W E S T E R N JUSTICE: T H E C O U R T F O R T BRIDGER, U T A H BY W .
E
AT
TERRITORY
N . DAVIS, JR.*
that the tales of the more sensational occurrences of frontier justice have indulged in a good deal of license regarding the facts. Less appreciated perhaps, the popular portrait of western law and justice that has come down in a haze of gunpowder and tobacco from frontier days—it is but a shade removed from a regular stereotype now—has suffered just as grievously on other accounts. Almost wholly ignored, for example, has been that great body of men on the pioneer bench who, quite unconcerned with the chances for notoriety or show, actually did honor their sworn obligation to uphold the law. It may be that, here and there, the vicissitudes of frontier justice occasionally did require the eccentricities of "hanging" judges, or of courts colorfully convened amidst the confusion of some crowded saloon. But notwithstanding the extravagant publicity this kind received, they were clearly and always the exception to the rule. The demeanor of the western court generally, whether unlettered or cultivated, as indeed everywhere else, was one of simple dignity and relative restraint. For every swashbuckler on the western bench, countless even-mannered justices served. VERYBODY KNOWS
This, of course, is not to imply that the color, range, and vitality of western justice were in effect confined to any particular type of court. For the truth is, the whole panorama of social frailties and errors was known to all of them. Dramatic cases along with the commonplace, actions involving large issues and small, were regularly entered on every docket. Professor Harvey Wish has stated, in his study of American society and thought, "While there must have been innumerable honest and hardworking local judges, their achievements were apparently too dull to attract the chroniclers of the West; hence the illiterate, un* William N. Davis, Jr., is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley.
