by Tim Slessor
It did not actually work out that way. When the crash came, all the investors - not least those in distant Scotland and England - took a hammering. On the northern plains, where most of their investments had been made with such high promise only a few years before, it was becoming obvious to the people on the spot that every fourth or fifth year there came a winter that was too severe for the cattle to forage for themselves; they needed hay if they were going to be meaty enough to be saleable in the spring.
But the causes of the crash were wider than just a lack of winter-feed in the bad years. For some time, more and more investors had been enticed by the rich returns. So there was a deal of over-grazing. The grass and the profits were wearing thin. To disguise the problem, some directors quietly sold off parts of their company’s assets - parcels of land and the cattle on that land. The cash thus generated was then used to boost dividends to keep the distant and unsuspecting investors happy and, of course, to entice new investment - one of the oldest tricks in the corporate fraudster’s handbook. It worked for a while because cattle numbers (and value) were calculated on what was called the “book count”. This was a wholly theoretical calculation dependent on every cow producing a calf every year. It ignored rustlers, disease, the weather and other depredations - to say nothing of those cows (or bulls?) that did not perform as required. The only people not in on the secret seem to have been the investors reading the seductive balance sheets back east and, even further away, in Britain. But, by the mid 1880s the truth began to overtake the fiction; in some cases the book count was found to exced the reality by 50%.
Then came another blow: the winter of 1886-7 was unusually hard. It was preceded by a very dry summer, so many cattle were already in poor condition before the storms even arrived. Across the northern plains of Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas and down into Nebraska tens of thousands of cattle did not survive.
***
During the year we lived in north-west Nebraska, the first snow fell before the end of September. The temperature had peaked at 1000F only five weeks before; one night in February it fell to 440F below freezing. That range of more than 1100F was, they told us, “only a little bitty more than usual. What matters is the wind-chill and the precipitation”. I don’t know if, back in 1886, they talked about “precipitation”, or if they still called it “snow”, but by mid-October of that year they were getting plenty. And wind: dry, sub-zero temperatures are just about endurable to people and to livestock, but it is the wind that makes the difference.
A snow-blizzard or, even worse, an ice-storm on the High Plains is a thing entirely of its own, beholden to no modifying influence whatsoever. It blows down from the north like a hammer. From the Arctic to the plains it seems that there is nothing bigger than a barn to deflect it. It knocks down trees, buries trains, blows over trucks, turns rivers into solid ice, and even kills people. Hours before the storm arrives, barriers are erected on all the roads leading out of town, to stop anyone who has not heard the news. Schools close (or fill up with stranded travelers), drivers out on the highways head for the nearest refuge, shops shut to send their employees home, and local radios give an almost minute-by-minute countdown. “Right now, it’s at Rapid City; weatherman says it’ll be coming our way within the hour. More details coming up. Stay tuned.”
Every year some motorists don’t catch the warnings or are foolish enough to think that they can make a run for it before the storm hits them. Mostly they will be lucky, but not always. They will come to a stop because in the “white-out” they can’t see the road, or are blocked by a drift. If they stay in their cars, they might survive. Sometimes they get out to look for help; sometimes they find it and sometimes, huddled in some roadside gully, their bodies aren’t found until the thaw. A blizzard can last for two hours or for two days. They don’t happen everywhere every year, but almost every year they happen somewhere. Early in 1887 they seemed to happen “all over”.
Nowadays, ranchers have snow-fences and shelter-belts of trees to protect their cattle from the full force of the storms. Nevertheless, the effect of a sudden blizzard on untended cattle can still be disastrous; a rancher can lose a sizeable proportion of his herd. The animals will drift before the wind until they come to a fence, where their frozen carcasses are later found. Sometimes they will just freeze to death; sometimes the snow builds up inside their nostrils and around their mouths until they suffocate; sometimes they may be blinded by icicles building up on their shaggy forelocks and hanging down over their eyes. Sometimes the survivors will have large areas of their flanks stripped to bare, pink skin where the ice has built up until it is so heavy that it finally falls off, dragging out the hair on which it has frozen.
