Jefferson Hope (The London cabman): The hunter who crossed half the world to collect a Utah debt in London

In chapter VII of the first part of A Study in Scarlet (Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887), Sherlock Holmes has Inspectors Gregson and Lestrade in his Baker Street sitting room when Wiggins, the leader of his street boys, announces that the cab is waiting downstairs. Holmes takes a pair of handcuffs from a drawer, shows off how well the spring works and asks for the cabman to come up and help with his luggage. Kneeling over a trunk, without turning his head, he asks the man to give him a hand with a buckle. There is a sharp metallic click, Holmes springs to his feet and introduces the inspectors to Mr. Jefferson Hope, the murderer of Enoch Drebber and of Joseph Stangerson. The cabman hurls himself at the window, smashes the glass, and it takes four men to subdue him. (Warning: this case file reveals the ending of the novel.)

// The theoryWhen two codes judge the same act

Hope is the murderer in the novel that introduced Holmes to the world, published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887. He is a hunter and silver prospector from the American West who, in London, makes his living as a cabman while he stalks two former Mormons from Utah. The tool for reading him is the culture conflict theory of Thorsten Sellin, who in 1938 published Culture Conflict and Crime for the Social Science Research Council. Its central idea is conduct norms: every group has its own rules about what is right, and they do not always match those of the criminal code, which usually belongs to the dominant group. Sellin distinguished a primary conflict, between different cultures, which arises when two culture areas meet, when one group imposes its law on another’s territory or when someone migrates, from a secondary conflict, within a single society that splits into subgroups. In both cases crime is born not from the absence of norms but from loyalty to other ones.

// The subjectThe hunter who became a cabman

The second part, “The Country of the Saints,” tells the origin. In chapter II, Hope rides Lucy Ferrier out of a stampeding herd of cattle on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, and before leaving for the Nevada mines he becomes engaged to her with her father’s consent. In chapter III, Brigham Young visits Ferrier and gives him a month for Lucy to choose a husband between Stangerson’s son and Drebber’s; every morning the number of days left appears written somewhere on the farm. In chapter IV, Hope returns in time and leads father and daughter out through the mountains. In chapter V, while he is out hunting, the pursuers catch up with them: he finds a grave bearing John Ferrier’s name and the date August 4th, 1860. Lucy, taken back to Salt Lake City, is forced to marry Drebber, and dies within a month. The night before the burial, Hope bursts into the house, kisses the dead woman’s forehead and takes the wedding ring from her finger.

He says it at the end of his confession, in chapter VI, before an inspector and with an aortic aneurysm that, a doctor has told him, is bound to burst within days. There he explains that, since no court could any longer convict those two men, he decided to be judge, jury and executioner all at once. He drove Drebber, drunk, in his cab to an empty house on the Brixton Road, showed him his face by the light of a candle and forced him at knifepoint to choose between two pills, one poisoned with an alkaloid he had stolen from the laboratory at York College; he swallowed the other himself. With the blood from his own nose he wrote RACHE, German for revenge, on the wall to put the police on a false trail. Stangerson, who refused to choose and flew at his throat, he stabbed at Halliday’s Private Hotel. The aneurysm bursts in his cell the night after his capture, before he can be brought before the magistrate.

// The crackA Utah written from a single source

Culture conflict demands that both codes be seen as norms, and the novel sees only one. Its Utah is a regime of terror policed by the Danites, a secret band that kills dissenters and abducts women for the Elders’ harems. In 1991 the historian Michael W. Homer documented that Conan Doyle, who had never set foot in Utah, relied mainly on anti-Mormon books written by former Mormons. It shows in the details: the “thirteenth rule” of Joseph Smith that Young cites appears in no Mormon text (the thirteenth of his Articles of Faith is about honesty, not marriage), the angel Moroni appears as “Merona,” and the novel presents a Brigham Young of no more than thirty in May 1847, when he was forty-five. The Danites did exist as an armed group in Missouri in 1838, and the violence was real: in the Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857, Mormon militiamen killed some 120 emigrants. But the novel turns episodes into an all-seeing system. After visiting Salt Lake City in 1923, Conan Doyle himself called his picture of the Danites sensational and overcolored in Our Second American Adventure (1924), though in a letter of 1923 he had insisted that what he wrote about the Danites and their murders was historical and that he could not withdraw it.

The novel also idealizes Hope’s code. It attributes his thirst for revenge to what he may have learned from the Indians he had lived among, another stereotype, and sends him off with a placid smile in his cell, like a man who has done his work well. Explaining Hope is not excusing him. The novel takes the guilt of both men as given (according to Cowper, a Mormon, it was Stangerson who shot Ferrier, and Drebber married Lucy by force), but no court ever tried them: Hope was the sole judge of two men to whom he offered a choice between death and a coin toss. That is the risk Sellin did not want forgotten: understanding which code a conduct comes from does not oblige us to accept its victims.