‘Wild and Ungovernable Passions’: Emotional Scripts and the Fate of U.S. Expansion in the Vigilante Rocky Mountain West, 1864–1866

Lecture by Abby Gibson, Ph.D. Candidate in History, University of Southern California. Recipient of the 2024–25 Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Graduate Research Fellowship

During the first two months of 1864, Montana Territory was in the throes of a violent spate of “vigilante justice” that resulted in the hangings of twenty-two men, including the Sheriff of Bannack City, Idaho Territory, and what historians largely agree was a brutal lynching of a mistakenly identified Mexican man, Joe Pizanthia. Hangings happened in quick succession as the self-appointed Vigilance Committees rode across Montana and Idaho Territories and snatched up accused “desperadoes” and “road agents,” sometimes setting up ad hoc gallows multiple times a day. The Montana Vigilantes, as they have become known within the popular nostalgia of the Wild West, were almost immediately and are still often hailed as heroes of the frontier in their brave efforts to fill in for the American justice system in the wild days before statehood. In 1866, English schoolteacher and recent arrival to Montana Territory, Thomas J. Dimsdale, published a passionate defense of the events of January and February 1864–The Montana Vigilantes!–which is held in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library’s vast collection of Montana memorabilia. Dimsdale’s book is among the most cited firsthand accounts of the Montana Vigilantes, but in this presentation Gibson will take a different angle on his work by bringing to the fore his extensive commentary on the disorderly emotional climate of Montana Territory that made the extremism of the vigilante violence possible. With this affective lens trained on Dimsdale’s account, Gibson will discuss not only an implicit ambivalence in his descriptions of the Vigilantes, but consider the larger story of emotional containment and U.S. expansion in the Rocky Mountain West contained within this work.

Abby Gibson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Van Hunnick History Department at the University of Southern California and an Editorial Assistant for The Huntington Library Quarterly. Before arriving at USC, she received her Master’s degree in the history of the American West at the University of Oklahoma, where she worked as one of two Editorial Fellows for The Western Historical Quarterly during her two years at OU. Abby’s dissertation, “Fearful Land: Managing Terror in the American West, 1820–1920” lies at the intersection of the history of U.S. westward expansion and the history of emotions. This project reexamines the protracted struggle for the West over the course of the 19th century through the lens of fear, tracing the terrors this region posed to an expanding settler nation. Her novel analytic focus on the emotional underpinnings of the American settler project introduces a different set of criteria by which to characterize this process and its instruments. Abby’s dissertation ultimately suggests that we measure the culmination of this process in terms of feeling when the West as a colonized region emerged as both a materially and emotionally managed landscape fully incorporated within the territorial and affective boundaries of the United States.

The lecture will take place via Zoom. To register to attend, please fill out the form here.

Image: Title Page from Dimsdale, Thos. J. (Thomas Josiah). 1866. The Vigilantes of Montana, or, Popular Justice in the Rocky Mountains : Being a Correct and Impartial Narrative of the Chase, Trial, Capture, and Execution of Henry Plummer’s Road Agent Band, Together with Accounts of the Lives and Crimes of Many of the Robbers and Desperados, the Whole Being Interspersed with Sketches of Life in the Mining Camps of the “Far West”… / by Prof. Thos J. Dimsdale. Virginia City, M.T: D.W. Tilton & Co. Clark Library Reference; F731 .D58.