Colorado mining camps prized killing men as a badge of status.

Evidence

To-night I am in a beautiful place like a Dutch farmlarge, warm, bright, clean, with abundance of clean food, and a clean, cold little bedroom to myself. But it is very hard to write, for two free-tongued, noisy Irish women, who keep a miners’ boarding-house in South Park, and are going to winter quarters in a freight wagon, are telling the most fearful stories of violence, vigilance committees, Lynch law, and “stringing,” that I ever heard. It turns one’s blood cold only to think that where I travel in perfect security, only a short time ago men were being shot like skunks. At the mining towns up above this nobody is thought anything of who has not killed a mani.e. in a certain set. These women had a boarder, only fifteen, who thought he could not be anything till he had shot somebody, and they gave an absurd account of the lad dodging about with a revolver, and not getting up courage enough to insult any one, till at last he hid himself in the stable and shot the first Chinaman who entered. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 422

Categorization

• BMF: The fifteen-year-old who thinks he ‘cannot be anything’ until he shoots someone strongly evokes the honor-pressure dynamics of Okonkwo’s son Nwoye’s world in Things Fall Apart, and also the young-men-needing-to-prove-violence pattern in Parable of the Sower, though the connection is thematic rather than a specific plot device.