Outside the cadre of die-hard fans of western fiction, few of its authors have much popular cache—Zane Grey; Larry McMurtry; Cormac McCarthy. The number of westerns on the shelf of classics tends to be small by most reckonings. Even with books like Blood Meridian poking holes in Riders of the Purple Sage, it remains a genre defined largely by its pulp rather than its literature.
Ordinarily this feature tackles overexposed books. Yet The Ox-Bow Incident, despite its place on lit class syllabi and its adaptation into a successful movie, remains curiously under the radar in the twenty-first century. In 1940 Walter Clark published the first novel to turn a critical eye on the genre that had been brought into its modern form three decades earlier in Owen Wister’s The Virginian.The Ox-Bow Incident had all the familiar tropes of western fiction—saloons; cowboys; cattle rustlers; posses. But Clark took the western’s morally uncomplicated frontier and used at as a backdrop for a tale that questioned the frontier itself.
In the town of Bridger’s Wells, two riders, Art and Gil, stop at Canby’s Saloon for a rest. While they’re there, word arrives that local cowhand Kinkaid has been murdered, and that the culprits are likely cattle thieves. The enraged townsmen quickly form a posse, despite protests from Osgood and Davies, two locals who fear a lynch mob in the absence of official law. Art and Gil are dragged along, and that night the posse finds their suspects; what follows is anything but justice.
Tension in the novel builds like an oncoming storm, and it’s difficult not to finish it in one sitting. Even by today’s standards, the language of the prose is grim and hard, though not purple like the era’s noir pulp. And despite over a dozen characters, Clark gives unique perspectives and motivations to each of them, so that that mob that acts as one body is plausibly composed of several, which is delicate work.
Clark’s most significant achievement, however, is his transformation of abstract notions into high and riveting drama. He asks heavy questions—what is the relationship of the frontier to civilization? What does the individual owe to the community? How does the social contract function on the fringe? How does violence relate to justice, and to whom does justice belong? Does the frontier give it to the individual, or take it from her?
Often times these questions are explicit, but they are never out of place or didactic. They make up the very real thoughts of very real people in the face of terrible choices. The Ox-Bow Incident has no black hat or white hat. At no point do the characters have the option of answering their moral questions with anything as simple as a showdown of sixguns.
Contemporary readers might recognize some of these issues in the current political climate, which tells on the western’s historical role as a barometer for the state of American identity. For that and for its tight language, The Ox-Bow Incident could have been written yesterday. For its penetrating look at the genre, it deserves to be read today along with the hard-hitting works of McCarthy and others, for which it has so clearly served as inspiration.
To buy a copy of The Ox-Bow Incident, click here.
If you liked this book, check out:
Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Modern Library), by Cormac McCarthy
The Lonesome Gods
Dance Hall of the Dead