We all know the A-listers of Old West bad men and their pursuers: Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickock — one bloodstain after another. Less familiar but no less fascinating are the reprobates whose stories are told by five-time Spur Award winner Loren D. Estleman in THE BRANCH AND THE SCAFFOLD: THE TRUE STORY OF THE WEST’S LEGENDARY HANGING JUDGE, about Isaac Parker of Fort Smith, Arkansas.
Parker believed that executions should be public — not to provide entertainment, but to teach a moral lesson. Murderers and rapists should receive in a public display the wages of their sins. With hangman George Maledon as the man with the rope, and deputies of the caliber of “The Three Guardsmen” — Bill Tilghman, Chris Madsen and Heck Thomas —the Hanging Judge was ready to get to work.
Parker’s men are described by the characteristics they lack: “I don’t want drunks and gamblers like that preening man Hickok, or bush-whackers like the gang in Dodge City. Such men are timid when they become separated from the pack. Pin that star on men of swift judgment and good instincts.”
Work for Parker was made up of holding court six days a week, for up to 10 hours a day. In 21 years as the judge presiding over the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas, Parker sentenced 156 men and four women to death by hanging. Only 79 eventually dangled from one of the six nooses — “Parker’s Tears” — for which Maledon cared.
Estleman introduces us to Parker and his wife, who baked cakes for the prisoners, but the bulk of the book is taken up by stories of pursuit and capture. The main attractions are Ned Christie, Cherokee Bill and Belle Starr. About Starr, Estleman writes: “Most of what was written about the West was rubbish, and more rubbish was written about Myra Belle Shirley from Arkansas than about Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and Buffalo Bill Cody combined. The process by which a lank-limbed, crab-ridden consort of bushwhackers with a face like a log butt made the long climb from the brothels of Carthage, Missouri, to be coronated the Bandit Queen of the Border said more about the hacks who performed the ceremony than it did about their subject.”
Estleman is not a romancer. About Cherokee Bill’s traveling companions he writes: “Cherokee Bill had slain a man at a dance over some little, and ‘lit a shuck’ toward the outlaw life with the Cooks, as stupid a pair of brothers as had ever taken to the outlaw trail, although he’d admired the viciousness of their dedication.”
But it isn’t just the villains who lead a hard life. Manhunting was not romantic, and it sure as hell wasn’t comfortable. “No matter how reliable a man’s umbrella, when it rained he got wet. At times he seemed to be hauling the downpour with him, as if it came from a nozzle that followed his progress, a moving spout surrounded by dry. When he camped he made a shelter of the slicker with cottonwood branches, wrung out his socks, and slept until he was awakened by his own misery.”
The prose is a wonderfully readable combination of Estleman’s poetics and Mark Twain-like sarcasm. For instance, murderer and thief Bill Dalton is called a “reformed politician.”
And the book’s title? Well, if you’re hanged from a branch, you’re the victim of vigilantes, and that’s bad. If you’re hanged from a scaffold, then the law got you, and that’s good. Just a distinction to keep in mind when you find a rope around your neck and you’re looking for something uplifting. —Doug Bentin
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• AMERICAN DETECTIVE by Loren D. Estleman
• FRAMES by Loren D. Estleman
• PEEPER by Loren D. Estleman
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Also check out Estleman’s MASTER EXECUTIONER, a novel about a man who becomes a professional hangman in the wild west. A realistic dark drama.
I’ve only read a few westerns in my time. This title sounds good, though. I’m gonna have to start reading more westerns, and add this to my wish list.