by Tim Slessor
While the railroading (and one uses the term literally) of those two cowboys had been a purely defensive measure, back in Cheyenne Major Walcott was mounting a major offensive. The plan required the involvement of the Federal Government. The local US Marshal was a man called Rankin who, in the past, seems to have been sympathetic to the problems of the cattle barons. Now the Major quietly urged him to send some deputies north to Buffalo to serve warrants for conspiracy on all the rebels. The Major knew that anger and resistance were certain, and so, with luck, a federal warrant server might get himself shot at or (with even more luck) killed. That would force a presidential declaration of martial law; the army would have to be sent into northern Wyoming to enforce the declaration and to quell what would quickly become, with a little encouragement, an open rebellion. When the insurgents had been put down with federal firepower, the Major and his crew could return to triumph over his former enemies, if any of them were left. Splendid.
The invaders in Cheyenne awaiting the trial that never happened. Billy Irvine is 5th from the right, Major Walcott stands to his right (with white cravat), and Frank Canton is seated in front of the Major
But US Marshal Rankin had doubts. It seems that he was aware of the “disappearance” of those two cowboys. And he did not need second sight to see the bullying Major’s plan for what it really was: a calculated incitement to violence. He did not like it. He refused to cooperate. The Major was furious. He and the Association tried a different tack. Once again the long-distance telegraph called for the help of Wyoming’s two State Senators in Washington. They were “instructed” to ask the President to authorize the US Department of Justice to suspend its uncooperative man in Cheyenne. But the US Attorney General, perhaps with a recent report from Marshal Rankin on his desk, was suspicious. He sent one of his inspectors out to Cheyenne to take a closer look at what was going on. A few days later, the Association, never an organization of much subtlety, met the inspector off the train and made the mistake of being over-persuasive with offers of assistance. The inspector would have none of it: he didn’t need help; he was quite capable of making his own inquiries. He took only a few days to write a damning report about what was afoot, fully upholding US Marshal Rankin:
“I am forced to the conclusion that it was not so much the intention to have the men [of Johnson County] arrested as it was to have them driven out of the country or killed... it appears that nearly everyone in authority was doing what the representatives of the cattle owners told them to do...”
Now Major Walcott and his not-so-merry men were not only furious, they were impotent. And their trial was coming up. The authorities in Cheyenne were in deep embarrassment; if they ever allowed the affair to come to court, a whole load of very dirty state washing was going to get aired. So, with legal delays and subterfuge, with adjournments and attempts to change the venue, they did their best. But public opinion in the rest of the state would not let go.
On the other hand, things were not going well for Johnson County. The state’s Attorney General was charging the County $100 a day to guard, feed and hold the prisoners. And there were all kinds of legal expenses. In another few months the County would be bankrupt. Meanwhile, the taxpayers of northern Wyoming were not getting much for their money; the prisoners were prisoners in name only. True, the Texans were under guard: there were too many of them and they knew too much. But, on any evening, the “gentlemen in custody” could be seen in the downtown saloons or over at the Cheyenne Club. After some months of this near-farce, the local judge decided to let the whole crowd have bail on their own surety. The Texans promptly took the next train south. That was the last Wyoming ever saw of them.
When, in the spring of 1893, the trial was convened, there were 23 defendants. Large crowds turned up at the courthouse; they need not have bothered. More than 500 potential jurors were challenged by the defense or the prosecution. After nearly three weeks, it had not been possible to find the twelve “good men and true” with whom both sides were satisfied. The defense attorneys were particularly long-winded in rejecting anyone who did not fit with their definition of impartiality. This was the last card in the Association’s hand. It was enough. Johnson County was now bankrupt with the cost of the never-ending delays. It had debts of $28,000. In the end, a weary attorney for Johnson County had to ask the judge to dismiss the case; his clients could afford no more. The judge complied, and no one was ever tried for the murder of Nate Champion and Nick Ray.
