Matthew P. Mayo – who won the Spur Award for
TUCKER'S RECKONING - tells me a favourite of his own books is WRONG TOWN, first of the ROAMER books.
Circumstance (not helped by his homely face) has made Matthew’s hero ROAMER
into what his name suggests – a lone drifter. Roamer’s day begins with him
being attacked by a grizzly bear – and then gets worse! With the zippy beginning
and black humour characteristic of Matthew, WRONG TOWN takes Roamer from wrestling a grizzly for breakfast into
a Rocky Mountain town where he’s locked up for a murder he didn’t commit. And
then a lynch mob comes after him…
We authors are always being told our books need ‘grabby’ beginnings. WRONG TOWN certainly has an opening
line that’s hard to beat: ‘My eyes snapped open in the strange gray light of
early morning as a grizzly grunted hot breath in my face.’
There are plenty of instances of lynching in the
real Old West, where official law and order officers were rare. Sometimes they
had racial (not to say racist) motivations. Between 1848 and 1860, white
Americans lynched at least 163 Mexicans in California alone. On July 5,
1851, a mob in Downieville, California, lynched a Mexican woman named
Josefa Segovia. She was accused of killing a white man who had attempted to
assault her after breaking into her home. On October 24, 1871, a mob rampaged
through Old Chinatown in Los Angeles, killing at least 18 Chinese-Americans,
after a white businessman had inadvertently been killed, caught in the
crossfire of a Tong battle within the Chinese community.
Sometimes lynching’s were carried out when groups
of individuals banded together to deal with outlawry in areas
where there was no official law. Or, as in early 1860s in Montana, where the ‘official
law’ turned out to law-breakers themselves. HENRY PLUMMER, Sheriff of Bannack, was
suspected of being part of a gang of road agents plundering the area. He was
dragged off to a hanging tree by The Vigilance Committee
of Alder Gulch in 1864.
Henry Plummer
In 1884 cattlemen
in Montana organised against rustlers operating in the Musselshell River region.
Led by prominent rancher, GRANVILLE STUART, this group of vigilantes, known as "Stuart's
Stranglers", were responsible for the deaths of at least 20 thieves in
July 1884, by hanging, shootings or fire.
Granville Stuart
Many outlaws fell foul of ‘lynch law,’ particularly
the gang led by the RENO BROTHERS. They robbed and killed across the Midwest in
the years immediately after the American Civil War, and carried out the first
train robbery in U.S. history at Seymour, Indiana on October 6th
1866. Later three of the gang were captured and taken by train to gaol. On July
10, 1868, three miles outside Seymour, the prisoners were taken off the train,
and hanged from a nearby tree by a group of masked men calling itself the Scarlet
Mask Society or the Jackson County Vigilance Committee. Three other gang
members were captured shortly after. In a grisly repeat, they too fell into the
hands of vigilantes and were hanged from the same tree. The site became known as
‘Hangman’s Crossing, Indiana.’
Frank Reno
Finally FRANK RENO and three more gang members were
captured and held in the New Albany, Indiana gaol. On the night of December 11,
about 65 hooded men forced their way into the gaol and dragged the prisoners from
their cells and lynched them – making a total of 10 Reno gang members lynched
in the course of 1868.
Grizzly bears deserve a blog all to themselves.
Movies about grizzly attacks include THE REVENANT and MAN IN THE WILDERNESS, both
about HUGH GLASS, a ‘mountain man’ mauled by a grizzly in 1823.
Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘The Revenant’
Lynch law features in many a western including books/movies like THE OX
BOW INCIDENT
and WARLOCK.
Reviews:
‘Mayo is a breezy yarn-spinner… steeped in authenticity and boiled in
action’
‘Terrific’
‘An original piece of work’
‘In the great tradition of noirish Westerns’
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