Lecture by Abby Gibson, Ph.D. Candidate in History, University of Southern California. Recipient of the 2024–25 Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Graduate Research Fellowship
The Montana Vigilantes, as they have become known within the popular nostalgia of the Wild West, were almost immediately and are still often hailed as heroes of the frontier in their brave efforts to fill in for the American justice system in the wild days before statehood. In 1866, English schoolteacher and recent arrival to Montana Territory, Thomas J. Dimsdale, published a passionate defense of the events of January and February 1864–The Montana Vigilantes!–which is held in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library’s vast collection of Montana memorabilia. Dimsdale’s book is among the most cited firsthand accounts of the Montana Vigilantes, but in this presentation Gibson will take a different angle on his work by bringing to the fore his extensive commentary on the disorderly emotional climate of Montana Territory that made the extremism of the vigilante violence possible. With this affective lens trained on Dimsdale’s account, Gibson will discuss not only an implicit ambivalence in his descriptions of the Vigilantes, but consider the larger story of emotional containment and U.S. expansion in the Rocky Mountain West contained within this work.
Abby Gibson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Van Hunnick History Department at the University of Southern California and an Editorial Assistant for The Huntington Library Quarterly. Before arriving at USC, she received her Master’s degree in the history of the American West at the University of Oklahoma, where she worked as one of two Editorial Fellows for The Western Historical Quarterly during her two years at OU. Abby’s dissertation, “Fearful Land: Managing Terror in the American West, 1820–1920” lies at the intersection of the history of U.S. westward expansion and the history of emotions.
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