“There was no shout of victory”, wrote John Clay, president of the Association and now returned from his timely absence in England. “No unseemly disturbances - a quiet dispersal of this gallant band who had been led into an ill-conceived scheme. There was a mild jollification at the club but it did not touch the bubbling enthusiasm of the old days.” Elsewhere in his book, My Life on the Range, he described Major Walcott and his immediate crew as “a band of the best, bravest men who ever lived... intelligent beyond the average. This refers of course to the Wyoming men. I do not class the hired bad men from Texas who were with them.” (There speaks a solidly class-conscious Englishman.)
No one had won. But, in the dying storm of the conflict, the distant thunder rolled on. There were at least two more murders up in Powder River country, and more cavalrymen were posted to northern Wyoming. Libel actions and injunctions kept the lawyers busy for years. And there is an intriguing postscript involving book-burning and intimidation.
A book with an overlong title, The Banditti of the Plains, or the Cattlemen’s Invasion of Wyoming in 1892 - the Crowning Infamy of the Age, was secretly printed in Denver in 1894. Today, its original edition is one of the rarest books in the US. Indeed, given the efforts of the Cheyenne establishment, it is a wonder that the book was ever published at all. Its author, a Wyoming newspaperman called Asa Mercer, was charged with printing obscenities and then held in prolonged custody. At the same time, the printing plates were smashed.
Curiously, until the Powder River invasion, Mercer had written supportively of the cattlemen’s struggle. No one knows why he switched sides. Some have suggested that he sincerely recognized that his earlier stance had been wrong; others imply that he was simply a journalist with an eye for a good story. Does it really matter? Surely, more interesting (and revealing) are the extreme measures that some people felt were needed to destroy the book. As for Mercer’s motives, it seems that - like most people who, late in the day, see the light - his conversion made him even more ardent for his newfound cause than the folk who had been there all the time.
Indignation fuels every paragraph. Nowhere does he admit to the merits of understatement. “Nothing”, he writes, “so cold-blooded, so brutal and yet so cowardly was ever recoded in the annals of world history.” But what matters is that, despite the invective and the undoubted distortions, the story of the cattlemen’s invasion is all there. He names names, from the President down. He spares no one. Today, even with the generously loose libel laws of the United States, he would never get away with it. There were plenty of people in Wyoming who tried to stop him getting away with it in 1894. They came within a whisker of success. But enough copies of his book got out for it later (much later) to be reprinted. (See the Bibliography.) Though over-colored, it has become a useful starting point, or end point, for any account of what Mercer called the “Crowning Infamy of the Age”.
As a simple narrative, the Johnson County War and its aftermath is as rich a story of rifle-toting conflict and legal trickery as ever came out of the West. But it had a deeper meaning than that. Rustling was what the members of the Association thought it was about. And of course in an immediate sense they were right. Other people thought that it was about the small man’s rights and freedoms. They too were right. But, more deeply, given the perspectives of hindsight and history, it was really about the shift from a vast open-range pastoralism to a smaller scale of individual ranching, from free-grass feudalism to settled enclosure. In short, it was
about the antagonisms generated by an inevitable process: the domestication of what, only a few years before, had been an almost limitless wilderness. But if, in 1892, you had suggested to Major Walcott that what he and his feudal cronies had been fighting was an aspect of what some, both then and since, have more grandly called “Manifest Destiny”, the Major would have regarded you with a very strange look indeed.
Johnson County - We Haven’t Trusted Cheyenne since 1892...
A bumper sticker sometimes seen in Johnson County
Butch Cassidy And All That
If Butch Cassidy didn’t come back - if he really was killed in that shoot-out in Bolivia - then what were all those Wyoming old-timers talking about? Damn it, they knew what he looked like! They’d known him before he went off to South America. They didn’t get in a huddle to cook up a story - some of them didn’t even know each other, yet they all said much the same thing: “Sure, it was Butch.” Yes, he’d have been older, but in 20 or 30 years a fellow’s looks don’t change that much. Anyway, they’d have shared old jokes, old gossip. So, are we meant to believe that those old-timers were all just a bunch of conniving mischief-makers? Or were they just gullible old hayseeds, taken in by some imposter?
