by Mari Sandoz
The newspapers stood their ground, with great blank pages where ads were withdrawn by order of the Association. The Cheyenne Leader backed up the Sun, deploring the un-American spirit of dominance that would force "the weaker elements to immigrate or crawl, cowed and subdued, to the feet of the fierce and implacable oligarchy."
Long before this violence had come once more to the settlers of the Sweetwater country. The Bothwells, with the Sweetwater Land and Improvement Company, started Both-well as a coming metropolis of the cattle barons and a place for the cowboy to spend his money, offering everything he might want, even a newspaper. But a settler, James Averill, took up a homestead not far away and opened a small store and saloon, in the heart of the country claimed by the Both-wells, Clay, Hesse, Sun, and their associates. Although Averill was personally a quiet, peaceful man with many friends among the cowboys as well as the settlers, he wrote fiery letters to the papers denouncing the big cattlemen as range tyrants and grabbers of the public domain. "Is it not enough to excite one's prejudice to see the Sweetwater owned, or claimed, for a distance of seventy-five miles from its mouth by three or four men?"
Because he shouted words that many in the Sweetwater country would not have dared whisper, he became a threat. Although many agreed that Jim Averill had not one head of cattle and was apparently never accused of rustling, Ella Watson, a woman who lived nearby, was called Cattle Kate because she entertained cowboys and, it was said, took cattle in trade. Perhaps she was Averill's wife, as some said, and was using her maiden name to take up a homestead. There was a rumor, too, that the Averills had a small son off east somewhere. Anyway, Kate was a strong, husky woman in her late twenties, and in addition to the supposed entertainment, she washed the cowboys' shirts and had a mighty smooth hand with the sadiron if a man was going back East and wanted to look good. Gradually her homestead was stocked with cattle, around forty head, some guessed; at least eighty, others claimed, with many more marketed at the railroad.
"That ain't likely, not with them brand inspectors grabbing 'em," a settler said as he looked over a hot letter from Averill in the Casper paper. "I ain't seen no marks for Kate in the Association's Brand Book—"
Although Averill and Kate received some warnings and threats, everybody got them. Neither carried guns, and there was still the notion that if Chisum could go through the wild Texas days and the Lincoln County war unarmed, a mild, pacific Jim Averill out on his homestead should be safe. Apparently the cattlemen were just talking about the rustling; they made no attempt to take the two to court, although they controlled the county officials.
But it seems that Averill contested some land that Connor had covered by a filing. His protests to Washington made trouble for Durbin in his final proof, too. Besides, Averill kept Bothwell from fencing all the Sweetwater country against all comers.
Then one day in July, 1889, the crippled boy living around Averill and Kate's places slipped out to the hired hands, Buchanan and DeCory. Some men were making trouble back at the store, he said, picking a fight—
The two hurried over. Later it was reported they found ten in the outfit, including Fred Hesse, still looking like a genteelly-bearded solicitor and his range manager George Henderson; Bob Connor, also high in the Association; John Durbin of Durbin Brothers, already buying cattle from the Snyders in 1871 and delivering beeves to Iliff's slaughterhouse corral near Cheyenne in early 1872 and now of the Durbin Land and Cattle Company here in the Sweetwater country; Tom Sun, the Canadian Frenchman early in the region, and Bothwell of the town.
It seemed they had gone to Ella Watson's place. Durbin kicked the staples from the wire and drove the cattle out of her pasture while a couple of armed men kept her from coming out of the house. The cattle were freshly branded, because, she explained, she had just managed to get her brand recorded at Cheyenne and hoped it would be accepted for the fall roundup. The men laughed, and Both-well forced her into the wagon by threatening that he would drag her there at the end of a lariat if she didn't go. At Averill's store they made him get into the wagon, too. Jim, who often spoke of the man-burning Print Olive, said quietly that he was reminded of Mitchell and Ketchum in their drive to a lynching, but of course Wyoming would not hang a woman.
