by Mari Sandoz
When everything was in order Wolcott and former Governor Baxter, the West Pointer who was now general manager of the Western Union Beef Company up in Johnson County, headed for Colorado together. They went to raise a force that would clear out the rustlers, the rabble, and trespassers, all those poaching upon the sacred premises of the cow.
In the meantime others were beating the farther brush. Tom Horn, the outlaw who had worked for the Pinkertons until he was charged with a gambling-house holdup, was sent off through the Dakotas to hire gunmen at $150 a month and expenses, with a bonus of $500 for each man killed, Horn to lead the force he gathered. Hiram Ijams, secretary of the Board of Livestock Commissioners, went up to Idaho, talking openly about a cattleman "Invasion" of Johnson County to kill the rustlers, including Sheriff Angus and some other officials. That would scare out around 300, maybe 400, more and clear the range, be a lesson to settlers all through the cow country. He talked up the safety of the job—many of the homesteaders were without even a bird gun. The Invasion force would be hundreds strong, with bounties for all. Tom Smith, who had led the very successful Waggoner lynching, was back home in Texas recruiting twenty-five of the bravest gun fighters of "impeccable" character, at $1,000 each and expenses. It was said that Smith was getting $2,500 for the organization and leadership.
Things had not been quiet in Wyoming. One November dawn four men kicked in the door of a Powder River shack, come to hang Nate Champion and Ross Gilbertson sleeping there. In the dusky room they shot at Champion, still in bed. He jerked his gun from under the pillow and fired six times, almost in a solid roar, one bullet striking a man in the ribs and another going up his sleeve before the gang could crowd out the door and get to cover in the gray morning light, their boots loud as running hoofs on stone. They all got away but there was a lot of blood where they rested awhile. They left without their horses, overcoats, bedding, grub, ropes laid out handy, and Frank Canton's new Winchester saddle gun that Tom Smith had given him as a present.
The men had been so confident there would be no witnesses they hadn't masked as those who ran out the mustanger up near Sheridan did. Champion and Gilbertson recognized three of them as Association men: Canton, Tom Smith, and Joe Elliott, a stock inspector, the fourth a drifting trigger man called Coates. Plainly they had come for another lynching but Champion turned out a little fast with the gun.
Even before this both men might have known they were marked. Gilbertson had used the last days of the old law to brand up a handful of fine mavericks right under the eyes of the roundup foremen, although any stock he might try to sell would go to the Live Stock Commissioners anyway. Champion, a good-looking man with a brown mustache, around five foot eight, had been a steady top-pay cowhand in north Wyoming, and very good at getting the proper share of mavericks for his bosses. But after the Big Die-Ups he was dropped, with many other good cowboys, for cheaper help. Since then he worked with his few cattle and jobbed around as extra hand, sometimes with his brother Bud, and Ross Gilbertson, working for such outfits as Plunkett's EK, the Hoe, and the 21, and maybe helping Matthews gather up odd marketing stock of those brands that was missed on the roundup and shipped for the owners. Even Champion's enemies admitted he was not only top help but likable, soft-spoken, and gentlemanly, of good Texian stock. His mother was a Standifer of Williamson County, with fighters for Texas independence on both sides of the family, and longtime enemies of the man-burning Olives while still down there.
The cattlemen now claimed that Nate Champion was a member of the Red Sash gang who terrorized the country although he was never around the rest of them and was known as a peaceful man. They said he had been run out of Colorado for rustling, not saying whether for homesteading —rustling land—or for swinging the long rope. Anyway, they never mentioned this while his rope worked for them here. Away from the cow country they told of Champion and his men, heavily armed, coming in on Bob Tisdale's roundup outfit. Tisdale's men were holding 1,500 wild range stock ready to brand. Seems Champion's outfit roped and tied all the calves and scattered all the stock. It sounded like a good trick to scatter a lot of cows while their calves were tied down—a good trick and a likely story. Later some did admit that the calves roped and branded belonged to the settlers and small outfits barred from the roundup run by the Association. Nobody except Champion had the guts to brace the outfit and save the stock from being turned into the maverick fund.