A comment in an interview with Larry Pointer, long-time researcher and then writer of the book In Search of Butch Cassidy
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The story goes that, by 1933, Butch Cassidy was almost bankrupt; he had lost his livelihood and nearly all his savings in the recent financial crash. So, working under the name William Phillips, which he had used since returning from South America a quarter of a century earlier, he set about writing his autobiography - in the third person. Eventually, a year later, he sent the manuscript off to Hollywood. He called the rather rambling narrative The Bandit Invincible: the Story of Butch Cassidy. He ended his tale with details of a shoot-out in South America from which he (in the third person) was the only survivor. Butch was obviously hoping that some movie-maker would buy the rights, and thus the income would go some way to clear his debts. So he must have been very disappointed, insulted even, when, only a few weeks later, his story was returned as being “too preposterous to be believable”. He tried to sell his work elsewhere, to magazines and publishers. But no one was interested. Three years later, Butch died of cancer, penniless. The local Spokane newspaper carried a brief obituary for William Phillips, a one-time local businessman.
In fact, as the world knows, it was another 35 years before Hollywood bought into the many-stranded story of Butch Cassidy and, via Richard Goldman’s marvelous screenplay and Burt Bacharach’s music and lyrics (“Raindrops”, amongst others), fashioned it into one of the most successful movies of all time. It made super stars of Robert Redford and Paul Newman. And everyone fell in love with Katherine Ross, who was cast as Sundance’s girl, Etta Place.
It was consequent on the worldwide interest triggered by the film that a copy of The Bandit Invincible came to light. The manuscript, initially in the keeping of Mr. Phillips’ adopted son, had lain forgotten for nearly 40 years until what one might call “perusal rights” were granted to a Spokane journalist, James Dullenty, and to the historian-author Larry Pointer.
The fact is that, before the film, Butch hardly had a place on the world’s roll call of bandit heroes. Even within the US he ranked well below, say, Jesse James, Doc Holliday, Belle Starr, the Dalton Brothers, or Billy the Kid. Yet, within a year or two of the film’s release, he had surely become the world’s favorite outlaw. While the film certainly takes full advantage of dramatic license, many of its details are essentially true: Butch really was, by almost every account, a good-looking and very likeable rogue, a gentleman who seems to have behaved, except when deeply angry, with a quiet courtesy to almost everyone, even in a hold-up. Until that shoot-out, there seems to be no record that he ever killed anybody. And yes, he really did enjoy the company of children and they, in turn, seemed to adore him, and he really did catch the turn-of-the-century craze for cycling and, further, for doing acrobatics on his machine. Also he really did play the harmonica, after a fashion. As for Sundance? We know less about him, but, according to most reports, he had the laconic and mordant wit that comes across so powerfully in the film. He was said to be a very mean hand with a shooter and, in terms of his temper, he could also be quick on the draw. He does seem to have really loved Etta; and Etta, neat and beautiful, really did look rather like Katherine Ross (or should that be the other way around?). Together with other members of the so-called Wild Bunch, Butch and Sundance really did get away with holding up a succession of banks and with blasting their way into a series of railroad bullion cars. Also there really was a relentless Pinkerton detective who, ploddingly, seemed to be getting ever closer. Plus the Union Pacific railroad, in some desperation, really did put together a posse that held itself in a state of almost permanent pursuit-readiness. So when, in the end, things just got too hot, the three of them really did take off for South America. But there is just one rather important aspect, perhaps the most important (certainly the most intriguing) aspect in which the film may have got things seriously wrong...
