The Mammoth Book of the West

by Jon E. Lewis

  Two of the vigilantes crawled up and set fire to the hay stack and the cabin. The men inside stationed themselves at port holes and kept up the fight until they were all killed or burned up: The cabin burned to the ground. The tent was near the river bank and almost surrounded by thick brush and it was easier to escape from it than to get out of the cabin. Stringer Jack crawled under the tent and reached a dense clump of willows from which he made his last stand. Dixie Burr had his arm shattered with a rifle ball but jumped into an old dry well and remained until dark. Paddy Rose ran out of the tent, passed back of the men engaged at the cabin and concealed himself in a small washout and after dark made his escape. Nickerson, Edwards, and Swift Bill reached the river bank and crawling along through the brush and under the bank, succeeded in passing above the men at the cabin and hid in some brush and drift wood. Orvil Edwards and Silas Nickerson were the only ones that escaped without wounds. After the fight at the cabin the men went down the river and spent the day looking for the men who had escaped but failed to find them.

  On the afternoon of the ninth, the fugitives rolled some dry logs into the river, constructed a raft and started down stream. At Poplar creek agency they were discovered by some soldiers stationed there, ordered to come on shore and were arrested.

  Notice of their arrest was sent to Fort Maginnis and Samuel Fischel, deputy U.S. marshall, started at once to get the prisoners and take them to White Sulphur Springs. At the mouth of the Musselshell a posse met Fischel and took the prisoners from him. Nearby stood two log cabins close together. A log was placed between the cabins, the prisoners tied to this and shot.

  By the time the Stranglers were disbanded in 1884, rustling in the Montana–Dakota range country had been all but wiped out. This was far from true in Wyoming’s Johnson County, where grandee cattlemen were losing steers by the hundred to a motley crew of thieves which included hardened criminals but were mostly homesteaders and disenchanted cowpunchers wanting to establish their own spread. Through the agency of the powerful Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association, the cattlemen determined to protect their property and keep the range open – or, more accurately, under their exclusive control.

  Initially, the stockmen employed legal methods, hiring former peace-officers and gunmen to act as “stock detectives”. Posing as genuine cowboys, the detectives spied on the homesteaders and reported evidence of rustling to the barons. To prove brand alterations, the detectives often skinned the hide from stolen beeves; the inner side would reveal the original brand, which the rustler had altered on the outside with a running iron. Suspects were hauled to court, but juries failed to convict. Local people had little sympathy for the big stockmen, who were often wealthy absentees.

  The grandee stockmen tried another way. They secured the passing of an extraordinary piece of legislation, the Maverick Act, which made the branding of any unbranded calf by anyone who was not a member of the Stock Growers’ Association a felony. Small ranchers and settlers were thus unable to round up and brand their own calves without being charged with a crime.

  To oversee the efficiency of the Maverick Act, the Stock Growers’ Association hired Frank Canton as their chief range inspector. Previously the sheriff of Johnson County, Canton – whose real name was Joe Horner – had a long history of hired gunfighting and outlawry, including the robbery of a bank in Comanche, Texas. Under Canton’s zealous leadership, Association inspectors at markets and shipping points seized 16,000 cattle not bearing approved brands.

  While the seizing of the cattle outraged their homestead owners, the impounded cows’ lack of suitable brands only proved to the grandees that rustling was still a major problem. With the inspiring example of Granville Stuart’s Montana campaign before them, the local stockmen decided that Wyoming – especially Johnson County – required a dose of lynch-law medicine.

  Among the first victims was the 170-pound Ella Watson (also known as Kate Maxwell), who ran a saloon in Sweetwater County. Her business partner was Jim Averill, a justice of the peace who liked to scribe letters to the Casper Weekly Mail denouncing cattle barons as landgrabbers. By most accounts, the Canadian-born Watson was a prostitute, with mavericked cattle the medium of exchange. These she used to stock a small ranch near the saloon.

