Legends, Liars, and Lawbreakers: Incredible Tales from the Pacific Northwest

Geoff Hamilton is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of
British Columbia.

Legends, Liars, and Lawbreakers consists of nine chapters on
transgressive types who spent time in the Pacific Northwest. The
subjects include Chief Leschi of the Nisqually, homicidal smuggler Henry
Ferguson, the psychopathic Harry Tracy, triple murderer Bill Byrd,
conman and killer James E. Mahoney, the murderous couple Decasto Earl
Mayer and Mary Smith, alleged outlaw William Thadeus Phillips (aka Butch
Cassidy), “king of the bootleggers” Roy Olmstead, and Wild West
preacher and lawman Reverend Dr. Mark Matthews. Several black-and-white
photographs and a bibliography of related reading are included.

While the subjects are inherently colourful, the author’s
presentation of their lives and misdeeds is, overall, rather drab. Green
tends to indulge in hoary descriptive formulas (e.g., “Harry Tracy,
Public Enemy Number One, was finally gone—but his legend refused to
die”) and offers little insight into the characters or the cultural
climates in which they lived. On the late-19th-century outlaw Tracy, for
example, Green’s observation about the increasingly rationalized and
technologized space around him—“Eastern Washington did not offer as
much cover as he had found in the west. Modern telegraph wires were
constantly updating his progress from place to place”—could have led
to an interesting discussion of the way in which the American frontier
was closing for criminals as well as everyone else. Instead, here and
elsewhere, the narrative simply moves on without proffering any
memorable perspective from which to view its subjects. This book offers
a group of criminal case studies organized geographically, but it does
not give us a coherent or compelling sense of the Pacific Northwest as a
distinctive region in which these “legends, liars, and lawbreakers”
made their names.