Ranchers usually reduce the numbers of cattle they will keep through the winter by selling in the fall. Apart from the climatic unpredictability, any cattle remaining will have to be given feed, and there is only a limited amount of that available. Northern ranchers also take the precaution, the previous spring, of running their bulls with the cows a little later than is the practise further south. They do this so that the calves will not be born before the end of April. Even so, an unusually late storm - and they can be as late as mid-May in northern Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas - can kill a lot of calves.
***
Before the winter of 1886-7 they took none of those precautions. They expected to lose some cattle; they would write the loss off as a necessary overhead. But that winter the so-called “die-up” was worse than ever before. Newspapers tell of blizzards before the end of November. The Bismarck Tribune wrote: “The storm of Monday and Tuesday was the worst on record. The snow drifted to a greater extent than ever before and it penetrated buildings wherever it was possible for the wind to find its way.” In December the weather moderated a little, but all this did was to melt the surface of the snow which then, when sub-zero temperatures returned two weeks later, re-froze into a crust of concrete-like ice; the cattle could not break through to reach the grass underneath. Many died of starvation.
It was reckoned that the northern ranchers lost at least 40% of their herds. Some lost twice that many. John Clay, who had been an early English neighbor of Moreton Frewen’s in the Powder River country, wrote in his memoirs that “the cowmen were flat broke. Many of them never recovered... most of the Easterners and the Britishers said ‘enough’ and went away. The summer and fall of 1886 was, to use a western expression, simply a fright. The big guns toppled; the small ones had as much chance as a fly in molasses.”
Perhaps Clay was not quite right; a few of the “big guns” picked up the pieces and slowly built their herds again; some of the small guns struggled on. But by the late 1880s the ever-optimistic hey-day of the open range was gone. It was prudence, not profligacy that now governed the successful cattleman’s strategy. And another thing: a different breed of pioneer was closing up behind - the settler and his family. For most rancher-barons, these late arrivals were to become much more than just a nuisance...
Range War
We are beset by rustlers... there is an urgent necessity for a lynching bee.
Major Walcott, a leader of Wyoming’s large ranchers, advocating that the sternest measures be taken against all alleged rustlers
The Johnson County War... the most notorious event in the history of Wyoming.
A comment by Ray O’Leary and Bob Edwards, in their book Frontier Wyoming (2006)
***
With hired gunmen from Texas, bloody intimidations, vigilante hangings and assassinations, crooked lawyers and the cavalry cantering onto the scene at the last moment, the story of what is usually known as the Johnson County War has the theatrical sweep of a Hollywood epic. Indeed, the incomparable Shane was at least partly based on it; and the three hours of one of the most expensive film flops ever made, Heaven’s Gate, was almost wholly so. But as a social drama that really happened, it had deeper causes and wider consequences than might have bee
n invented by any mere scriptwriter.
To start at the beginning... “If you can’t beat them, join them.” But what if “they” won’t let you in? Well, if you had hopes of starting your own small ranch or farm in Wyoming in the late 1880s, you had best be very determined and very well armed. For more than a decade, the cattle barons had had things very much their own “closed shop” way. They saw no reason to change. By pressuring the state government in Cheyenne they virtually wrote laws in their own favor; by dominating the banks they promoted their own wealth; by leaning on the editors of a chosen newspaper or two they made sure of a favorable press; by legal manipulation they held off late-comers; and by their own self-righteousness they reckoned they could (and should) get away with anything, even murder. But the “Die-up of ’87” had weakened them financially, and now a wave of would-be settlers - trespassers who did not give a damn for the careless imperialism of the barons - were nibbling away at them territorially. And there were other, more distant forces to worry them as well.
Starting back east, antagonisms had been growing between “big business” and the individual, between conservative and radical, between speculator and worker, between creditor and debtor. There were clashes in factories, mines, iron-works and slums. The discontent was catching out West. The momentum had gone out of Manifest Destiny: it didn’t provide a living; it didn’t pay the rent. The railroads, eastern financiers and their banks, big government and politicians - these were the enemies. The would-be farmers, the homesteaders, hit by falling prices and harassed by their creditors, were thoroughly unsympathetic to “big money”. In the famous words of a settler wife, it was time to “raise a lot less corn and a lot more hell”. It was Populism in the west, Trade Unionism in the east.
