THE OX-BOW INCIDENT

My edition is CE2525.

The medium of television, when it was new, glorified the American cowboy. There was Gene Autry; there was Hopalong Cassidy; there was The Lone Ranger; there was Roy Rogers, "The King of the Cowboys" — all of them quick on the draw, tough in a fistfight, superior in moral wisdom, and splendidly garbed. And they had a host of imitators: Wild Bill Hickock,1 Wyatt Earp, and many others. And there was of course a sexual stereotype that film and television almost never broke in those early days: the subservient position of women. They did not take part in manly activities like riding, roping and shooting and were generally secondary characters.

Some films followed these trends, but there was far more variation; consider movies like Shane and The Searchers. Portrayals on television became more realistic as time went on. But literature is the place to go for true verisimilitude. Walter Van Tilburg Clark was one of the pioneers of this realism. In The Ox-Bow Incident, he took one of the standard plots found in so many hackneyed stories and wrapped around it the unvarnished settings, complex characters, and tangled interactions found in real life in the Old West. Clark also shattered the stereotype of the subservient woman with his character Ma Grier.

The standard plot can be called "Mob Justice." Some serious crime has been committed. In most wild west tales, rustling (the theft of cattle or horses) was the most serious crime, because it threatened the livelihood of an entire community. It invariably takes place away from town, and the rustlers are at large somewhere. Men of the community are outraged; they determine to find those responsible and bring them to justice. They refuse to listen to voices advocating patience, and have no patience with legal authority. Often, as in this case, the sheriff — the only man who can rein in the mob — is absent. (Think of Marshall Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke.)

However, in the standard plot the legally constituted authorities always prevail, either because they arrive on the scene at the last minute, or some advocate of patience prevails in the end — probably by defeating the mob's ringleader in a fight — after which the others agree to bring the prisoners in rather than hanging them.

Here is where Clark departs from the script. The men of Bridger's Wells, Nevada are fired up, all right, about the reported shooting of a ranch hand named Kinkaid, a popular man thereabouts, and the possible rustling of fifty head of cattle. And Sheriff Risley, is absent, though not far away. But the men gather in the main street and spend half the day discussing going after the suspects, probably a group of three men. A minority argues that they should wait, or at least pledge to bring back anyone they capture for a fair trial, but does a poor job of it. Then they wait for a former civil war veteran, an officer of the Confederacy, who takes charge and pulls them all forward. They ride off into the dark of what promises to be a cold and stormy night, heading for the 8,000-foot pass to Pike's Hole.

The novel devotes a lot of pages to their trek up to the pass. It does turn cold and snowy, and the clouds block what light there might be to see by, but they press on. Around midnight they reach the top, where there is a little valley with a stream that bends like an ox-bow. And there they find three men asleep around a fire, beyond which the lowing of cattle can be herd. They capture these men and, after a lot more discussion, hang them at sunrise.

And then, on the way back, they meet Sheriff Risley with a few others — one of them being Kinkaid, with a bandaged head. A great deal of angst ensues, which the various men of the vigilante posse deal with in their individual ways. Clark handles this as well as he did the long arguments that led up to the injustice, and the development of the various characters.

The novel does have defects. The principle one, in my view, is the passage of the stagecoach through the pass in the middle of that stormy night — with both the driver and the man riding shotgun drunk, to boot. Clark never explains the internal reason for this: what put either the driver or the passengers in such an all-fired hurry that they would chance such conditions. The stage just appears without warning; and the driver, dimly seeing the posse surrounding him on the trail, thinks it's a holdup. He whips his four horses to a gallop heading for the downslope and certain destruction. The man riding shotgun, meanwhile, aims his carbine as best he can on the rocking stage and ends up shooting a hole in the shoulder of Art, the narrator of the tale.

The driver manages to get the stage stopped short of a tumble into the creek, and things begin to get sorted out. From the stage steps Rose Mapen, Gil's one-time paramour, with her new husband from San Francisco. So it seems the stagecoach arrival has an external purpose: it allows Clark to set up a confrontation between short-tempered Gil and the man who now possesses "his" woman. To me this seems totally gratuitous. Gil helps his injured partner ride up to the stage, into the light of its lantern, and the men help Art get down from his horse, clean and cauterize the wound, put a crude bandage on it, and get him ready to ride because he insists he can. And he does ride, all the way back in fact.

Which brings me to the second perceived defect. Many of these men set out poorly prepared for the weather. A black man named Sparks wore only a light shirt, and pants that left his lower legs bare. Art was more warmly clothed. He also had a wool jacket in his saddlebag, but on top of the pass he let Sparks wear it. Riding hour after hour in windy, snowy, sub-zero weather, the men expressed discomfort but suffered no obvious inability to function. A lot of them were acclimated to rough weather; Gil and Art had just come off a winter on the range, living in a small shack. And Art carries on almost as before after being shot through the shoulder. He suffers pain, feels light-headed from loss of blood, becomes nauseous a time or two. But some coffee and a shot of whiskey pull him through. Of course, it was the left shoulder, not his primary side. Clark never makes this blatant; his characters have all the human limitations. But still, I think he paints the men in general as a little too immune to harsh weather, and Art as a little too tough.

Walter Van Tilburg Clark was born in East Orland, Maine in 1909. But when he was eight, his father became president of the University of Nevada at Reno. So Clark grew up a westerner at a time when cowboy culture was very much alive. Yet it is interesting that in this novel he never once uses the words cowboy, cowpoke, or cowpuncher. And he avoids attempting to portray a western drawl or any other sort of accent. He describes accents a time or two, but sticks to standard English in his prose. The depth of his characterizations, the understated nature of his situations, and the quality of his writing throughout make this a worthy addition to the list of great American novels. Walter Van Tilburg Clark gets top marks for this one.

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