The big Horn Basin of northern Wyoming was one of the last frontiers in the continental United States.
The first in-depth assessment of vigilantism and justice in the region, Goodbye, Judge Lynch reveals the unique challenges faced by a western society attempting to build a social system from scratch..
This legal victory marked the end of a brief but powerful vigilante tradition.
But authorities fought the odds and finally gained guilty verdicts, the first convictions of sheep raiders in Wyoming.
Impunity was the immediate result, and the defeat of law and order in the region seemed complete.
Six years later, in another infamous case, raiders murdered three sheepherders.
Although Gormon received a first-degree murder conviction, a shocking breakdown of order ensued, when a mob attacked the Big Horn County jail and killed Gormon, another prisoner, and a deputy sheriff.
Jim Gormon, in which Gormon, infatuated with his sister-in-law, killed his brother.
He highlights the infamous 1902 case of State v.
Davis examines murders, assaults, and thefts in the region over the course of three decades, when the problems of prosecution were overwhelming.
Without a legal system to control them, extralegal practices, such as lynching and sheep raids, grew at an alarming rate.
The cattlemen who arrived in the Big Horn Basin in the 1880s were almost all young men, hardworking but impulsive.
Davis tells the fascinating story of how lawlessness finally came to an end in this remote corner of the West.
In Goodbye, Judge Lynch, John W.
In their haste to seize opportunity, the new residents did not establish an effective criminal justice system, and the consequence was rampant violence.
With settlers did not arrive until 1879, when cattlemen poured into the Basin to capture empty grasslands.
The big Horn Basin of northern Wyoming was one of the last frontiers in the continental United States
