Page:Journal of Religion and Society Volume 24.pdf/2

Who Lynches on the Frontier? conventional mechanisms of law and order that had yet to be established. Given the prevalence of that explanation, it is not surprising to find traces of its influence in Jesuit accounts of their experiences in the nineteenth-century American West. And yet, if some Jesuit references to lynching reflect the Wild West trope, others support interpretations of Western frontier lynching that emphasize hierarchies of race, class, and ethnicity rather than institutional weakness. Jesuit incidental statements about lynching on the Western frontier, therefore, both confirm the influence of the institutional immaturity trope and anticipate recent interpretations of lynching as a practice that white/Anglo settlers brought with them and exercised by choice rather than necessity.

To understand these Jesuit references, one must set them in historical context, first by considering the trope of frontier lynching, and then, the presence of Jesuits on the Western frontier. This background will illuminate one twentieth-century Jesuit reference that illustrates the influence of the frontier justice paradigm. It will also facilitate analysis of three nineteenth-century Jesuit references to lynching from the Alaska and New Mexico Territories. By associating lynching with whites or “Americans” (i.e., Anglos), these references anticipate contemporary historians’ emphasis upon the role of race and ethnicity in Western frontier vigilantism.

The Western Lynching Trope

In the mid-nineteenth century, the portrayal of lynching as an emergency mechanism of frontier justice attempted to defuse an American public relations problem. Against conservative British claims that US vigilantism revealed the slippery slope leading from democracy to anarchy, apologists responded that vigilantism was necessary where legal remedies were weak (Silkey 2015, 16–17, 23–24; Pfeifer 2011, 64). This excuse treated lynching as a temporary expedient that would disappear as maturing communities developed conventional systems for responding to crime. In addition, depictions of frontier culture often interpreted accounts of lynching as part of “the authentic American experience” – a stereotype portrayed, for example, in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show during its European tour in 1892 (Silkey 2015, 27; Gonzales-Day 2006, 113–14). As a result, reports Sarah Silkey (2015, 28), frontier lynching became an “integral part of transatlantic popular culture.” Ken Gonzalez-Day (2006, 38) emphasizes the influence of this paradigm on everything “from the five-penny novels of the nineteenth century to the great American Westerns of the silver screen in the twentieth.” Such narratives often romanticized lynching as an emergency response to lawlessness.

Despite its influence, the institutional immaturity explanation of Western lynching fails to explain critical features of the historical record, as many recent studies attest. While acknowledging some deficiencies in frontier law and order, Carrigan and Webb (2013) cite the chronological record of Western lynchings of so-called Mexicans to demonstrate this model’s weaknesses. If lynchings were primarily the product of institutional immaturity, one would