Frontier Justice in the Wild West: Bungled, Bizarre, And Fascinating Executions

R. Michael Wilson's Frontier Justice in the Wild West: Bungled, Bizarre and Fascinating Executions is a surprisingly good book, both in terms of its readability and the marvelous insights it offers into just how executions were really handled in the Old West. Wilson's style is smooth and matter of fact, relating each of its eighteen occurrences with a good reporter's clarity and lack of embellishment, yet vividly bringing the events to life in the reader's mind. A good example is this bit describing the capture of Jack McCall after the murder of "Wild Bill" Hickok: "Finally McCall was cornered in a Deadwood butcher shop and captured. A mob formed and McCall was rushed down the street for a lynching. Just at that moment, however, a man rode into town with the head of an Indian; he was seeking the scalp bounty he had just earned. The lynch mob was distracted by the dead Indian, as interest was high after Custer's defeat a month earlier, but not distracted enough for McCall to escape. He was taken into custody and held for a people's court the following day." What the reader gets in Frontier Justice is an unvarnished and unromanticized look at how everything from man-hunts to trials and appeals and finally to the actual executions took place. And as it is in many cases, the true historical accounts are far more interesting than the popularized fictional ones. Like the judge who ordered a pair of shoes made from the chest skin of a man after he was hanged, which he actually wore on special occasions. And the posse that decided to lynch a man they'd captured rather than take him in for the reward after they realized that there were so many people involved that the reward, after it would be divided up, didn't make the trip worth the cost. Of particular interest are the technical details that show how real hangings were carried out, which were often very different from the way they're generally portrayed in movies and TV series. There was actually a surprising amount of variety, including a frequently used technique I'd never even heard of: the "twitch-up gallows", where instead of the condemned man being stood over a trap door that would open under him and drop him down, the gallows was set up with a set of pulleys and counter-weights so that when the release was pulled, the weights would drop down and jerk the condemned man up into the air. And in the case of Tom Horn, one of the more famous executions that took place, the gallows design was something Rube Goldberg might have designed, an elaborate contraption involving ropes, pulleys, water tubs, and a hinged double-post under the trap door. It would've been comical if the end result were not so serious. My only quibble with the book is that Wilson sometimes fails to take the extra step needed when an account makes reference to things that most readers wouldn't know, like what "French leave" meant or what "the Industrial Army" was. A few footnotes here and there would've been very helpful.

This book is very interesting. Has individual stories of different situations in the Wild West that led to frontier justice and executions. Some of the people mentioned were famous and some no so famous, but the stories are so interesting. The way executions were carried out was sometimes bizarre, and it really makes you realize that people were quite determined to carry out justice in a way they thought to be right. Also, there were some tales of injustice carried out by dishonest individuals.