Ambrose Bierce's The Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge

Executions can be dated back to as far as the first human beings. They have always been part of the human culture. There are different kinds of executions; such as firing squad, beheading, hanging, gas chamber, electrocution, and lethal injection. In “The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, a short story by Ambrose Bierce, tells the story of a man, Peyton Farquhar, who was hung for giving a Confederate soldier water during the Civil War. The Northern forces declared any civilian caught interfering with the North’s efforts in the area, would be hanged. Farquhar had been turned in and order to execution by hanging. Hangings and lynchings have been in the American history from Salem Witch Trials to the KKK killings to the Civil War and have shaped and changed the outlook of the world today.

As early as the fifth century, hangings were introduced to Britain by the Germanic Anglo-Saxon tribes. Then transferred over to the United States before it was even the United States. A major trail of executions began in the spring of 1692 when a group of girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts, claimed to be possessed

This explains to him while he is waiting that he is trying to focus on his thoughts of his wife and children. While he is waiting he hears a metallic ringing sound and it turns out to be his watch. He starts to recognize the little things he hadn’t before while death is waiting for him. He then imagines freeing his hands, removing the noose, and plunging into the stream, swimming to freedom and his home, safely located outside enemy lines. Then the sergeant steps away from the board. This story helps depicts just have cruel Americans were to each other mainly because the color of someone’s skin. Also, how they’d take a man, a man who is harmless and was just giving water to a soldier, from his family that is probably starving and suffering from the war