| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 35.2

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 35.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Lynching in Colorado, 1859–1919. By Stephen J. Leonard. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2002. xiii + 246 pp. Illus-trations, map, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95.)

If Stephen J. Leonard, a professor of history at Metropolitan State College in Denver, has failed to record a lynching or vigilante hanging in Colorado, I would be surprised. From the smallest mining camps to the largest towns, he notes each and every extralegal incident of capital punishment. The practice was common. Nearly every Colorado town of any size was visited by Judge Lynch. Relying on an expansive definition of lynching as posited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Leonard includes all those shot or beaten to death (or in any other manner killed) by a group putatively serving justice. Whether those punished met their final demise at the end of a rope or in some other way, argues Leonard, they were "just as dead" (p. 3). Such an approach has its benefits: everything is there for the reader. However, it also tends to blur distinctions—with real differences—between the actions of hysterical mobs and those of extralegal courts and vigilance committees. It was not all the same.

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