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3 John/the Victim/the Heathen Hubert Howe Bancroft and the Making of Western History V igilantes and vigilante historians were initially responsible for the narrative construction of vigilante practice as heroic—for making, to borrow Foucault’s formula, “the stuff of history from street brawls.”1 But the vigilantes and their early chroniclers were not exclusively endowed with the power to narrate their location within larger regional historical narratives. This privilege resided with the group of men who were, in fact, positioned to create inaugural regional pasts—both archival and narrative—and to locate the actions of the vigilantes within these newly minted histories. As Richard Slotkin notes, “Writers in each section (of the country) attempted to create a rationale of American history in which the history and the cultural attitudes of their own section would emerge as the moral quintessence of the American national experience.”2 Men such as Charles Coutant in Wyoming, Wilber Fisk Sanders in Montana, and Samuel Asbury in Texas were able to amplify, obscure, and remix events from the past in ways that altered the qualitative location of vigilantism within larger histories.3 To an even greater extent than any of these men, Hubert Howe Bancroft ennobled his local vigilance committees— the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance of 1851 and the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance of 1856—making these men the central actors in local historical dramas; larger regional stories; and, ultimately, important symbolic figures within a national narrative about citizenship. To do this, Bancroft, like the men who had written accounts of specific vigilance committees before him, had to stretch the truth a bit. But Bancroft’s interest in recasting vigilante practices in a positive light was different from 80 Chapter 3 that of the vigilantes. First, Bancroft was not a vigilante himself; while he was deeply (and conspicuously) invested in shoring up the legitimacy and heroism of the two vigilance committees in San Francisco, this investment had nothing to do with mitigating interpretations of his own violent actions. Bancroft’s own reputation did not hinge on the proper interpretation of the violent practices of the vigilance committees in San Francisco. Except—and this leads to a second important characteristic of Bancroft’s work on vigilantism—Bancroft’s sense of his own significance, as a collector and narrator of a specifically western past, did hinge on his narrative about the significance of vigilantism as a regionally distinct practice. The vigilantes, for Bancroft, marked the zenith of what was distinct and distinctly possible about what he deemed “the Pacific States Region.” The significance of the vigilantes to Bancroft’s overall understanding of regional history was made abundantly clear when he devoted two enormous volumes of his thirty-nine-volume Pacific states’ history series to “popular tribunals” (see Appendix B). Bancroft was acutely self-conscious about himself as a historian and about the process whereby he produced both his archival collection and his written work. Because of this, he left not only the multiple thousand-page volumes of the Pacific states’ history but hundreds of pages of research notes, chapter drafts, and interview transcripts. By looking closely at Bancroft’s unpublished and edited manuscripts, we can see not only the traces of Bancroft’s attempts to write favorably about vigilantism but his ruminations on what was at stake in these historical practices. Simply put, Bancroft knew he was stretching and obscuring the truth in his writings on vigilantism. An illuminating example of Bancroft’s historiographical sleight of hand can be found in the draft of a chapter written for but deleted from the published version of Popular Tribunals, volume 1: “Vigilance in Northern California.”4 The story at issue concerns the theft of gold dust in a mining community in Diamondville in 1857. In fact, the story demonstrates a number of things about vigilantism that Bancroft wanted to de-emphasize or erase from the historical record altogether—unpleasant details and realities that had long compromised ideal characterizations of vigilante practice such as racial violence and torture. The story Bancroft tells begins in a familiar way. “Gold in tempting quantities being discovered,” miners rushed to form a settlement near Butte Creek in 1857. After naming this new settlement Diamondville, Bancroft reports, “the next thing to do was to hang somebody. . . . Fortunately for the purposes of that little crude community providence sent a lamb for the sacrifice. In form and color it was like a Chinaman; and it was seen robbing the sluice.” Bancroft’s critical...

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