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1923 Recap: Death to the Lambs
The Dutton family defends their way of life against nature and man, which gives us a nice, pithy summary of their lives as forever victims.
To conceive of their predicament this way, if only as a thought experiment, makes it possible to understand why one of the most entitled and influential men in the Mountain West — Jacob Dutton is the Montana livestock commissioner and one of the area’s largest landowners — routinely behaves as though he’s punching out of the corner. Jacob learns in Bozeman that Zane and Alice won’t be subject to a humiliating jury trial because they’ve already been found guilty of miscegenation on a preponderance of the evidence: They were living together, they have “mongrel” kids together, and they have a marriage license. Bigotry might be alive in the Wild West — the inebriated judge refers to Alice as a “flapper,” and her husband, who has been left maimed by police brutality, “the invalid” — but, in the time of Prohibition, it’s not as powerful as Jacob’s threat of blackmail.
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