Hang 'Em High

<p> For more than a century the Western film has proven to be an enduring genre. At the dawn of the 20th century in the same years that <I>The Great Train Robbery</I> begat a film genre Owen Wister wrote <I>The Virginian</I> which began a new literary genre. From the beginning both literature and film would usually perpetuate the myth of the Old West as a place where justice always triumphed and all concerned (except the villains) pursued the Law. The facts however reflect abuses of due process: lynch mobs and hired gunslingers rather than lawmen regularly pursued lawbreakers; vengeance rather than justice was often employed; and even in courts of law justice didn't always prevail. Some films and novels bucked this trend however. This book discusses the many Western films as well as the novels they are based on that illustrate distortions of the law in the Old West and the many ways most of them marked by vengeance in which its characters pursued justice.</p>