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December 6, 2022 @ 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Park City Museum will host an in-person lecture, Murder, Lynching, and Vigilantes in the Old West, presented by Michael Rutter, Tuesday, December 6 from 5-6 p.m. at the Education and Collections Center located at 2079 Sidewinder Drive. Please register for the lecture at www.parkcityhistory.org/events.
Michael Rutter will lecture about real people who didn’t make good choices—and those who lived and died in fear as a result. The inconvenient truth in some parts of our history are not pretty and should give us nightmares. Our past is a curious amalgamation of triumph and tragedy. Forging a new country is hard work, but it must be measured in human terms. A sanitized history should be more frightening than the truth, especially when we examine examples of ethnic cleansing. Rutter will look at how tabloids and newspapers manipulated public opinion and negotiated manufactured narratives. Some law enforcement agencies—touted as nonpareil good guys in Western mythology—could more accurately be considered instruments of ethnic cleansing. Just as shocking are examples of vigilantes who took the law into their own hands.
Michael Rutter is a recipient of the Ben Franklin Book Award for Excellence and the Rocky Mountain Book Publishers’ Award. An “addicted” fly fisherman, his outdoor essays have been published from Yale University to Outdoor Life. He worked with American Experience on “The Wild West Series: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” He has been a Christa McAuliffe Fellow and an AT&T Scholar. His new book, Colorado Madams, Farcounty Press, was released in September 2022. Some of Michael’s other projects include Upstairs Girls: Prostitution in the American West; Boudoirs to Brothels: The Intimate World of Wild West Women; Myths and Mysteries of the Old West; Wild Bunch; Colorado Madams. His book, Frontier Terror: Murder, Lynching, and Vigilantes in the Old West (1840-1920), will be released in the spring of 2023.
Register for this lecture