People felt the same way about the case of a settler named Broadhurst whose wife was insulted by a neighbor. Once he heard of his neighbor’s transgression, Broadhurst saddled up, rode to his neighbor’s house and shot him down. His fellow citizens thought some formal gesture ought to be made, so they convened a home-grown court, presided over by a man who had once been a judge somewhere else. The verdict, predictably, was ‘not guilty.’ You did not insult a respectable woman; it was that simple. If you did, whatever you got you deserved.

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In another case, a hoodlum saloonkeeper took umbrage at the town’s opposition to his watering hole and passed his time taking potshots at the soddies of those who opposed him. A storm of return fire extinguished the bully permanently, and an ad hoc court promptly exonerated the man who fired the fatal shot. Such summary justice had a couple of real virtues: It was dealt out by the people directly affected, and it was simple to administer. As one resident of No Man’s Land put it, ‘There were no court expenses, no long drawn-out trials; no delays; no appeals; no dockets; no paroles; no pardons.’ All that surely had its advantages, depending on which end of the law you were on.

The same rough justice was applied to a small group of men organized to jump as many claims as possible. Two of the gang came in second in a gunfight with some 100 citizens, who then loaded the surviving families into their wagons, complete with all their belongings. Git, said the citizens, the family members got, and justice was done again in No Man’s Land. Some of the area’s leading citizens also created an entity called the Respective Claims Board, in an effort to adjudicate disputed land titles and abate the nuisance of the road-trotters. The board’s authority depended mostly on the Winchesters of its own members, but in most cases that power sufficed.

It worked perfectly with another gang of road-trotters who got their comeuppance in Beaver in 1887. The worst of the bunch, a man named Thompson, had already tried to kill the locally elected marshal, Addison Mundell, and now was ordered by the Respective Claims Board to vacate a disputed claim. When Thompson arrogantly refused, Mundell and a posse set out for his dugout on the claim.

Spotting them from a boardinghouse window, Thompson shouted: ‘You thus-and-such, are you going to that claim? I’ll stop you now!’ He raised his Winchester, but Mundell was quicker, putting a bullet through Thompson’s knee. ‘I throwed my gun down,’ Mundell later said, ‘and pulled as a man would shoot a bow and arrow.’

Taking Thompson to his dugout, where the local sawbones amputated his ravaged leg, the posse now searched for Thompson’s confederates, Tracy and Bennett. Tracy had wisely departed the area at a high lope, but Bennett had stuck around too long. He was duly apprehended and led to the dugout. As he confronted his wounded cohort, the last sound he heard on earth was the cocking of many hammers. Bennett departed this life forthwith, and the posse immediately sent Thompson to join him. The matter was then closed with a coroner’s inquest, which opined as follows: ‘We the jury appointed to view the remains…find that they came to their death from gunshot wounds received at the hands of many law-abiding citizens, there inflicting, as nearly as possible, the extreme penalty of the law as it should be in such cases…their untimely end is but the result of their many wrongs.’

At least a couple of locals suggested that Mundell had dry-gulched Thompson, but the jury either didn’t believe them or didn’t care or both. It was sufficient to be rid of this arrogant pest. And that was that, except for the burying, at which the Rev. Overstreet preached appropriately: ‘Ye fools, when will ye be wise? And He shall bring upon them their own iniquity, and shall cut them off in their own wickedness … . ‘

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