Roy Bean
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Phantly Roy Bean, Jr. (c. 1825 – March 16, 1903) was an eccentric U.S. saloon-keeper and Justice of the Peace in Val Verde County, Texas, who called himself "The Law West of the Pecos". According to legend, Judge Roy Bean held court in his saloon along the Rio Grande on a desolate stretch of the Chihuahuan Desert of southwest Texas. After his death, Western films and books cast him as a hanging judge, although he is known to have sentenced only two men to hang, one of whom escaped.
Roy Bean's sentencing of Jose Gonzales and the latter's reply
“Jose Manuel Miguel Xavier Gonzales, in a few short weeks it will be spring. The snows of winter will flee away, the ice will vanish and the air will become soft and balmy. In short, the annual miracle of the years will awaken and come to pass, but you won’t be there.
The rivulet will run its soaring course to the sea, the timid desert flowers will put forth their tender shoots, and the glorious valley of this imperial domain will blossom as the rose. Still, you won’t be there to see.
From every treetop some wildwoods songster will carol his mating song, butterflies will sport in the sunshine, the busy bee will hum happily as it pursues its accustomed vocation; the gentle breeze will tease the tassels of the wild grasses and all nature, Jose Manuel Miguel Xavier Gonzales, will be glad but you.
You won’t be here to enjoy it because I command the Sheriff, or some officers of the country, to lead you to some remote spot, swing you by the neck from a knotting bough of some sturdy oak and let you hang until you are dead.
After then, Jose Manuel Miguel Xavier Gonzales, I further command that such officers retire quickly from your dangling corpse; that vultures may descend from the heavens upon your filthy body, until nothing shall remain but the bare, bleached bones of a cold-blooded, copper-coloured, blood-thirsty, throat-cutting, chilli-eating, sheep-herding, murdering son-of-a-bitch.”
Seemingly unperturbed by the severity of the brutal sentence, neither flabbergasted by the descriptive prose, it turns out Jose Gonzales, a poor sheep-herder, was also capable of a little articulacy, in a fashion, and totally unafraid to match dialogue with the judiciary, whilst coming clean with an ultimate confession.
“I admit I’m a thief, but so eager was this court to add another to its already long list of slaughtered victims that you remind me more of buzzards hovering over a carcass than men supposed to dispense justice.
You half-starved hyena, you’ve sat through this trial with devilish glee written all over your hellish face. You talk about spring with its sweet-smelling blossoms and fall with its yellow moon; you damned offspring of a diseased whore. You say that I am to be hanged and, as I gaze into your bloated whiskey-soaked face, I’m not surprised at the pretended gravity and the evil sarcasm with which you send me to my death.
You haven’t even the grace to call down the mercy of God on my soul, you dirty-nosed, pot-bellied, dung-eating descendent of an outhouse maggot. I defy you to the end. You can hang me by the neck until I’m dead, dead, dead, and you can also kiss my arse until its red, red, red, and God damn your foul old soul.”
