The Worst And Brutal Execution in History Channel "Hanging and photos of Executions

The Worst And Brutal Execution in History Channel "Hanging and photos of Executions

 

Since we are on the subject of the law in Westerns, both juridical and, ahem, extra-legal, I thought we might look today at a facet of the Western movie that is very common, the whole subject of stringing ‘em up from the nearest tree.

Director Raoul Walsh had Clark Gable and Cameron Mitchell in the first reel of The Tall Men (1955) see as they ride in from the prairie a corpse, hanging from a tree. “Looks like we’re near civilization,” says Gable.

 

This wry and sardonic comment is not necessarily typical of the Western movie. More often, death by hanging, either imposed by a proper judge or less official, was treated with either a certain amount of black humor, such as in Bandolero! (1968) and Goin’ South (1978), or indeed with something that comes close to approval. In a world – the West, the mythical one anyway – where lawmen were few and courts were fewer, and often corrupt or incompetent at that, men were used to swift and expedient judgments. The noose was a quick and easy

answer.
Hanging appeared in so many Westerns that I won’t (can’t) list them all here. I’ve just chosen some key ones or ones of interest.

 

Wyoming

 

In the early and seminal Western novel The Virginian by Owen Wister, published in 1902, filmed five times and hugely influential on the Western movie in general, the centerpiece is the hanging by a party led by the Virginian, without trial, of rustlers, including the Virginian’s friend Steve. Even the local bigwig, Judge Henry, the Virginian’s employer, condones this act. 

The actual hanging takes place ‘off stage’, as it were: the book’s narrator remains in the stable and hears about it later. This, probably, was to soften the blow and make the grisly event slightly more palatable to Eastern readers. In the movie versions, such as, for example, the 1914 one, the hanging is done with grimacing reaction shots, then shadows of hanged men.

There is a definite Virginian tone to Tribute to a Bad Man (1956) – the Wyoming setting and even the young character’s name, Steve (Don Dubbins), attest to that. The hanging of the rustler they catch is suitably grim, and the same arguments are put forward – that there is no formal law enforcement anywhere around and the law of the rope is the only effective way to maintain order.

 

We’re livin’ in the middle of nowhere. Two hundred miles from any kind of law and order. Except for what I built myself. Ever since I started – and this you don’t know – I’ve been badgered, skunked, bitten out and bushwhacked by thieves from everywhere. And now, one of my men’s been killed. I find my horses, I find the killer.

 If I find the killer, I hang him. I gotta’ keep my own reckoning, Jo. It’s the way I built my life and half the transportation of the West.” Of course in The Virginian it is Steve who is hanged. Here, it is the young Steve who is offended by the lynching. It is said that the great cinematographer Robert Surtees delayed the grim hanging scene four days, waiting to get just the ominous lighting he wanted. And it worked.

 

And Stuart Whitman, as the simple-minded cowhand Tom Ping, comes to a Steve-like end in These Thousand Hills (1959), also set in Wyoming.

Real hangings

Were there real hangings in the West? Yes, of course there were, like the one in 1864 of Henry Plummer, elected sheriff of Bannack County, Montana. He was accused of being leader of a gang of road agents, and the local Vigilance Committee took matters into its own hands.

 

The Texas Rangers were also famous for stringing up all and sundry. Many Mexicans loathed the rinches with their shoot (or hang)-first-and-ask-questions-later approach, using the ley de fuga (shooting down prisoners who were ‘trying to escape’) and especially for their propensity for hanging any Mexican, rustler or not, and their use of other atrocities.

 

In Lonesome Dove (1989) two ex-Texas Rangers, Call and Gus, carry on Ranger tradition by hanging their former friend Jake Spoon as a horse thief (even though they have been thieving horses as well; but that was across the Rio Grande so didn’t count). Of course stealing a horse was a key motive for hanging in Westerns.

And there were famous high-profile hangings which filled the newspapers. A noted historical hanging, that of Tom Horn in Cheyenne on November 20th, 1903 for the murder of farm boy Willie Nickell, was also represented on celluloid. Slim Pickens got the unwelcome job of hanging Steve McQueen in Tom Horn (1980).

In the final days of the ‘Wild West’, in turn-of-the-century Arizona, Augustin Chacon was one of the last charismatic outlaws. No one knows exactly how many people Chacon killed but it was certainly a lot, probably around thirty, and he ended on the gallows in 1902.

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