‘The Ox-Bow Incident’: A Timely Tale on Groupthink

The illustrated version of the Western classic "The Ox-Bow Incident" by Walter Van Tilburg Clark.

Early spring, 1885. After being cooped up together in a cabin through a long Nevada winter, two cowboys, Art Croft and Gil Carter, ride into the small town of Bridger’s Wells looking for some excitement and relief from their months of solitude and boredom. Their lives will never again be the same.

As the two men settle into drinking at Canby’s saloon, they quickly learn that an outbreak of rustling has left local cattleman tense and angry. After a run of good luck during a card game, hotheaded Gil gets into a fight with one of the other players, mean-spirited Farnley. Canby breaks up that fight, and it’s all but forgotten when news arrives that rustlers have struck again, stealing more cattle and killing a man in the bargain—Larry Kinkaid.

These events occur in the first 40 pages of Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s 1940 classic Western “The Ox-Bow Incident.” With Art as narrator, readers wend their way through rumors, events, and emotions as a lynch mob forms to track down and hang the three murdering thieves. We ride along with them through some treacherous weather and into the night until they get the drop on the three men sleeping by a fire. By now, this “posse” has fallen under the leadership of Maj. Tetley, a wealthy rancher and man of sophistication who seems intent, despite evidence to the contrary, to see these men hanged.

At dawn the following morning, the prisoners are mounted on horses, nooses are slipped around their necks, and the deed is done. Riding back toward town, this band of self-appointed judges, jurors, and executioners meets Sheriff Risley and discover the horrible injustice they’ve done. Kinkaid is alive, and they’ve murdered three innocent men.

American cowboy from 1887. Public Domain

The plot of “The Ox-Bow Incident” is simple and straightforward. What is more complicated, what gives readers much to think about, are Clark’s timeless reflections on law, civilization, human nature, and the ugly power of a mob.

Vox Populi, Vox Dei

“The voice of the people is the voice of God” is the translation for that Latin tag. It’s an expression sometimes delivered in support of majority rule.

In “The Ox-Bow Incident,” the voice of the people is heard through the mob, but the voice of God seems missing in action. Religious faith is institutionalized in the town’s Baptist minister, Osgood, who is such a figure of scorn and open derision that readers may well wonder who on earth in Bridger’s Wells attends Osgood’s church. No one in this rough crew of ranchers and cowboys pays the slightest attention to the weak and ineffectual Osgood or to his plea that they put aside their blood lust, listen to reason, and abide by some sense of Christian mercy and justice.

And perhaps this is one of Clark’s points. In A.D. 800, the scholar and teacher Alcuin wrote to Emperor Charlemagne, saying among other things that “those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always close to insanity.”

In “The Ox-Bow Incident,” riotousness and insanity prevail.

Reason Without a Backbone

Two other men stand against the lynch mob. The first is Judge Tyler, who is disliked nearly as much as Osgood. Though he does warn the lynch mob before it rides out of town to bring the accused back for a trial, his words have little effect. The men don’t trust the judge’s justice or his court.

The town’s shopkeeper, Davies, is a different matter. Art describes him as “an old man, short and narrow and so round-shouldered he was nearly a hunchback” whose face was “white from indoor work.” Unlike the preacher and the judge, Davies is respected by many of the townspeople. Moreover, he never gives up arguing for justice done under the law. He rides along with the posse, and even there, he continues to make his case.

At one point, after he has first failed to sway these vigilantes, Davies speaks with Art, Gil, and a third posse member, Bill Winder. Here, he gives an intelligent and sound defense of the law and its relation to civilization. Davies tells them that the law “has taken thousands of years to develop,” that all of mankind’s tools, arts, and sciences are not “so great a thing as his justice, his sense of justice. … It is the spirit of the moral nature of man; it is an existence apart, like God, and as worthy of worship as God.”

Davies presents excellent arguments for turning the supposed brigands over to the law, but as he will tell Art after the hangings, he lacked the physical courage to back up those arguments with the force of a weapon. He offered fine words as a defense of justice, but stood down from cowardice in the final moments and consequently regards himself as a profound failure.

(L–R) Dana Andrews, Paul E. Burns, and Henry Fonda in 1943’s “The Ox-Bow Incident.” MovieStillDB

Passion Conquers Reason

Though characters like Ma Grier, the massive, middle-aged woman who runs the town’s boarding house and “was strong as a wrestler,” act as rabble-rousers among the men, it is the ex-Confederate Maj. Tetley who plays their emotions like a musician. Some resent him for his aristocratic bearing and wealth, but even these men follow him, if for no other reason than by the force of will that is a part of his nature. When they’ve captured the presumed outlaws, it’s Tetley who brushes aside Davies’s arguments. It’s also Tetley who calls for a vote on the hanging of the three captives. When only four other men join Davies, appeals to reason come to an end.

One of the men who stand alongside Davies is Tetley’s own son, Gerald. Sensitive and bright, he is in complete opposition to his father’s intentions. While riding in the night with the posse, Gerald launches into a discussion of the herd instinct of human beings with Art. Though he repulses Art with his “raving,” Art admits “you could feel what he meant.” When Gerald asks, “Why are we riding up here, the twenty-eight of us, when every one of us would rather be doing something else?” Art has no satisfactory answer.

At work in the posse, then, is mob rule—submersion into a group that tears down ethical awareness, relieves people of responsibility, and robs them of their ability to consider matters critically.

The Curtain Falls

When Sheriff Risely encounters the vigilantes on their return ride to town, he realizes that he can’t bring to law so many men without destroying the town and consequently allows them to go unpunished. He selects 10 volunteers from their number to join his search party for the real thieves and orders the rest to keep quiet about it when they get back to town.

But punishment comes nonetheless. Gerald Tetley, whose father pistol-whipped him after botching the execution of one of the men, hangs himself in a barn on his return home. His father, who has displayed nothing but contempt for what he regards as the weaknesses of his son, literally falls on his sword after learning this news. The shopkeeper Davies is a broken man, filled with contempt for himself and his weaknesses. The others will carry their guilt for a lifetime, and Gil and Art decide to leave town.

Fault Lines of the Heart

In an introduction for “The Ox-Bow Incident,” novelist Wallace Stegner wrote that Clark’s “theme was civilization, and he recorded, indelibly, its first steps in a new country.”

Here, I must partially disagree. We do see the clash between civilization—the law, the church, the town—and the rough code of the men who lived there. But I believe that Clark had more in mind than the clash of civilization with lawlessness. Though he lacked the modern slang term we now apply, I believe “The Ox-Bow Incident” was an examination of the dangers of “groupthink.” The dialogues throughout the book, especially those between Davies and Art, and Art and Gerald, hit on this topic again and again.

On finishing this novel, a popular quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came to mind: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

Clark’s thoughtful novel reminds us of the dangers that may befall us when we try pleasing a group rather than obeying the dictates of the heart.

"The Ox-Bow Incident" was first published in 1941 and is now a Western classic.

’The Ox-Bow Incident’ By Walter Van Tilburg Clark Modern Library, April 27, 2004 Paperback: 288 pages

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