  Watson and Averill were both warned to leave the area, but refused. One night in July 1889 they were seized in their saloon and taken to Spring Creek Gulch, and hanged. A reporter described the scene when people from Casper found the bodies:

  Hanging from the limb of a stunted pine growing on the summit of a cliff fronting the Sweetwater River were the bodies of James Averill and Ella Watson. Side by side they swung, their faces swollen and discolored almost beyond recognition. Common cowboys’ lariats had been used and both had died by strangulation, neither having fallen over two feet. Judging from signs too plain to be mistaken, a desperate struggle had taken place on the cliff, and both man and woman had fought for their lives until the last.

  A local rancher called Albert J. Bothwell was widely believed to be behind the lynching. No indictments, however, were ever returned in the case. Bothwell later appropriated Watson’s cabin and turned it into an ice-house. To justify the murder, subtle propaganda turned Watson into the notorious rustler queen “Cattle Kate”, who “had to die for the good of the county.”

  After the execution of Watson and Averill, death spread across the land. A horse-raiser named Waggoner was lured from his home and hanged at “Dead Man’s Canyon”. In November 1891 four vigilantes, including Frank Canton, made a dawn visit to a cabin on Powder River, intending to kill two cowboys turned homesteaders, Ross Gilbertson and a Texan called Nathan D. Champion. The intruders burst in, one of them shouting “Give up, we have got you this time.” The assailant fired and missed. Champion grabbed his gun and put all four vigilantes to flight.

  The vigilantes were more successful a month later, shooting two homesteaders as they drove out of Buffalo, the only town in Johnson County.

  Such assassinations, however, only stirred up more animosity towards the big cattlemen. They did nothing to curb rustling. When, in spring 1892, the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association heard that the homesteaders were planning an unlawful pool round-up, they determined on nothing less than a full-scale invasion of Johnson County.

  Members of the Association formed themselves into a secret society they called the “Regulators”, electing as their leader former US Army Major Frank Wolcott. The portly, pompous Wolcott owned a large ranch on Deer Creek. At Wolcott’s instigation Tom Smith, a range detective with the Association, was sent south to hire an army of gunmen. The pay offered was $5 a day and expenses, plus a $50 bonus for every homesteader killed. Smith hired 22 gunfighters, one from Idaho, the rest from Texas. Wolcott, meanwhile, journeyed to Denver and hired a special train from Union Pacific – an engine, three freight cars and three passenger cars. When the train reached the state capital, Cheyenne, on 5 April, horses, guns, dynamite, ammunition and tents were loaded aboard. Just after nightfall, the gunfighters entrained, accompanied by five Association detectives and 19 cattlemen, including Frank Wolcott. A doctor Penrose signed on as official surgeon. Two pro-Association newspapermen, Sam T. Clover of the Chicago Herald and Ed Towse of the Cheyenne Sun, went along as war reporters.

  The Johnson County War

  At three o’clock in the morning of 6 April 1892, Wolcott’s army arrived at Casper, end of the line. Here they cut the telegraph wire to Buffalo and set off on horseback for Johnson County. In Wolcott’s pocket was a list of 70 homesteaders and rustlers who were to be executed by the Regulators. During a restover at the Tisdale Ranch, Wolcott learned that Nathan Champion and another homesteader, Nick Ray, were wintering at an old line camp, the KC. Wolcott consulted his list, and found that both Champion and Ray were on it. Wolcott’s original intention had been to ride directly to Buffalo, but now he decided to swing over to the KC and eradicate Champion and Ray first.

  The expedition reached the line camp in the bitterly cold morning
of 9 April. Inside were Champion – who had already driven off one gang of Stockmen assailants – and Ray, together with two fur trappers to whom they were playing host, Bill Walker and Ben Jones. The cabin was surrounded, and when the two trappers came out they were silently captured. A few minutes afterwards Nick Ray walked out the front door and was wounded by a volley from Regulator guns. He began to crawl back to the cabin, and Champion rushed out into the gunfire, grabbed his collar and hauled him into the cabin.

