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By Root 1942 0

Clay, who wrote reminiscences of life on the range in Wyoming and Montana, had a similar reading of what “reason and civilization” required. He describes a rare event: the lynching of a woman, Ella Watson, also known as “Cattle Kate.” This woman, who had appeared in Casper, Wyoming, “was a prostitute of the lowest type, ... common property of the cowboys for miles around. If they could not pay her the price of virtue in cash, they agreed to brand a maverick or two for her behoof.” This was cattle rustling, plain and simple, but it “was impossible to get a conviction.” Finally, in summer 1889, after repeated warnings “that the objectionable class of business must stop,” Cattle Kate and her henchman, Jim Averill, were hanged. “The man wilted and begged for mercy; the woman died game. This of course was a horrible piece of business, more especially the lynching of the woman, and in many ways indefensible, and yet what are you to do? Are you to sit still and see your property ruined with no redress in sight?”33

Modem historians, on the other hand, are not so sure about how to assess the vigilantes. They see much more ambiguity and diversity, a lot more dross among the gold. They see class conflict and elitism; they see the clash between law and “law and order.” Vigilante movements were diverse, and had diverse motives, sought diverse ends.

Sometimes the good guys and the bad guys seem fairly obvious. In the days of the Klondike gold rush, the town of Skagway, in Alaska Territory, was terrorized by Jefferson (“Soapie”) Smith. In 1898, Smith was murdered by vigilantes, who then, in a “frenzy of excitement,” invaded “dive after dive, slugging, shooting, and intimidating.” But the net result was law and order.34 Vigilante groups typically complained of failure or corruption of the laws, or defects and holes in schemes of law enforcement. In Henderson County, Illinois, on the Mississippi River, the local vigilance committee attacked and burned a so-called gunboat in 1870. The “gunboat” was not a warship, but a “raft or flatboat with a cabin built on it, used as a floating gambling den, brothel, and drinking saloon.” Both law officers and the inmates of the boats had acted as if the Mississippi River were “a sort of no-man’s-land where state laws did not apply.” The vigilance committee filled the vacuum of enforcement. Niceties of jurisdiction did not trouble them, and they got rid of this floating center of vice.35

Sometimes, then, vigilantes enforced the moral code in cases where the formal law did not seem strict enough or had fallen down on the job. According to a report in 1885, a man named Joseph White was arrested in Wallingford, Vermont, for abusing his foster daughter, who was thirteen. White had beaten the child mercilessly, pushed pins through her ears and needles through her tongue. His wife, not to be outdone, made the child stand on a hot stove until her poor feet were blistered. The Whites were arrested, but the justice merely assessed a five-dollar fine on Joseph and a ten-dollar fine on his wife, nothing more. The next night, “masked men caught White in his barn, and, after beating him, ordered him to leave the town.”36

It would be hard to argue that White did not get what he deserved. The response of the vigilantes was, nonetheless, lawless. For some people, that in itself was damning enough. Besides, the vigilantes sometimes punished the innocent, and they often overpunished the guilty. Vigilante justice had its elite core and leadership, but it was always in tune with some deep strains of popular justice. Law did not allow a man to be banished or hanged because of his general behavior or past acts. Vigilante justice drew no such fine distinctions.

This was also the source of its worst abuses. Governor Thomas Ford of Illinois, an unusually astute observer, described a movement of “regulators” in Massac County, Illinois, in the 1840s. The “original purpose” of the movement was to clean out the bad guys, but soon this purpose was forgotten, “and instead of punishing horse-thieves and robbers those who drop the