AS EVERY SENSIBLE person knows, there is pretty much no such thing as being “cruel to be kind.” Sometimes it does work the other way around, though. Every now and then you run across a story in which someone did something that was intended as a kindness, but turned out to be anything but.

Such a case happened in the office of Oregon Governor Oswald West, sometime in 1912. It had to do with a little shooting scrape that Z.H. Stroud, an acquaintance of West’s, had gotten into in the little frontier town of Harney City, where he was the town marshal.

Reading between the lines of the story, it’s clear that the governor’s well-intentioned intervention was probably the worst thing that could have happened to Marshal Stroud, and precipitated the closest thing Oregon history has to Arizona’s famous O.K. Corral gunfight. Which, as I’m sure you’ve gathered, the lawman lost.... (Harney City, Harney County; 1910s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/24-04a.1107e_os-west-pardons-gunfighter-marshal.html)