.
These two men, both coming from different backgrounds, joined together and carried out a terrible choice that rendered consequences far worse than they imagined. Living under abuse, Perry Smith never obtained the necessary integrity to be able to pause and consider how his actions might affect other people. He matured into a man who acts before he thinks, all due to the suffering he endured as a child. Exposed to a violent father who did not instill basic teachings of life, Smith knew nothing but anger and misconduct as a means of responding to the world. He knew no other life. Without exposure to proper behavior or responsible conduct, he turned into a monster capable of killing an entire family without a blink of remorse. In the heat of the moment, Perry Smith slaughtered the Clutter family and barely stopped to take a breath. What could drive a man to do this in such cold blood? The answer lies within his upbringing, and how his childhood experiences shaped him to become the murderer of a small family in Holcomb, Kansas. ¨The hypothesis of unconscious motivation explains why the murderers perceived innocuous and relatively unknown victims as provocative and thereby suitable targets for aggression.¨ (Capote 191). ¨But it is Dr. Statten´s contention that only the first murder matters psychologically, and that when
Tim’s loyalty is torn between his family, neighbors, friends. One of these sides is with his brother Sam. First is allegiance to his brother Sam. Sam was going to join the fight against the British and he told Tim. In the novel it reads “‘It’s true, Tim I’m going to fight the Lobsterbacks’ That scared me, but it excited me, too”. Collier 15. Since Tim is terrified that Sam is fighting he wants to say to his father what he is doing,but since he is excited he is also proud and gleeful that Sam is fighting it’s loyalty to his brother.Also Tim lied to his father about Sam in the story to protect him. In the novel it recites “‘Tim, did Sam say anything to you about going
Atticus shows true courage by defending Tom Robinson, a black man charged with the rape of a white woman. Atticus continues to fight for justice despite knowing he can’t win the case because he is doing what he knows is right. The town is against this…..
In 1931, on a freight train bound for Memphis, around twenty-five young men, both black and white, were hoboing, looking for work. The whites began to act spitefully at the blacks, picking up rocks to throw at them, stepping on their hands, and calling them names. The blacks, wanting to keep their pride, came back at them. In the brawl that followed, all but one of the whites were thrown off the train. These whites, sore about being beaten, ran back to the nearest rail station, who phoned ahead to the next station, in Paint Rock, Alabama. A mob of whites were waiting there, armed to the teeth. They took everyone off the train and rounded them up. Nine of them were blacks. These men: Roy and Andy Wright, Eugene Williams, Haywood Patterson, Olen Montgomery, Willie Roberson, Charlie Weems, Clarence Norris, and Ozie Powell were brought to the Scottsboro jail, and charged with the rape of two young white women, also hoboing, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates (Patterson 13-17). They were tried for rape, convicted, retried, convicted again, retried again, and convicted a third time (Patterson 9). These trials and retrials of these nine young men, who became know as the “Scottsboro Boys,” were not fair.
The cowboys of the frontier have long captured the imagination of the American public. Americans, faced with the reality of an increasingly industrialized society, love the image of a man living out in the wilderness fending for himself against the dangers of the unknown. By the end of the 19th century there were few renegade Indians left in the country and the vast expanse of open land to the west of the Mississippi was rapidly filling with settlers.
In the book The Condemnation of Little B, Brown's central theses is the criminal justice system. Throughout the book the one argument she is constantly supporting is the idea that young black boys, in their early teens, are arrested and put through the criminal justice system in a new age version of lynch-mob justice. The alleged crimes of these young black boys recieve much media fanfare, but when they are cleared of any wrong-doing nothing is said about it in the media. She makes her arguments by using the story of Little B as a frame for her theses. By taking his story and stripping away the prosecution's rush to judgment in the investigation and trial; using the words of drug dealers awaiting sentencing and addicts, such as Little B's mother, to ramrod through a conviction in which there was no physical evidence connecting the boy to the killing. To supplement the frame she recaps high profile cases of young black children being arrested and charged for crimes despite evidence to the contrary.
The townspeople then surround the townhouse where the kings money was lodged threatening to kill the troops with clubs. He then received information the mobs of people have declared to murder the troop by taking him away from his post. Captain Thomas Preston then sent a non-commissioned officer and 12 men to protect the sentry and the king’s money in hopes to deescalate the situation before it gets out of control. After arriving Captain Thomas Preston came across the rural crowd screaming and using profanity against the troops telling them to fire. C...
In "The Thematic Paradigm", Robert Ray explains how there are two distinctly different heroes, the outlaw hero and the official hero. The official hero embraces common values and traditional beliefs, while the outlaw has a clear sense of right and wrong but operates above the law (Ray). Ray explains how the role of an outlaw hero has many traits. "The attractiveness of the outlaw hero's childishness and propensity to whims, tantrums, and emotional decisions derived from America's cult of childhood", states Ray. (309) Ray also says, "To the outlaw hero's inconsistence on private standards of right and wrong, the official hero offered the admonition, you cannot take the law into your own hands." (312) The values of these two traditional heroes contrasts clearly. Society favors the outlaw hero because we identify with that character more. We see ourselves more so in the outlaw hero than in the official hero. The outlaw hero has the "childlike" qualities that most of us wish we had as adults. To civilians it may seem that the outlaw hero lives more of a fantasy life that we all wish to have.
Near the end of the novel, a mob of men from the town gather in front of the jail to lynch Tom Robinson. To there surprise Atticus is waiting there for them. Later Scout, Jem and Dill joined them. This was a very awkward situation for everyone there, and Scout tried to ease the tension by starting conversation.