| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Myth of the Hanging Tree: Stories of Crime and Punishment in Territorial New Mexico. By Robert J. Tórrez. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. x, 186 pp. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-0-8263-4379-6.)
For those fascinated with stories of the Wild West this book will be of considerable interest. It includes newspaper excerpts and summaries from the nineteenth century and well-researched explorations of some of New Mexico's most notorious crimes—everything from racially motivated shootouts in the arroyos, to scheming lovers, lost mines, and poisoned husbands. It also sheds new light on the case of Paula Angel, the only woman to be legally hanged in New Mexico during its territorial days.	1
Robert J. Tórrez began his research on hangings shortly after he was appointed state historian at the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives in the late 1980s. Over the many years that followed, he assembled hundreds of case histories of both the lynchings and the legal hangings in New Mexico. Tórrez spends most of his time on selected case studies taken from the over fifty legal hangings from the territorial period, with a smaller selection of cases that occurred after statehood.	. . .

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