Champion and Gilbertson reported the attack on them on the Powder, but only Elliott was arrested and put under $5,000 peace bond. Gilbertson, Champion's only witness, vanished, scared off or picked off, nobody seemed to know which.
But now Nate Champion was doubly marked, for Canton was not the man to overlook this second humiliation on top of his defeat for sheriff. Worse, the little fellows, hearing that Nate had run off four of the Association's hired gunmen while still in his underpants, made him their double symbol of resistance, particularly with the wholesale attack coming, as many feared. Even some who had been ready to hitch up and quit the country decided to try it a little longer.
There was strong talk among the settlers and little ranchers for action, with the actual rustlers pushing their two bits' worth in now, and not many honest men standing against them. The cow thieves had the good guns and the will to use them when the attack came. All the little fellows had to unite, arm, stop these killings, known and suspected.
"Let's ride against them big outfits in the night, fire the buildings, and shoot the rats when they come running out in their shirttails, like they would do us," one gaunt, bearded man kept shouting over and over at every crossroads, at the country post offices, and out on the streets of Buffalo.
Seeing where such talk could lead, a few with cooler heads tried to point out that this was getting down on the level of gunmen. Besides, most of the larger outfits would surely be against any mass killing of settlers. Some of them did try to ride herd on their stock, keep them away from the homesteader's crops, if only to protect the blood from the scrub bulls loose in the country. Some worked for irrigation on the state and national level, for railroads and post offices, even while they resisted settlement. But when the settler was actually there they paid lease for his land, maybe gave him a little meat for his kids, even flour and sugar and shoes on tick, on time, at the ranch store. But these were not the outside forces behind men like Canton and Smith, or the lynchers on the Sweetwater.
Because the loudest voice against all violence came from Buffalo's Sheriff Angus, there was complaint against him, even from his closest friends. "By God, Red, you better be deciding which side you're on before the bullets start," Black Jack Flagg warned him at a political meeting.
But Red Angus didn't like talk about shooting.
Buffalo, under the blue granite of the Big Horns, was the only town in Johnson County and had grown to around 1,200 population. But if anyone thought that size was any protection, they soon changed their minds. A month after the attack on Champion and Gilbertson two men were dry gulched right in the Buffalo region. The first was Orley Jones. The Jones brothers, well liked, had come up from Nebraska with a buggy and a span of mules that they traded for Indian mares. They went to punching cows, saved their money, and bought a few heifers. Orley, known as Ranger, was a jolly young man, temperate, and particularly popular. After five years of riding for the big outfits and saving his money, he took up a homestead in the range of one of the big cattlemen and got himself engaged to be married. He drove up to Buffalo, ordered lumber to finish the house for his bride, and on his way home was shot from under a bridge. The wagon was drawn off into a gully, the horses unhooked and turned loose.
But before his body was discovered, Charlie Basch came spurring in to Buffalo to report that Johnny Tisdale had been killed. Basch had heard shots off the road a piece and saw Frank Canton tear away from a gulch. Riding over to see, Basch found a wagon drawn in there, the horses dead in the harness, and Tisdale with a bullet in the back. Johnny, apparently no relation to the ranch Tisdales,
was headed for his homestead sixty miles out with the winter supplies and the family Christmas presents. He had been warned in Buffalo that his life was in danger from the rancher down there; he even overheard Canton tell Fred Hesse that he would "take care of Tisdale." But Johnny's wife was alone on the homestead with the small children and expecting another. He had to get home, and by following the open road, for a man with a loaded wagon couldn't cut across in that rough country. He did buy a shotgun in addition to his pistol but he had known they would get him sooner or later if they were after him. They made it sooner.
Sheriff Angus sent a posse out for the body. They found Tisdale slumped down in the seat, his blood frozen over the Christmas presents for his children.
The men sat silent and dark on their horses, holding their impatience in the cold wind. "Any man that won't fight them sons of bitches after this ought to be run out of the country," a young puncher named Baker said angrily, and set the unnecessary spur to his faunching horse.
Before long men like Baker had more reason for anger. About the time Tisdale's body was brought back to Buffalo, Orley Jones' brother came riding in, uneasy that Orley hadn't reached home.
