Searching the Used Book Store Shelves for Forgotten Nuggets
By Bob Cuddy
“Mining for Musty Gold” is written by Arroyo Grande journalist Robert C. Cuddy in hopes of drawing attention to the reading treasures available at local libraries and second-hand book shops. Each month he reviews a book he found at one or the other location, and tells why it matters today in today’s world. At the end of each column he cites a second-hand bookstore for those who seek them out during their travels.
This Months Nugget:
“The Ox-bow Incident”
By Walter Van Tilburg Clark
“The Ox-bow Incident” is a classic novel that grasped the public consciousness after Hollywood made a movie of it. The film version was a great work of art, matching and even surpassing the source material.
The novel covers 24 hours in 1885 in Western Nevada. But author Clark has a much wider and more complex territory in mind: Men’s individual consciences as they react to the lure of being swept up in mob justice.
“Ox-bow” begins with a couple of cowpokes, Croft, who is the narrator, and his pal Gil, riding into the town of Bridger’s Wells after spending a winter on the range. Soon after, a boy rushes into town with news that rustlers have murdered a local rancher and stolen his cattle.
Some 20 of the men begin forming a posse. Clark burrows into their consciences as they decide whether to join the hunt.
Most, like Croft, are reluctant. Some suggest letting the law handle it, others want to check out the boy’s story. But one by one they sign up, falling under the passionate sway of a few persuasive men.
They are led by a sadistic former Confederate colonel named Tetley. But Tetley, though reprehensible, is not the villain here. The villain is mob psychology.
Clark wrote the novel as Nazis were swarming over Europe, but later rejected analogies to the Third Reich. He told writer Walter Prescott Webb, “what I was most afraid of was not the German Nazis… but that ever present element in any society that can always be led to act the same way, to use authoritarian methods to oppose authoritarian methods. What I wanted so to say was, it can happen here. It has happened here.”
It happens when individuals become, as Webb puts it, “”a mob composed mainly of those who lack the physical or moral courage to oppose it or refuse to be in it.”
The mob tracks down three men and, despite their protestations of innocence, hangs them. Later they come across the supposedly murdered man alive and well.
Throughout the remainder of “Ox-bow”, members of the lynch mob seek to escape their own consciences. Some suggest another necktie party, this time with Tetley as the guest of honor.
An old man named Davies points out that this would be scapegoating to avoid their own consciences.
Davies is the novel’s most wrenching character. He tries to talk men out of beginning the hunt, then goes along and tries to comfort the three apparent rustlers as they await death. When the posse returns to Bridger’s Wells, he torments himself for failing to stop the train of death at any of numerous stations as it chugged to its destination.
“The Ox-bow Incident” is a harrowing look at how easy it is to do nothing in the presence of evil. The dilemma it sets forth is apropos today, and will be in the future. It is a novel about all of us and what we can become if we let others decide moral questions for us.
This month’s gold mine: Green Apple Book, 506 Clement St., San Francisco. Grab your pickaxe!
Information courtesy the Grover Beach Community Library.