Explore "The Trapper's Daughter" by Gustave Aimard on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Before going further, we will explain in a few words what Lynch Law is to which we have several times referred in the course of this narrative, and which plays so great a part, not only in the prairies of North America, but also in certain districts of the United States.
Although we Europeans are rightly surprised that such a monstrosity as Lynch Law can exist in a general society, to be just to the Americans, and although we are bound to disapprove their present system derived from the original, this law was the result of imperious circumstances. When the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth, Lynch Law was the chastisement imposed by a community deprived of all law, who could only have recourse to their own justice to punish crime.