The barons of the northern plains, some of them being those English, Scots and Irish m’luds who had managed to hang on through the problems of a few years before, were well aware of the undercurrents. Around the billiard tables and in the smoking room of the Cheyenne Club, the talk was of getting convictions and meaningful penalties against rustlers, of falling cattle prices and the need to cut cowboys’ wages. And among some, there was undoubtedly quieter and more sinister talk: buying judges, arranging evidence, and even secret assassinations.
So during the late ’80s, battle lines were forming. On the one side were the ranchers of the powerful Wyoming Stock Growers Association, in informal session most evenings in the Cheyenne Club. On the other side was a shifting alliance drawn, at different times, from almost everyone else in the state.
As good a time as any to pick up the narrative is late on the afternoon of 30 October 1891. The place: the town of Buffalo in north-east Wyoming. Then, as now, it was the unofficial “capital” of the Powder River country. Main Street would have been crowded with buckboards and saddle horses tethered to the hitching rails. By early evening the saloons would have been emptying; people were going to a meeting.
First arrivals would have taken all the seats, so others stood around the walls; at the doorway latecomers peered over the shoulders of those in front, straining to catch the run of the proceedings. There are no written records (perhaps deliberately) of who said what. But we can be almost certain that there were angry words, appeals to solidarity, and warnings of the intimidations that would undoubtedly be coming their way. Cheyenne, 250 miles away to the south, was decried as the source of all their problems. By the end of the evening, on a show of hands and loud vocal approval, a number of decisions had been made. None was more important (or more provocative to the cattle barons) than the title that the meeting chose for itself: the Northern Wyoming Farmers and Stock Growers Association. The small ranchers and farmers of the Powder River country reckoned that things would be a little different from now on. For a start, they would now be running their own spring round-ups, away from the heavy-handed bullying of the official Cheyenne-based Association. With that decided, everyone shuffled out of the hall and, after the usual sidewalk post mortems, they went back to the saloons or rode home.
Two days later, very early on a frosty morning, the man who, at that Buffalo meeting, had been suggested as the “captain” of the first round-up of the new Association was awakened by a gun shot. It missed. Nate Champion was half out of his bed when from just outside the now-open door a voice called out, “Give up. We’ve got you this time.” The isolated one-room cabin (50 miles south of Buffalo) was very small and its interior would have been much darker than outside. Perhaps, for that reason, the attacker could not see properly and his aim - when he heard Champion moving for his own gun - was poor. The man fired twice in quick succession - and missed again. Champion, whose eyes were accustomed to the gloom, fired and hit the man in the stomach. He and his three companions just beyond the doorway turned and fled. Champion had identified one of the would-be assassins.
It has to be said that Champion was certainly not the embodiment of all Western virtues. On the contrary, he was a self-opinionated Texan. He had come north a few years before to work as a cowboy on one of the big spreads. But at some point he had broken one of the most sacred tenets of the big ranchers’ Association by deciding to graze a few cattle of his own. The Association’s rule was rigid: no cowboy could possess so much as a calf because, to permit him to do so, would be to encourage him to “divert” some of his employer’s cattle and then, later, to sell them as his own. Any suspected cowboy was immediately sacked and, from then on, he was barred from employment by all the Association members. Anyone thus blackballed could no longer find work as a cowboy - maybe the only trade he knew. So, unless he left the state to find work on the railroads or to drive a freight-wagon, he almost had to become a small-scale rustler. The country of the Powder River, with Buffalo as its center, had more than its share of such men. Owning a few calves (or maybe more than just a few) had become socially acceptable. The region was regarded, by the people who mattered down in Cheyenne, as a breeding ground of petty thieves; plus a few who were not so petty.