More than 30 years ago, while making a documentary for the BBC, I interviewed a veteran Montana rancher called Boyd Charter. He told me that his father, as a very young man back in the late 1890s, had been one of Butch Cassidy’s get-away-men; he had held the horses while Butch and others went into a bank to make what Mr. Charter told me were “some cash withdrawals”. No less interesting was his account of how one summer in the early 1920s, when he was aged 17, he and his sister became friends with a man who had turned up unannounced at their father’s Wyoming ranch; the stranger unloaded a tent from a T-Model Ford (with a small trailer) and then, for a week or two, made himself comfortable camping down by the river. Apparently, Boyd’s father greeted the visitor warmly. It was obvious that they were old buddies, but they were both quite unforthcoming about the origin and history of their friendship. At the time, young Boyd learned only that the visitor’s name was Bill Phillips. Even then, his father warned him and his sister not to talk about their visitor to the neighbors or when they went to town. Only much later did their father tell them something of his earlier acquaintance with their guest, whom he then revealed was a certain Mr. Cassidy.
I believed Boyd Charter-which means that if anybody was killed in some Bolivian shoot-out, then it can’t have been Butch Cassidy. I believe he came back, and so do many others who have been much better informed than me. The fact is that less than a lifetime ago there were still living at least a dozen old men and women - ranchers, cowboys, lawmen, store keepers, garage mechanics and others - who, like Boyd Charter’s father, had known Butch when they were all young men in central Wyoming through the 1890s, and who two or three decades later still easily recognized and greeted (but, one imagines, with some surprise) the man they had known back in those earlier days. As author Larry Pointer’s comment at the top of this chapter makes very clear, they could not all have been “just gullible old hayseeds” taken in by some clever imposter.
***
Incidentally, on Larry Pointer’s suggestion, we filmed that interview in an entirely appropriate location: the remote Hole-in-the-Wall valley of the Big Horn Mountains in central Wyoming; it was appropriate because that valley was one of several hide-outs across the West used by Butch Cassidy and his crew when, after a bank raid, they wanted to lie low for a while. Yet, despite the legends, it was not a place that was particularly difficult to get into. Rather, it was the remoteness and geography of the place that would give any outlaw plenty of warning of an approaching posse of lawmen. And certainly, in its remoter draws and gulches, even today, one could hide herds of cattle or horses - or outlaws.
***
The real-life story began in 1866, when Cassidy was born and christened as Robert LeRoy Parker, the first of 13 children of a Mormon family - though, it seems, not a polygamous one. Just ten years earlier, his father Maximill
ian Parker, then a lad of about 12, had helped his father (another Robert) and his mother push a handcart, loaded with everything that they owned, from a railhead in Iowa across more than 1,000 miles of prairie and mountain to the Mormons’ New Jerusalem. Grandfather Robert had been a cotton worker in the Lancashire town of Accrington, when, as an early convert, he had been drawn across the Atlantic with his wife and young son in answer to Brigham Young’s call for pilgrim-artisans to join his flock in a far-away Promised Land.
When that young son Maximillian was grown to 21, he married Ann Gillies; she had not long arrived from England (maybe from Newcastle), and Robert Leroy was born the following year. Presently, the Parkers took up some rough farming land just outside the small Mormon settlement of Circleville, nearly 200 miles south of Salt Lake City. The family grew: a baby arrived every 18 months. So money was scarce, and by the time young Robert LeRoy was 13 he had to leave school and work full-time on a nearby ranch. During this time, he had two experiences that, some say, planted the seeds of a cynicism toward authority that was to stay with him, one way and another, for the rest of his life. The first incident allegedly happened when the lad rode into town to buy some new overalls, only to find that for some reason the local store was shut. Night was coming on and he wanted to get home. So he climbed in, helped himself, and left a signed note saying that he, Robert LeRoy Parker, would be back with the money before the end of the week. But the store-owner, on opening up the next morning, took a dim view of the break-in and reported the boy to the town’s Mormon authorities. He was sent for and reprimanded and, though it went no further, one supposes that, as a 13-year-old, he would have been deeply humiliated, and would surely have resented the imputation that he was less than straight and honest. The second of those experiences occurred a little later: his father lost a tract of land to which he was sure that he had rightful title; it was taken from him and given to a disputatious neighbor on the decision of the local Mormon elders. Their judgment seems to have been prompted less by the legalities of the matter than by the fact that Mr. Parker’s church attendance was deemed to be too infrequent.