Guest Blogger Judy Alter is director of the TCU Press in Fort Worth and the author of over 60 books, most for children and young adults. She's the winner of the 2005 Western Writers of America Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Please visit her blog at http://www.judys-stew.blogspot.com/ and her website at http://www.judyalter.com/

When Catherine asked me to blog on the subject of justice in the Old West, my mind boggled. I’ve written about the Old—and New—West most of my professional career, but I don’t know that much had to do with justice. It’s certainly not something I researched.

But then I thought about my first young-adult novel, published in 1978 by William Morrow & Co. I called it A Year with No Summer, but the marketing folks changed it to After Pa Was Shot, which does not trip easily off the tongue. The story was taken from an actual incident in a small East Texas town, but my ideas about East Texas—and the Old West—at the turn of the 20^th century were hazy at best, typical of a northerner come south (which I then was—now I think of myself as a Texan and will argue with those who say you have to be born here to be a Texan). A young girl’s father, a deputy sheriff, arrests a drunken man on Christmas Eve and jails him to sleep it off. When the now-sober drunk is released, he shoots the father to death on the streets of the town. I remember thinking, “How could that be? East Texas was civilized by then. It wasn’t the wild and woolly Old West.” It may not have been the Old West, but as I now know from having studied Texas history for 40-plus years, East Texas was a violent place, home of some of the West’s most notable feuds.

The whole story is less about official justice than it is “fair” and “right.” Ellsbeth’s father dies because, although he fired first, his gun misfired the first time, and the shooter, Ben Short, gets off because the sheriff says it has to be called self-defense. Ben Short recovers from his wounds, and Pa dies. Ellsbeth writes she wanted to holler to God in Heaven that it wasn’t fair. Would an East Texas jury have been any more fair?

A lot of justice in the West was unfair. Butch Cassidy was once jailed for taking a pair of jeans from a store, even though he had left an IOU and considered his word was his bond. After that jail term (from which he escaped when being transferred on a train) soured him on following the law, Butch skirted justice a whole lot, once robbing a landlord of the money his tenant, an elderly woman, needed to pay the avoid eviction. Sure, he almost got caught several times, but he didn’t—probably not even in South America.

In The Virginian and in Elmer Kelton’s much more recent The Day the Cowboys Quit, cowboys take justice into their own hands and lynch rustlers. I could go on and on with examples—just re-watch “High Noon” for a definition of justice. Fair? Who’s to say? Especially who among us of the 21^st century is to apply standards of justice to the late-19^th-century West.

It seems to me a lot of justice in the Old West had less to do with the law that with fairness or the lack thereof. There were judges and juries of course—Hanging Isaac Parker comes to mind—but a lot of the “law” never reached the courts.