"Oh, hell! He left here three days ago!" the lumberman said in alarm.
A search party spread into the gullies and draws along the road, expecting the pattern set in the shooting of Tisdale to hold. It did. They found the body slumped down over the grain sacks and boxes of groceries in the wagon, frozen stiff, the eyes open and staring.
"By God, this one was Hesse's, as Johnny heard them plan," one of the men from Buffalo said.
Now men came streaming into Buffalo from all up and down the great range lands that lay up against the Big Horns, some from as far off as 100 miles and more. Their women were afraid, crying to leave the country or grimly taking gun in hand, shooting at tin cans about the distance that a man who came to kill would start firing. Rustlers, the Association had called these settlers, yet Waggoner, Jones, and Tisdale were known as quiet, hard-working men, making no trouble, fencing their places to avoid range-cattle damage. But they were plainly men who would stay. True, Allison Tisdale, Johnny's brother, was called a rustler as were all the others out with the nester roundup wagon, by law not allowed to operate until the big outfits had combed the range and were done, and not encouraged then. Even so it wasn't Allison they shot but John, who had been range boss for Roosevelt over on the Little Missouri for several years—Johnny the solid family man.
Canton was arrested for murder but he managed to get a preliminary hearing before Justice of the Peace Par-malee, also commander of the local National Guard and one of the few cattlemen friends left in office in Buffalo. Although Canton had the attack on Champion against him, and a mighty shaky alibi for the day that Tisdale was killed, with Basch an eyewitness to his presence in the gulch at the time, Parmalee released him. Some said on orders from DeForest Richards, state commander of the Guards, and a big cowman, too, and banker.
Now there was a real bull-roaring up and down the winter streets of Buffalo against both Canton and Hesse. Only the solid, law-abiding Scotsman, Sheriff Angus, could hope to hold angry mobs from riding out to burn down one ranch after another, clean out the big cattle companies, and get rid of all the hirelings of the foreign interests. At the least they must string up Canton, Canton and that Britisher Hesse.
Angus managed to hold them off long enough to give Canton and Hesse a chance to skip town in the night, with, it was said, Sutherland, Hesse's brother-in-law, riding with them. Even so they had a couple of real scares from little gangs that tried to cut them off on the dark ride to Gillette and the train that Red Angus recommended they take to get out of the state fast. Later, when a lot of new evidence was turned up, Acting Governor Barber refused to issue extradition papers to have Canton brought back from Chicago.* When he returned in March to join the coming invasion he was given a fast hearing and put under $30,000 bond for murder, signed April 4 by the leaders of the Regulators, as they called themselves, by all except Major Frank Wolcott, who, it was said, couldn't bail out a two-bit whore.
During the holiday season a long article in the Washington, D.C., Star had characterized the people out in Johnson County, Wyoming, as rustlers and bad men generally. No one cared to recall that the state's two U.S. senators, Carey and Warren, were ranchers who claimed vast stretches of government land illegally, both still members of the Stock Growers Association, with its record red from the blood its members and employees were shedding. Papers from Omaha to New York made a great story of the wrongs suffered by the cattlemen, perhaps not understanding the meaning of the term "public domain" or willing to side-jump it if they did. Very few understood that even the actual rustler was no more than an excuse for what was really a cattle war—a war of the ranch interests against the government and its avowed public-land policy: free land for everybody, a 160-acre place for every bona-fide homeseeker. This was the essence of what America meant to peoples of the earth and against this the cattlemen were warring, the crusade being joined.
Late in 1891 the newspapers of north Wyoming warned in huge headlines that the next step in the campaign of terror, of the bullet and the noose and the torch started with Averill and Cattle Kate and carried through Jones and Tisdale, was a great invasion of the Powder River country. Every man, woman, and child on the range was to be slaughtered so the settler holdings would revert to the public domain, the domain the cattlemen considered their preserve by a sort of divine right.