  Besieged on all sides, Champion began returning fire so dense and accurate that he kept his attackers at bay for hours. In amidst the action, Champion somehow managed to write an account of his ordeal in a little pocket book:

  Me and Nick were getting breakfast when the attack took place. Two men here with us – Bill Jones and another man. The old man went out after water and did not come back. His friend went out to see what was the matter and he did not come back. Nick started out and I told him to look out, that I thought there was someone in the stable and would not let them come back. Nick is shot, but not dead yet. He is awfully sick. I must go and wait on him.

  It is now about two hours since the first shot. Nick is still alive . . .

  They are still shooting and are all around the house. Boys, there is bullets coming in like hail. The fellows is in such shape I can’t get at them. They are shooting from stable and river and back of the house.

  Nick is dead. He died about 9 o’clock. I see smoke down at the stable. I think they have fired it. I don’t think they intend to let me get away this time.

  It is now about noon. There is someone at the stable yet; they are throwing a rope out at the door and drawing it back. I guess it is to draw me out. I wish that duck would get out further so I could get a shot at him.

  During the early afternoon Black Jack Flagg, homesteader, rode by on horseback, trailing his stepson who was driving a wagon. Flagg saw the men around the cabin and guessed what was occurring. When the Regulators fired on him, he yelled to his stepson to jump on one of the team horses and cut the rest loose. Flagg and his stepson then galloped away to Buffalo to raise the alarm.

  Realizing that he was losing precious time, Wolcott decided to fire Champion’s cabin. An old wagon was dragged up, piled high with brush and lit. Burning, it was pushed by four men to the side of the cabin.

  Champion stayed inside as long as he could. With the flames roaring around him, he wrote a final entry in his diary:

  Well, they have just got through shelling the house like hell. I heard them splitting wood. I guess they are going to fire the house tonight. I think I will make a break for it when night comes, if alive. It’s not night yet. The house is all fired. Goodbye, boys, if I never see you again.

  NATHAN D. CHAMPION

  Putting the book in his vest pocket and holding his Winchester in his hand, Champion rushed out the back of the cabin. The final moments of Nathan Champion were described by Sam Clover, one of the war correspondents with the Regulators:

  The roof of the cabin was the first to catch on fire, spreading rapidly downward until the north wall was a sheet of flames. Volumes of smoke poured in at the open window from the burning wagon, and in a short time through the plastered cracks of the log house puffs of smoke worked outwards. Still the doomed man remained doggedly concealed . . . “Reckon the cuss has shot himself”, remarked one of the waiting marksmen. “No fellow could stay in that hole a minute and be alive.”

  These words were barely spoken when there was a shout, “There he goes!” and a man clad in his stocking feet, bearing a Winchester in his hands and a revolver in his belt, emerged from a volume of black smoke that issued from the rear door of the house and started off across the open space surrounding the cabin into a ravine, fifty yards south of the house. But the poor devil jumped square into the arms of two of the best shots in the outfit, who stood with levelled Winchesters around the bend waiting for his appearance.

  Champion saw them too late, for he overshot his mark just as a bullet struck his rifle arm, causing the gun to fall from his nerveless grasp. Before he could draw his revolver a second shot struck him in the breast and a third and fourth found their way to his heart.

  Nate Champion, the king of cattle thieves, and the bravest man in Johnson County, was dead.

  The Regulators stood around their fallen foe, more in awe than in triumph. Wolcott, looking at the lifeless Nate Champion, was moved to exclaim, “By God, if I had fifty men like you, I could whip the whole state of Wyoming!”

  Champion’s pocket diary was found and read. The dead homesteader had recognized some of his besiegers, including Frank Canton, and these names were removed with a sharp knife. The diary was thrown back on the corpse, to be picked up by Sam Clover and later published on the front page of the Chicago Herald.

  After pinning a card saying “CATTLE THIEVES BEWARE” to Champion’s vest, the Regulators lined up behind Wolcott and moved out towards Buffalo, 50 miles to the north.

