When Caroline Lockhart wrote a
novel about a notorious rustler in 1911, it ended with him thrown
into a pit of rattlesnakes. Decades later, she encountered a
rustler in real life and decided to have a hit man bump him off.
Her contract on the life of the rustler is proving the
most controversial part of my recently published biography: The
Cowboy Girl: The Life of Caroline Lockhart. For some reason,
everyone wants to know how she could have contemplated murder.
Well, the answer is complicated.
Lockhart wrote
best-selling Western novels in the 1910s, and as in most frontier
literature, her characters lived beyond the reach of law
enforcement or other moral institutions, so they had to right
wrongs themselves. It’s the ultimate test of character and probably
why this literature endures. How do you act when there’s nobody
there to tell you how to act? Which violations require the response
of violence?
In Westerns, rustling represents the
ultimate injustice. Thus in Lockhart’s The Full of the Moon,
an Eastern lawyer earns his chaps by besting a rustler despite a
stacked courtroom. In The Man from the Bitter Roots, written two
years later, in 1915, a mountain guide vows to “lick [the rustler]
every day, reg’lar, or jest as often as I kin pay my fine,
git washed up, and locate him agin.”
Lockhart
helped the genre evolve to focus more on these moral situations
than on authenticity. Her contemporaries invented the stylized
gunfight, an ultimate test of character. That’s why academics
like to talk about the Western novel’s
“mythology” — it’s a powerful story form that
doesn’t necessarily represent real life.
But nobody
told Lockhart that. In 1926, hoping to live in the sort of blissful
cattle-laden setting she’d created for her novels, she homesteaded
a remote ranch in southern Montana. Never married, she ran the
ranch haphazardly with a succession of hired hands, until 10 years
later, she came up against the very problem she’d described in her
novels: Somebody was brazenly stealing her livestock.
In
large part because she was a women, she endured many frustrations.
Law enforcement, for example, could be found in the county seat
more than 100 miles away. The sheriff’s department did
nothing. A famed private detective cost her a fortune and hardly
got off the couch. Ranch employees refused to confront the obvious
suspect, and Lockhart’s attempts to drive him out of the area in a
“this town ain’t big enough for the both of us” approach proved
fruitless.
So finally she put out a contract on the
rustler’s life. She told a former employee that the
neighbor’s ears were worth $100 apiece to her. He understood
the request: Murder. When you tell people this today, they’re
aghast. Was she paranoid, out of touch with reality, mentally ill?
Was she just plain mean? The only regret she expressed in her diary
concerned her fear of getting caught. How could she place so little
value on a human life?
The way I see it, Lockhart was
coming face-to-face with more than a lawbreaker; she was up against
the limits of the Wild West mythology. After all, in a Clint
Eastwood movie, the rustler would be summarily dispatched, to great
audience satisfaction, because eliminating a villain is always more
important than following the rules. Why do we resist seeing
Lockhart playing the Clint Eastwood role? Well, for one thing,
she’s Clint Eastwood in a dress. Does that mean we expect
women to follow moral rules better than men?
She’s
also Clint Eastwood with a Fistful of Dollars but no Magnum Force
of her own. She hired a killer rather than doing it herself. Do we
accept outsourcing of business processes better than emotional
ones? There’s a third explanation for our dismay: Eastwood
himself has moved beyond those roles. Can his fans no longer
picture a lawless frontier where enforcing your rights is a job for
everybody, not just lawyers and cops?
In any case, the
hit man Lockhart hired never followed through on the contract. He
simply pocketed her $35 down payment and left town, sending
Lockhart back to pleading with the cops to arrest her thieving
neighbor. It’s not hard to sympathize with her feelings of
powerlessness. She must have hoped the West was just like her
fiction, a fairy-tale world, where silent strangers can mete out
vengeful justice. Instead, she found herself living in a real
world, where you can’t always find a reliable shooter or even
a pit of rattlesnakes when you need it.
John
Clayton is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He is the author of The
Cowboy Girl: The Life of Caroline Lockhart, and lives in central
Montana.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
