Comparing the characters we meet in the Oxbow Incident with Erik Baard's list of attributes a cowboy should own, we discover that there are many discrepancies. The novel as a whole is the story of a group of men who decided to form a lynch mob and go after a group of men responsible for murdering a townsman and apparently stealing cattle on Drew's ranch. The lynch mob moves in and attempts to hunt down the rebels responsible, they encounter three men they see as the troublemakers, and overall they decide to hang them. At the end of the novel we find out that these three men were not rebels, in fact they were wrongly accused by the mob, and now the mob has been murdered because they wrongly killed them. The story is full of contradictions about what a cowboy should be, when compared to Baard's list. In Baard's article, he cited a quote from Bonnie Wheeler who stated, "The idea of ​​the American cowboy is the direct descendant of the chivalrous knight." » Although we could argue that the crowd that went after the rebels was courageous, that did not make up for the fact that they acted as if they were the final law and judgment. As the lynch mob organizes, we are introduced to Tetley. The man who ends up becoming the leader of the mob. The town judge, Judge Tyler, tells Tetley that if he finds the rebels involved in the murder and theft, he must bring them back to town so they can stand trial. Unfortunately, Tetley has a completely different plan in mind, he thinks his son, Gerald, is too feminine and would like to have him kill one of the rebels in order to make him more like a man. Baard tells us that a cowboy should never shoot first, hit a smaller man,...... middle of paper...... he asks Drew to deliver the letter to the wife of Martin. It is Davies who once again goes back on his word since he promised Martin that he would be the one to give the news to his wife. When the men continued talking about Tetley, Davies spoke up and said, "Yes, he loved it, he extracted pleasure from every bit of pain." He stretched it out as long as he could. It was all one thing to him, the boy's mental torment. , the animal fear of the old man, the Mex removing that bullet from his leg. Did you see his face when the Mex took that bullet out of his leg? (p. 225). Speaking of these three men, we see that Tetley would not help anyone in distress, that he would fail to remain pure in thought and action, that he would disrespect the laws of his nation, and that he failed to be a patriot. However, the rest of the men in the crowd all failed in the categories presented by Baard..