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Book Review
| Nimrod: Courts, Claims, and Killing on the Oregon Frontier. By Ronald B. Lansing. (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2005. xiii + 305. Illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $21.95, paper.)
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Scholars who have written about the impact that the law and the courts have on society have far more often than not tended to focus on controversial national cases than on the thousands of state or local court cases that, in many ways, had an even more immediate impact on citizens' lives. Thankfully for students of the West, Ronald B. Lansing has rejected that approach. In 1993, his Juggernaut: The Whitman Massacre Trial (Pasadena, CA) was published to much-deserved critical acclaim. Nimrod: Courts, Claims, and Killing on the Oregon Frontier shows that he has not lost his touch. In focusing on a long-forgotten judicial episode that had ramifications far beyond its isolated rural setting, he has produced yet another superior study worthy of considerable praise. |
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Nimrod O'Kelly, the semi-literate anti-hero of Lansing's account, is virtually unknown today. After he arrived in the Willamette Valley in 1845, however, he quickly found himself and the 640 acres of land that he claimed the center of controversy. The area's only Roman Catholic, at sea in an ocean of unfriendly Protestant neighbors, O'Kelly, a loner, made few friends and many enemies. Tempers flared repeatedly. Finally in May 1852, he shot and killed one of the men whom he had frequently accused of attempting to usurp his land. Despite his assertion that the killing was done in self-defense, his neighbors, anxious to be rid of him, charged him with first-degree murder and, the following month, convicted and sentenced him to death. |
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Had he been hung on the special scaffolding built just for him in the heart of today's Corvallis, Oregon, Nimrod's story, as interesting as it is, would have been little more than a footnote in state judicial history. But that is not what happened. Fighting for both his life and his land, Nimrod soon involved nearly every major political and judicial figure in Northwest. Before he was done, his case even reached the halls of Congress and the office of the president of the United States. Such efforts proved successful. Though eventually he did serve two years at hard labor in the state penitentiary, Nimrod lived to return to his land and his wife and family. When he died shortly after his 50th wedding anniversary in 1864, he was eighty-four years old. |
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It would be hard to imagine anyone more on the "bottom" than Nimrod Kelley, but Lansing writes about history "from the bottom up," and his carefully crafted scholarship shows on every page. In any number of ways, this volume is a model of legal scholarship, a book that tells us a great deal about both the early history of the Northwest and about the American system of jurisprudence as well. |
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| M. Paul Holsinger, Emeritus
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| Illinois State University |
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ISSN 1939-8603
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