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Comment by pmjordan | Hacker News Reader

Entirely tangential to the main thrust of the article, but this threw me:

a noose dangling from “the hanging tree,” which a plaque explains was used to execute three cattle rustlers and two unlucky bystanders, cattle rustling being “considered one of the lowest forms of crime.”

Wait, WHAT? Can anyone with more knowledge about the Old West explain what crime these bystanders would have been committing? Am I interpreting this correctly that these "bystanders" had nothing to do with or to gain from the theft of the cattle but were thought to be in the vicinity and didn't prevent it?

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The implicit assumption you’re making here is that there was a court, trial, or even evidence. “Frontier justice” doesn’t always care about those things. Sometimes the “crime” is that you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, maybe with the “wrong“ skin color...

This part of history contains a lot of ugliness. It’s also part of the present. Extrajudicial killings are still very much a thing in the world.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montana_Vigilantes contains some leads for this specific history, I’d guess.

Thanks for the link. I guess I was aware of the general lawlessness of that part of the world at the time, but the part about "cattle rustling being “considered one of the lowest forms of crime.”" seemed like a reference to some specific, well-known rule with which I was not familiar.

Ah.

So, I am not super educated on this history, but I am the product of at least three generations of beef cattle farming. My understanding is that this phrase is true, and I think it makes some intuitive sense: if your community is based around herding cattle, stealing cattle is literally stealing the your livelihood. Furthermore, there's an "outsider" aspect to this kind of crime; it's not like there's farm A, and farm B, and farmer B steals some of A's cattle and now they have more. It's someone sneaking in from out of town, stealing your stuff, and leaving. In general, people are more likely to be lenient to their neighbors than to strangers.

I believe, if memory serves, there's a sort of racial/settler component to this as well. It ties into the whole "cowboys and indians" thing. Goes along with the whole "insider" vs "outsider" dichotomy.

That makes sense, so I suppose the explanation might be that these bystanders were also outsiders, but, as turned out, presumably too late, they merely were in the wrong place at the wrong time as you say and guilty by proximity.

My initial reading was that they were known to be bystanders at the time of execution, which seemed a bit extreme even in that context. But you're right, it's equally possible to read their being bystanders as posthumous exoneration, which is much more likely.

(FWIW, I've been to Montana, and as a middle-class European, it certainly felt by far the most foreign of the 15 or so states I've visited in the US.)

Ah yes, my assumption was that it was later determined that they were bystanders, not that it was known at the time.

FWIW, I grew up in Roundup (and am shocked to see it on HN). I remember the hanging tree being put up downtown sometime in late 80s or early 90s to (I suppose) add some Wild West decor. It’s entirely possible the whole hanging cattle rustlers and bystanders tale is apocryphal or loosely based on actual events. That’s not to say such things didn’t happen in the days of open range cattle ranching.

Speaking of both the racial/settler component and the "cowboys and indians" thing, it's worth noting that the modern-day stereotypical "cowboy" is pretty thoroughly whitewashed; a substantial minority (if not majority) of actual cowboys during this time period were non-white (black, Latino, and/or Native American, mostly).

Cowboys were also generally pretty lowly-regarded - about as low-class as one can be short of being an outright outlaw. They also didn't usually have ties to a given town/settlement, so they were easy scapegoats. Combine that with settlers bringing their racial biases with them from home to their settlements, and you've got a perfect storm for a "hang 'em first and ask questions later" scenario.

Thanks for that; I had heard of this pretty recently, but didn't know a ton about it, and so didn't want to get into it myself in case I was mis-remembering.

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