They took over Averill's place and when the hired men came up, jumped them. DeCory was knocked out and when he revived, everybody was gone, Buchanan and the crippled, sickly boy, too. Ralph Cole, who happened to come to the store, helped DeCory. Getting guns, they followed the mob by wagon track and pistol shot to Spring Creek Gulch. There Buchanan had crept up close enough to drop a few long-range rifle bullets among the mob who were putting the nooses on Averill and Cattle Kate, the woman fighting them, fierce as any Longhorn cow on the prod.
While several of the men drove Buchanan back to some rocks with their gunfire, the rest threw the rope ends over a long limb of a twisted tree hanging out over the gulch. Then Bothwell shoved the slight Averill off. While he jerked and swung in the air, the contemptuous and defiant Kate was pushed out, too, mainly by Henderson. The arms and legs of both jigged what seemed a long, long time, the young woman's Indian moccasins flying off, her skirts blowing and ballooning in the updraft and the slow dying.
Sickened, the men in the rocks tried to crawl closer, DeCory vomiting as he moved forward, yet was compelled to see, to know for certain just who such men were. Finally the two bodies hung still in the cooling shade of the old tree, with the sad and desolate forward-tipped heads of the hanged. Then the mob gathered up the sick boy and rode off, bunched as for protection, taking some parting shots at the men in the rocks.
DeCory and the others knew their lives were not worth a busted smokehouse check now, and they scattered to hide out, but at last Buchanan had to report the hanging to Casper. He got lost in the night, it seems, but sent word to the sheriff's office and named the men except the three that Hesse said were officers from the fort although dressed like the rest and acting as lynch-hungry.
Most of Wyoming knew about the two settlers hanging in the July heat of the Sweetwater country but no sympathizer or anyone else went to cut them down. Finally a deputy sheriff was directed to the place by Buchanan. It was dark in the gulch when the bodies were lowered, in horrifying condition from the July heat, but by rolling them in waterproof tarps they got them to Averill's store for the coroner's inquest and then buried them right there in the yard. News of the findings swept to the farthest claim shack. Apparently the stories of Buchanan, Cole, DeCory, and the Crowder boy had been told and the coroner's jury called it death by hanging at the hands of A. J. Bothwell, Tom Sun, John Durbin, R. M. Galbraith, Bud Connor, E. McLain, and one unknown man, said to have been George B. Henderson.
"Where was Hesse? I hear Canton was there, too?" settlers asked each other.
"Well, Hesse anyway. Everybody says he led the mob. He and Henderson."
The men named were put under $5,000 bond and held over for the grand jury, the witnesses heard, and now they knew their danger, particularly Buchanan, who had ridden for the sheriff. He slipped away to hide from those hunting him down. But the cattlemen smelled him out and headed him east, to hold him several months, or so it was told around Casper and out among the settlers as far as Buffalo and Newcastle and down the Platte below the Olive country.
While waiting for the grand jury some of the eastern papers protested the reign of lynch law in Wild Wyoming, and made it romantic, too. Some called it Border Justice meted out to the couple who had rustled twenty, twenty-five calves from Bothwell early in July and killed the cows. Westerners knew that in early July calves, in the late breeding region of the North, would still be too young to live on grass alone and nobody claimed they saw Kate trying to bucket-feed any wild young range stock. Another story was that the two had branded Bothwell cattle and took them to the railhead, where they certainly would have been grabbed up for the Live Stock Commissioners' fund.
Still, a lynching in Wyoming looked bad just after attaining statehood—Wyoming which had given wom
en the vote twenty years before and now added one of the few woman lynchings in the nation's history to that record.
Averill's brother came from the west coast and quietly, as Jim would have done it, he went around raising money for the prosecution. Ella Watson's father came up from Kansas to stay until the grand jury sat for her lynching as Cattle Kate.
But the anger and protest couldn't be covered by sod and a prayer, and when Wyoming seemed to be getting a little warm for the lynchers, Buchanan was shipped out of reach of a subpoena, off to Hesse's contacts in England, and set up in a little business there, so it was said. He had been under $500 bond as material witness but Frank Canton, the Association man up in Johnson County, got some friends to put up the cash so that the forfeit was all within the circle. Cole and DeCory were never seen again, and the sickly boy, taken away by the mob from the hanging, died after some weeks, so there was not one witness left. The grand jury failed to find a true bill, and there was celebrating at Bothwell.
