Western Vocabulary in the Ox-Bow Incident

An interesting thing occurs at the opening of chapter 3 of the Ox-Bow Incident.  We’re given a one-sentence description of the landscape as the soon-to-be lynch mob leaves Tetley’s house.  “Davies didn’t catch up with us until we had passed Tetley’s big and secret house behind it’s picket fence and trees and were out in the road between the meadows.” (pg 105).  The narrator then takes a few sentences to go back over this subject, redefining what he just described.  He explains that basically the meadows are not meadows and the road is not what one would traditionally call a road.  His need to alter the statement implies that the world he inhabits is not the same as the one the reader might know.  The west in this novel is still being explored by Europeans, it is at a stage where it is being settled and defined.  It is so different from the growing civilization in the East though, that Art doesn’t seem to feel like familiar language is sufficient to describe it.