Nimrod: Courts, Claims, and Killing on the Oregon Frontier.
Author | Suchy, Nathaniel |
Position | Book review |
Our story (1) begins in 1852 in Oregon, deep in the Willamette Valley. Here, between the Cascade foothills and the Coast Range, (2) we find ourselves almost instantly privy to an inquest into a murder over a land claim that, by today's standards and perhaps even by the standards of those lawmakers merely 3,000 miles east of the scene of the crime, would seem a feeble adherence to the law. At the murder scene of Jeremiah Mahoney, one R.B. Hinton stepped forward and "proclaimed that he was the justice of the peace" (3) and that he would be appointing the coroner over the inquest. From there began a chain of arbitrary appointments for jurors and key players in the trial of Nimrod O'Kelly that would link these individuals together over a period spanning several decades. Very early on, Professor Lansing subtly and eloquently foreshadows the direction of events to come:
The inquest had steered a predictable course. There were no surprises, but it had to be played out. The routine was a step toward law and order. The difference between that gathering and a mob was the difference between cool heads with a procedure and hot heads with a rope. To be sure, naked process was not enough, but without it, fairness had nowhere to root. (4) For such a capital offense, one would expect, at the very least, a rigorously enforced process aimed at achieving justice for the victim while maintaining a semblance of due process for the accused. But this was not to be. The trial that followed seemed more like a circus than a solemn legal inquiry into the fate of a killer; the ringleader being a certain Judge Orville C. Pratt who was more concerned with catching a boat back to the East Coast than presiding over a fair trial. Though the law existed, the execution of that law was haphazardly applied and the results indicate a system that was most certainly not a beacon of justice. Our author portrays a cast of legal marionettes controlled not by the law, but by the whim of a single flawed individual entrenched not in a bad system, but one almost nonexistent in that part of the country at a time when settlers from the Union were just beginning to make their way westward in search of a promised claim to land. To be sure, throughout the book we see this cast awkwardly stumble through the trial like a toddler learning to walk.
At the center of our story is Nimrod O'Kelly. Professor Lansing explains that
Nimrod was by no means a saint, certainly not a hero, and nothing of a...
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