In the meantime the small ranchers of the Powder River region looked ahead to spring-branding time, hoping to protect their stock from the Association's general roundup that would put the wholesale label of "maverick" on all their stock and throw it into the coffers of the Live Stock Commissioners and the pay envelope of men like Canton, Smith, Elliott, and their kind. In the past the settlers had put out a partnership roundup wagon under Jack Flagg, individuals coming to it for a few days each and taking away their stock that had been collected. But they could only move to the range after the big outfits were done. This year the Northern Wyoming Farmers and Stockgrowers Association was organized and notices sent out of their roundup, to start May 1. This was well before the Wyoming Association's official date, although everybody knew that some of the big outfits did a lot of "soonering" even before May. Bill Walker, a young cowpuncher riding for Fred Hesse down around the Sweetwater, once ran into a bunch of Hesse cowboys putting the iron to a calf out of season. He rode toward them, and got a chunk of lead set into the grass ahead of him. He knew they recognized him and thought they were joking, but the next bullet got him in the shoulder and so he quit and went to trapping furs.
In reply to the notice of the independent northern roundup, the Wyoming Association publicly enlarged their black list to include all but the top of the Johnson County ranches and ordered their inspectors to hold back everything carrying the newly outlawed brands, with or without a bill of sale.
* * *
* In his posthumous autobiography, Frontier Trails, Canton says he was called to his wife and daughters, visiting in Chicago and ill with diphtheria.
CHAPTER II
STETSONED CRUSADERS
THE day the $30,000 bond was signed for Frank Canton, former Governor Baxter presided over the regular spring meeting of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association in the absence of President Clay, off in Europe. Forty-three members were present, still only eight from ranches owned by individuals. Nothing of the meeting was to be remembered and no minutes were kept.
All the next day the gun counters did a rushing business in Winchesters charged to the Association, in addition to the full case that the governor had donated from the state's arsenal. Two days later a special train of six cars drew in from Denver. Three were full of horses, bought and branded in Colorado by R. S. Van Tassell, one of the main backers of the Invasion. For a while he had been a partner of Tom Swan, and the son-in-law of Alex Swan, whose empire was lost to Clay and his financiers. Another car held the equipment
and the flatcar was piled with the three new wagons and the camping stuff.
The blinds of the one passenger car were kept drawn close, but rumors flew like gray snow on the April wind. Some realized that this was the start of the long-planned invasion of Johnson County. Inside were Tom Smith's twenty-five Texas gunmen, with their saddles and ammunition, and two adventurers who had attached themselves to the group, a young English rancher from Colorado and Dr. Charles Penrose, younger brother of the Pennsylvania senator and the Colorado mining engineer, perhaps induced to come because he had been a medical classmate of acting governor of Wyoming, Dr. Barber. Two newspapermen came to join, and the one recruit that Ijam's trip to Montana and Idaho produced, nobody from Tom Horn's search of the Dakotas. Twenty-four Wyoming Regulators got on at Cheyenne, most of them in great contrast to the rough-and-ready Texas gunmen—many of the northerners well educated and cultured and cosmopolitan. Two were the owners of the Duck Bar Ranch in which Theodore Roosevelt was said to have an interest—the elegant Teschie, H. E. Teschemacher, Harvard bred, a world traveler, his parents living in Paris, and his polished and handsome partner, Fred DeBillier, owner of a villa in France. There was W. J. Clarke, state water commissioner and rancher on the Crazy Woman Fork; J. N. Tisdale, state senator and his son Bob, both with ranches up north; A. B. Clark, owner of the DE; the Englishman R. M. Allen, general manager of the British-owned Standard Cattle Company over on the Belle Fourche not far from the Waggoner hanging and tied in with Baxter; J. C. Johnson, the eccentric partner of Tom Sun who had been in the lynching of Averill and Kate; C. A. Campbell, a Scotch-Canadian who lost his cattle in the 1886-87 winter and went in with the Clay-Robinson Company; Billy Booker under Clay in the Swan Ranches; A. D. Adams, the burly Scotsman who managed the Ferguson Land Company and today was delegated to ride close to Pap, E. W. Whitcomb, the gray-haired old cowman, in the country from back in the beaver-and-buffalo-robe days and much too old and wise to be riding the stormy trail to Johnson County today. But he was under repeated financial obligation to John Clay, too.