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Who Lynches on the Frontier? expect numbers to crest early, and to decline as communities developed conventional mechanisms of criminal justice. Instead, documented Western lynchings of Mexicans increased in three distinct periods: the 1850s, 1870s, and 1910s. Institutional immaturity cannot explain these saw-toothed statistical trends (Carrigan and Webb 2013, 20–33). Similarly, Ken Gonzales-Day argues that one must not exaggerate the chronological discrepancy between the American West and other parts of the country in creating institutions to control crime. San Francisco and Los Angeles, he points out, began to establish police forces at roughly the same time as New Orleans, Cincinnati, Boston, and Chicago (2006, 76). In addition, while the numerous accounts of lynch mobs extracting or attempting to extract prisoners from jail might indicate distrust of or impatience with the normal administration of justice, they also illustrate that such facilities existed when the crowd acted. In such cases, the issue was clearly not the dearth of conventional systems for responding to crime, but the unwillingness to wait for or to respect their results.

The institutional weakness narrative regarding frontier lynching also presumes that lynching communities would have preferred to rely upon conventional mechanisms of criminal justice. However, Michael Pfeifer (2011) argues that alternative views regarding the appropriate response to crime in the American context were competing during the nineteenth century. One approach defended respect for the rights of the accused and for rule of law as foundations of public order, while rejecting public executions as a dangerous to civic virtue (Pfeifer 2011, 4–5, 12–13, 21). The other prioritized local consensus about guilt and defended a community’s right to protect itself with swift and violent punishments (Pfeiffer 2011, 13–15). Lynching, Pfeifer (2011, 21–22, 54, 69–70, 78) believes, emerged from the second approach, and was sometimes chosen as a conscious repudiation of the due process paradigm. In Pfeifer’s (2011, 31, 71) view, settlers who had already embraced the legitimacy of vigilantism brought lynching with them to the Midwestern and Western frontiers. If he is correct, then Western lynching was less a response to frontier conditions than a manifestation of preexisting attitudes.

However, the most significant flaw in the institutional weakness interpretation is its failure to consider the significance of race, ethnicity, and nationality in determining persons’ relative risk of being lynched in the West, although the role of race in Southern lynching has long been recognized (Carrigan and Webb 2013, xiv, 1–16; Gonzales-Day 2006, 34–35). In fact, before the American Civil War, Pfeifer (2011, 32) argues, “practices of racial lynching became a means for white southerners, midwesterners, and westerners to assert that their regions would constitute a ‘white man’s country’ regardless of the protections due process law might theoretically extend to black, Indian, and Hispanic defendants.” For Gonzales-Day (2006, 10), the image of Western lynching as the fate of “cattle rustlers and stagecoach robbers” obscures the frequent association of vigilantism with racial violence on the frontier. Carrigan and Webb (2013, 5) provide an inventory of 547 Mexicans lynched in the West between 1848 and 1928, while acknowledging that this represents “a fraction of the actual number.” In the West, in fact, lynching was only one form of collective violence against subordinated groups, who were