But there were plenty of rumors. One was that Ralph Cole left the Averill place after the hanging and got as far as a surveyor's camp for the night. Next day he headed down toward the Union Pacific railroad and was overtaken by Henderson, shot, and the body burned to ashes.
"Another man burner!" a cowboy named Cole down in Nebraska was reported as saying. He was supposed to be a brother of Ralph Cole. Nobody heard him say more or saw anything of him for a long time after that, although there were rumors that in the ashes he identified the remains of a blocky little hand-forged bullet mold his brother sometimes carried.
Some said that Henderson got rid of DeCory, too, but if anything as identifying as the bullet mold was ever found for DeCory, no word of this got out.
Although nobody was jailed even one day, the hanging at Spring Greek Gulch was not forgotten. Henderson, who used to travel under the name of John Powers, had been a strong-arm policeman around the iron and coal mines back in Pennsylvania in the Molly Maguire troubles before he became range manager for Hesse and Clay's Quarter Circle 71 in Wyoming. He was openly accused of killing the vanished Cole and DeCory as well as the lynchings, but his job as range manager of the 71 gave him powerful friends in Casper and Cheyenne. Besides, where were the witnesses to swear to anybody's connection with the lynchings or the killing of the two missing men?
Henderson had a lot of trouble with his cowhands and around the saloons after that, and finally ended in an encounter in which no smart lawyer or important connections could save him. He quarreled with a nighthawk of his own outfit, over wages, it was said, and got killed, although John Clay insisted that the killer was a "rustler at a small ranch." Clay admitted that George Henderson unfortunately gave way to drink at times and became garrulous and unreliable. Perhaps the dutch courage that had carried him through the lynching of a woman had slowed his hand on the draw. Not much more was known about the man who sometimes called himself Jack Tregoning, sometimes Smith, than about Joe Sparrow down at Trail City, the one who finally picked off the man-burning Olive.
Maybe wages were as good an excuse as any, the cowboys at Bothwell and Casper and Buffalo told each other, pretending to be busy with their drinks and to know no more. Some did hear that a couple of Cole's brothers from down in Nebraska someplace had been up, men who knew their way around Wyoming. Perhaps DeCory had relatives, too.
But others thought that Henderson had died because, by now, he knew too much, particularly for a man often "garrulous and unreliable" from drink. Anyway, it seems he found the cow business in Wyoming a little tougher than the black mines of Pennsylvania.
Over in the Sweetwater country Henry H. Wilson contested the homesteads of Ella Watson and James Averill on the grounds of desertion. He filed on the land and after final proof sold it to Bothwell. It was said that Cattle Kate's log shack was moved to Bothwell's ranch and used as an icehouse there for thirty years.
The settlers, instead of scaring like a flock of band-tailed pigeons at the crack of a gun, seemed more united, more determined to get to the ballot box. They talked Populism and squeezed out a little more from the coffee and shoe money for an old shotgun or maybe a pistol, and shot a few tin cans off the fence posts to get the feel of the sights. None of the small ranchers had been scared out, either, and not one rustler, so far as anybody could tell.
But the campaign to clear the range had only begun. The big outfits, particularly the foreign-backed, were gathering more gunmen than cowpunchers to their pay rolls. Next there was news out of the northeast, from near Newcastle. A thrifty German homesteader named Thomas Waggoner had started a little horse ranch there some years ago, trapping mustangs, breeding his stock up carefully, trading here and there. Around dark in early June of 1891 Tom Smith, former deputy U.S. marshal, Hall, a foreman of the 21 Horse Ranch, and two other men rode up and called Waggoner outside. Claiming they were officers with a warrant, they took him away. His wife and the three small children first supposed he had gone with friends, but he didn't return, and eight days later his body was found hanging over a gulch, decomposing, flyblown, the face blackened and the mustache that his wife had admired so much dropping away.
