What would happen to the posse at the Ox-Bow Incident?

by RudraAkhanda

The movie, The Ox-Bow Incident 1943, adapted from a book by the same name written by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, (spoiler alert) is about a 1885 incident in Nevada >!when a possewrongfully hang 3 people by falsely accusing them of murder of a rancher and theft of his cattle.!<

!The posse is formed without the direct approval of the Sheriff and the verdict is meted out by the posse mob against the direct instructions of the judge who asked the posse to bring the accused for a fair trial.!<

!All except 7 people of the posse vote to hang the accused. At the end of the movie, the Sheriff tells them that the rancher was still alive.!<

What punishment would be given to the posse? The movie does not say.

itsallfolklore

Let's be clear at the outset that this was based on a novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark (1909-1971). Clark was an amazing, but not very prolific author. The Ox-Bow Incident is fiction. So we must take this question as a hypothetical: if a self-constituted posse behaved this way in the mid 1880s, what would have happened to them?

Lynching in the region after the 1870s was extremely rare, so my first reaction is to say that there would be no response because there would be no lynching. The novel is setup to consider the angst that various players felt when participating in this extra-judicial activity with mortal consequences. It's a good novel. It is not good history.

Whether in that fictional world or in the real one, I would suppose that a society that would lean in the direction of lynching innocent people for their imagined participation in a crime would also lean in the direction of looking the other way when it came to the fate of the perpetrators.

During the 1879 Charcoal Burners War in central Nevada (Eureka County), Italian immigrants who worked as charcoal burners for the local ore mills were striking for better pay and working conditions. The mine owners organized the brutal killing of many of the immigrants, to suppress their labor agitation. Nothing happened to the perpetrators, but in this case, it was wealth and the power of government against workers - and foreign workers at that. It was a different situation than is described in The Ox-Bow Incident, and I don't believe it gives us much insight into the theoretical that Clark posed.

The short answer, then, is "probably nothing much."