So the Association had Champion firmly in its sights; they would make an example of him. No one was ever charged with his attempted murder, even though Champion knew two of his assailants, and one of the others would have needed treatment for that stomach wound. (In fact he died some weeks later, 1,000 miles away in Missouri.) One of the men recognized by Champion was Frank Canton, a so-called “range detective” in the pay of the official Association.
It had happened before. One did not have to be a cattle thief to incur the enmity of the Association. It was enough that you knew your rights and, thereby, that you were a troublemaker. In central Wyoming, 100 miles or more south-west of Powder River country, a couple of years earlier, a posse had kidnapped a man and his common-law wife. They made such an untidy mess of the hangings (the “drop” was allegedly a mere 2 feet) that the couple slowly strangled on the ropes. The slowly twisting bodies were left as an example. The man, James Averell, had been making life awkward for the Wyoming barons by writing letters to his local newspaper, the Casper Weekly Mail, pointing out the illegality of some of their land claims.
Of the barons, he wrote, “They are opposed to anything that would settle and improve the country or make it anything but a cow pasture for Eastern speculators... They advance the idea that a poor man has nothing to say in the affairs of his country... Is it not enough to excite one’s prejudice to see the Sweetwater [River] owned, or claimed, for a distance of seventy-five miles from its mouth by just three or four men?” Obviously, he had to be silenced. The woman, Kate Watson, had some calves in her corral; the assassins claimed that the calves were payment by some local cowboys for the lady’s favors. No evidence was ever produced to substantiate the allegation. But that did not stop the Cheyenne Daily Leader, a newspaper very much in the pocket of the big cattle interests, from referring to Kate Watson as “a brushwood tart of no consequence”. Again, the identity of the murderers was an open secret, but no one was ever charged - a fact that would seem to demonstrat
e the grip that the barons had on Wyoming’s judicial processes. Interestingly, even today, one can still start an argument (well, an intriguing discussion) in some parts of the state by suggesting that there is little evidence to think that Averell and Watson had come by their cattle illegally.
By the early 1890s no one in Wyoming was in any doubt about the power of the Association. Yet its ruthless bullying was also its weakness. Once away from its power-base in Cheyenne, it was so disliked that it could very seldom get a conviction. Juries, having some sympathy for even the most obvious rogues, would arrive at “not guilty” verdicts. So the barons decided that the time had come to take the law into their own hands. The Powder River country was the region that caused them most pain; the draws and broken hills that had given cover to Sioux war-parties only 15 years earlier now gave it to the rustlers. “God’s teeth, those people up there in Buffalo have even gotten themselves together and formed their own Association. Damned subversion! It must be stopped - otherwise everyone will be at it.” That observation, or something close to it, must have been heard more than once in the dining room of the Cheyenne Club.
Within a few weeks, not only had Nate Champion been attacked, but two other men were murdered as they drove their wagons home from Buffalo shopping trips. The first was Orley Jones, a young cowboy who ran some cattle on a small homestead he had started in the canyon country some 60 miles south of Buffalo. By all accounts, he was an “uppity” fellow, though whether he was a rustler would have depended on whose side you were on. Anyway, Orley Jones’ body was found a little way off the wagon track about half way home. No one knew who the assassin was, but there were some well-informed guesses.
Next was John Tisdale. In Buffalo to buy stores, he was overheard voicing his own well-informed suppositions about the assassin. He too was a Texan who, with some savings, had set up a small ranch a year or two earlier in the same neighborhood as Orley Jones and Nate Champion. He was a well-educated and settled family man; it seems unlikely that he was a rustler - though, like many people in those parts, he probably did not ask questions of those he knew who were. With his wagon loaded, Tisdale set off for home. It would not have been difficult for someone to watch his departure and plan accordingly. He was shot some miles south of town at a place where the track dipped down to cross a small draw called Haywood’s Gulch. One can still see the likely spot. Evidently, with the job done, the murderer led the loaded wagon a little way up the gulch and then shot the two horses. The whole business would have taken only a few minutes. Easy. But one thing would have worried the hit-man: he knew that he had been seen.