  In Buffalo, at that same moment, a citizens’ army was being raised to resist the Regulators. Wild rumours of invasion had been flying into the office of Sheriff “Red” Angus all day, which had finally been substantiated on the arrival of Black Jack Flagg and his stepson. A leading merchant of the town, the venerable white-haired Robert Foote, rode up and down the street on a stallion exhorting the men to arms. “If you have no arms,” Foote shouted, “come to my store and get them free of charge.” Meanwhile, Sheriff Angus dispatched two deputies, E. U. Snider and Arapaho Brown, to summon outlying homesteaders.

  At dawn on 10 April, Sheriff Angus rode out of Buffalo at the head of a 300-strong posse, whose ranks of volunteer citizens even numbered armed clergy. As it marched south, the giant posse was soon noticed by an advance Regulator scout who galloped back to warn Wolcott, now only 14 miles from town. Wolcott ordered a rapid retreat to the TA Ranch on Crazy Woman Creek, where the Regulators hurriedly built a barricade and prepared for a siege.

  The battle lasted two days. Towards the evening of the second day, the homesteaders built an ark of safety or “go-devil”, a moveable breastwork of logs six feet high attached to the front of a wagon. The plan was to push the ark close enough to the TA ranch house for men sheltered behind it to throw dynamite bombs. On the morning of 13 April, as the ark was being pushed into effective range, a bugle suddenly sounded over the hill.

  On the very brink of annihilation, the Regulators were saved by the timely appearance of Troops C, D and E of the Black Sixth Cavalry Regiment under Colonel J. J. Van Horn. During the previous night, Wolcott had succeeded in sending a messenger through the homesteaders’ lines and the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association had then called on the sympathetic Republican Acting Governor Amos W. Barber for help. Barber, in turn, had sent telegram after telegram to Washington D.C. urging President Harrison to send Federal troops to the relief of the Regulators at the TA Ranch.

  Colonel Van Horn gave Wolcott and his men protective custody and escorted them to safety at Fort D.A. Russell. Sheriff Angus was left to fume, “I had them [the Regulators] in my grasp, and they were taken from me.”

  None of the Regulators was ever brought to court, and the killings of Nate Champion and Nick Ray went unpunished. Farcically, all expenses (amounting to some $18,000) for the imprisonment of the Regulators while they awaited trial was charged against Johnson County, leading to the county treasury running dry. The county could not afford to prosecute. Moreover, the two trappers who witnessed the murders were spirited out of the state by friends of the Regulators and bribed into silence. With no money and no witnesses, the prosecution had no option but to move for dismissal of the case. In January 1893 the Regulators went free, and the Johnson County War was over.

  Almost. Traces of fallout from the invasion continued to descend for years. The cattle barons and their dominant Republican machine lost much of their influence, especially when a former ally, Asa Shinn Mercer, publisher of the Northwestern Livestock Journal, left their camp. In 1894 Mercer published a little bo
ok with a long title, The Banditti of the Plains, or the Cattlemen’s Invasion of Wyoming in 1892, which did much to expose the machinations of the “Cheyenne ring”.

  And, while it was clear to all that the era of open range had come to an end, the stock growers did not simply drop their campaign against rustlers. They only changed tactics. Instead of promulgating openly violent vigilantism, they paid bounty hunter Tom Horn to murder cattle thieves with stealth. Not cut short until 1903, Horn’s homicidal career marked a last throe of wildness on the Wyoming range.

  The Johnson County War was the starkest encounter between big ranchers and small farmers in the history of the West. Many of its events passed into popular stories and songs, among them “The Ballad of Nate Champion”. Inspired by Champion’s diary, the ballad became a favourite of settlers and cowboys everywhere, and ensured his status as one of the frontier’s greatest folk heroes.

  It was a little blood-stained book which a bullet had torn in twain.

  It told the fate of Nick and Nate, which is known to all of you;

  He had the nerve to write it down while the bullets fell like rain.

  At your request, I’ll do my best to read those lines again.

  “Two men stayed with us here last night, Bill Jones and another man,

  Went to the river, took a pail, will come back if they can.

  I told old Nick not to look out, there might be someone near,

  He opened the door; shot to the floor, he’ll never live, I fear.