-
2. Heroic Stories: Vigilante Ideals and Lynching Truths
- Temple University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
2 Heroic Stories Vigilante Ideals and Lynching Truths A n ideal vigilance committee convened and acted in an organized and evenhanded manner in response to uncontrolled criminal conditions and was roundly supported and applauded by its community for doing so. This story of vigilante practice is told again and again by vigilantes, their official historians, and their later admiring chroniclers. But this construction, like the “Bible Belt pornography” of the southern lynching narrative, has only an approximate relationship to real lynching events.1 In this chapter, I examine two secondary features of this frontier vigilante narrative—orderliness and public popularity—in order to demonstrate that the narrative of ideal vigilantism was important to the vigilantes themselves, not just their historians. My analysis in this chapter continues to draw on the most important critical premise developed within scholarship about southern lynching. Ida B. Wells and her successors effectively proved that the stories lynchers tell about their practices are not necessarily true. This crucial observation applies not only to southern lynching but to lynching in the frontier as well. The organizational and procedural practices of vigilantes did not guarantee equitable proceedings for those tried by the committees. In fact, between the lines of the vigilantes ’ own justificatory histories lay the traces of their own farcical engagements with the law. Vigilantes were not universally respected and adored by their communities; in fact, they were frequently criticized, challenged, and openly accused of breaking the law. But even in the presence of these less than ideal truths, vigilantes were aware of and sought to both attain and present themselves according to an idealized version of vigilantism. The bulk of this chapter 52 Chapter 2 focuses on two particularly vivid, though not unique, vigilante events in order to examine the way in which the narrative ideals of “orderliness” and “public popularity” were produced. By magnifying each of these events, it is possible to see the subtle accrual of narrative during, around, and after these violent moments. The chapter concludes with examples from the larger collection of official vigilante histories. The first event comes from Charles Summerfield’s Illustrated Lives of the Desperadoes of the New World, a narrative about a vigilance committee in northwest Arkansas.2 Summerfield, recall, was a pseudonym for Alfred W. Arrington, a minister turned lawyer. I focus here on Summerfield’s account of the 1842 Cane Hill Company’s “trial” and execution of five men. This trial reveals the peculiar way in which vigilantes adopted, and adapted, the forms of state-sanctioned court proceedings to advance their own aims and to instantiate the narratives subsequently told about them. Organization and orderliness function in a particular way in this trial for both the vigilantes and their public, serving what might best be described as a legitimizing, though not necessarily legitimate, function. The second event comes from the Alder Gulch, Montana, vigilance committee of 1864 and concerns the ideal, but forcibly constructed, public popularity of this movement. As discussed at length in the Introduction, Captain J. A. Slade was executed by this committee for defying their self-asserted authority and jurisdiction—he literally tore their arrest warrant to shreds. But Slade’s spectacular and troubling execution was not the only occasion in which the Alder Gulch committee acted swiftly and forcefully to eliminate challengers and detractors. Public popularity, as the story of this committee reveals, was willfully, violently, and successfully constructed by these vigilantes. I conclude the chapter by opening a discussion as to how, in the presence of these less than ideal vigilantes’ pasts, vigilantism became idealized within the context of a broader western history. The cases and documents I use make it possible to identify differences between the events surrounding a given vigilance committee or lynching and the way that these events were narrated by vigilantes and their historians . The inaccuracies in the narrative accounts are interesting in their own right—creating an opportunity for revised historical interpretations of some particularly well-known frontier vigilance committees.3 But my central concern here is with how the narrative of ideal vigilantism functioned alongside the practices of the vigilantes to not only legitimate but inform their actions . This unusual relationship between narrative and practice is analogous to Foucault’s work in the “Tales of Murder” essay, wherein he analyzes the relationship between Rivière’s murderous actions and his confessional narrative .4 Foucault asserts: [35.171.22.220] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:54 GMT) Heroic Stories 53 In Rivière’s behavior...