There was great excitement around the settler towns. Tom Smith bulled it through, frankly admitting that he led the hanging. Tom Waggoner had looked guilty, he said, and a man who stole a thousand horses didn't have a trial coming. The officials took the horses away but not a head of them was ever established as stolen. Later the big cattlemen changed their story. Waggoner was really an honest and hard-working man, they said, and the rustlers lynched him because he knew too much. The settlers, bolder now, too, threw Tom Smith's brags about the hanging into the teeth of his employers. But that didn't make Mrs. Waggoner less the widow, give her children a father, or get the thousand horses back.
Evidently somebody was spotting the attacks carefully over the map of Wyoming. The next one was another mustanger, but up in the Sheridan region. The man refused to leave his homestead. The Big Horns made a fine blue wall against the sky and glowed a rosy red in the fire of sunrise, the veiled head of Cloud Peak standing far off and aloof much of the day. One night a masked gang came, stripped the mustanger to the raw, and set him running naked across the dark prairie with bullets to hurry his bare feet. His horses were scattered by rifle shots; some bearing his brand were found fifty and more miles away.
Although many in the ranch country were as loose-rooted as the fall tumbleweed, no one could vanish now without the suspicion of a dry gulching. A few of the more timid, or those with small children, left their places. But not enough, and not from the more settled regions, where it seemed a man was surely safe, or a woman.
But there was a great deal of stirring from one big ranch to another during 1891. Up in Johnson County Frank Canton still refused to accept defeat as sheriff. Down east of Casper another man remembered more satisfactory times. The Scottish Tolland Company established the VR in 1877 along both sides of the North Platte River and as far back as the cattle would graze. The manager, and acting like the owner, was Frank Wolcott. He had come to Wyoming as receiver of the U. S. Land Office twenty years ago and now was fighting the settlers and small ranchers pushing in and challenging his hold on the vast area of the public domain that he was once paid to protect from just such exploitation as his ranch.
That Major Wolcott had his enemies was proved by his neck, wry as a bronc whose head had been pulled down by a careless rope. Wolcott's, it was said, came from a beating that a hired bruiser gave him, hired for a forty-dollar suit. The squat major was cocky, with that curious and often tragic cockiness that comes to some young officers upon victory in a civil war. It was a little like that of a small boy after he had overcome an older brother—so different from the eternal grief of the older officers, whether defeated or victorious in the spilling of fraternal blood.
There were those who knew that Wolcott had borrowed $80,000 back in 1885-86 from John Clay's British connections, the John Nelson Trust, and that after the Big Die-Up he was practically to
the wall, compelled to realize that sooner or later he would be closed out, and with no profession, no earning power. The time of such foreclosure lay in John Clay's calculating hands.
The Fourth of July, 1891, Clay was up at the VR for a talk with the major. The two men went out to the alfalfa field where the hay crew was raking and stacking. The commanding Clay and the stocky Wolcott strode along the uncut edge, the purple bloom striking their knees as they walked, heads down, speaking low although there was no one except a drowsy bumblebee close enough to hear. Out of this stroll in the alfalfa came a plan, one said to have been Wolcott's and partly Frank Canton's—a plan to solve the problems of the big ranchers everywhere. By Wolcott's scheme the real trouble spot, Johnson County and the surrounding regions, would be cleared of the rustlers and the homesteaders, and of their sympathizers in Buffalo, beginning with the sheriff. Much of Wyoming would be freed and the Association, under Clay as president, would be re-established as the power in the state.
Years later Clay said that he told Wolcott the plan was impossible but there were doubters who asked if Wolcott wasn't really helpless, his entire future in the palms of his creditors and their representative. Anyway, Clay was still the canny Scotsman, preparing to be in Britain and on the Continent when the time came to put Wolcott's plan into action. But there would be certain expenses and $100,000 was raised for these—to hire men, buy horses no one would recognize, the latest model Winchesters, three Studebaker wagons to haul the supplies which included some items only mentioned in whispers. A few of the big ranchers and ranch managers were dubious but they anteed up their share of the money. Some were neither consulted or told.
A long time afterward many spoke of seeing the two men stalking the alfalfa and told of what went before, and after, each telling it in his own way, depending upon where his eyes were at the time, his feet, his pocketbook, and perhaps his heart.