Monty Smith

Monty Smith

Monty Smith, the town bum of Bridger's Wells and a very enthusiastic member of the posse, mainly uses ethical appeals to get everyone to listen to him. He does use emotional appeals too, albeit sparingly. The most common type of ethical appeal Smith uses is appeal to the person/ad hominem, and the most common type of emotional appeal he uses is appeal to ignorance

Smith first used an ethical appeal on Davies and Osgood. When he was demonstrating the usage of a rope to hang someone and saw that Osgood and Davies didn't look too well watching him, he taunted Davies by saying, "You don't look too well, Mr. Davies....Maybe you'd better stay home and get rested up for the funeral...Maybe you could get the flowers." Upon seeing Osgood, Smith turned to him and said, "They're all sick. The flower pickers....Girls, shall we lay out the poor dear rustler wustler?" By calling Osgood and Davies "girls", he probably tried to get them riled up enough to make them join the posse. Right afterwards, Smith displays an emotional appeal: argument to the people. When he described how a man hanging on a rope suffocated and died, he made it descriptive enough to get Davies and Osgood scared. Not many of the people gathered there at the moment had seen a real hanging, so they were therefore unable to tell whether Smith was telling the truth or stretching the truth to scare everyone. At one point, Monty Smith also used an appeal to irrational premises. When he was demonstrating to everyone that he knew how to hang someone, he was implying that he'd done it before and nothing could go wrong with him there. He reassured everyone by telling them, "Don't tell me I don't know the trade." Of course, that might have kept most of the posse members from worrying, but everything didn't exactly go right. In the end, one of the "rustlers", Martin,