Johnson County War
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The Johnson County War, also known as the War on Powder River or Wyoming Civil War, was a range war which took place in Johnson County, Wyoming, in the Powder River Country, in April 1892.
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[edit] Background
Violent conflict over land use has been a somewhat common occurrence in the development of the American West, and was particularly prevalent during from 1889 to 1909, a period which historian Richard Maxwell Brown has called the "Western Civil War of Incorporation" and of which the Johnson County War was part.
In the early days in Wyoming, most of the land was in the public domain, open both to stockraising as open range and to homesteading. Large numbers of cattle were turned loose on the open range by large ranches, sometimes financed by British and other investors.
In the spring a roundup was held and the cows and the calves belonging to each ranch were separated and the calves branded. Before the roundup, sometimes calves (especially orphan or stray calves) were surreptitiously branded, and thus taken. The large ranches aggressively defended against cattle rustling, which sometimes included the lynching of suspect rustlers, and the ranches generally forbade their own employees from owning cattle. In addition, while property and use rights were usually respected among big and small ranches on accordance of who was first to settle the land and the size of the herd, large ranching outfits would sometimes band together and use their power to monopolize large swaths of range land and prevent newcomers from settling the area.
The often uneasy relationship between larger, wealthier ranches and smaller ranch settlers became steadily worse after the poor winter of 1886. The large companies began to aggressively appropriate land and control the flow and supply of water in this area; they justified these excesses on what was public land by using the catch-all allegation of rustling, and vigorously sought to exclude the smaller ranchers from participation in the annual roundup. Agents of the larger ranches killed several alleged rustlers, often on dubious evidence, with a number of lynchings of alleged rustlers taking place in 1891, including the double lynching of innocents Ella Watson and Jim Averell.
[edit] The war
The large ranches were organized as the Wyoming Stock Growers Association (the WSGA) and gathered socially as the Cheyenne Club in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
The WSGA hired a number of killers from Texas and organized an expedition of 50 men with the intention of eliminating alleged rustlers in Johnson County and replacing the local government. The men proceeded by train from Cheyenne to Casper, Wyoming and then toward Johnson County, cutting the telegraph lines out of Buffalo in order to prevent an alarm. The expedition was accompanied by two newspaper reporters whose lurid accounts later appeared in the eastern newspapers.
The first target of the WSGA was Nate Champion at the KC Ranch, a small rancher who was active in the efforts of small ranchers to organize a competing roundup. Four men were at the KC; two were captured as they emerged from the cabin; one was shot and died a few hours later; the fourth, Nate Champion, was besieged. The cabin was set on fire, and when Nate Champion emerged he was gunned down.
Two passers-by noticed the ruckus and rode to Buffalo (the county seat of Johnson County), where the sheriff raised a posse of 200 men and set out for the KC.
The following day the posse led by the sheriff besieged the WSGA force at the TA Ranch on Crazy Woman Creek. After two days, one of the WSGA members escaped and was able to contact the acting Governor of Wyoming, Amos W. Barber. Frantic efforts to save the WSGA group from the sheriff's posse ensued, and subsequent telegraphs to Washington resulted in intervention by the President of the United States, Benjamin Harrison. Harrison ordered the Sixth Cavalry from Fort McKinney to proceed to the TA ranch and take custody of the WSGA expedition and save them from the sheriff's posse.
In the end the WSGA group went free after the court venue was changed and the charges dropped.
[edit] Aftermath
Although many of the leaders of the WSGA's hired force, such as W. C. Irvine, were themselves Democrats, the ranchers who had hired the group were tied to the Republican party, and their opponents were mostly Democrats. Many viewed the rescue of the WSGA group at the order of President Harrison, a Republican, and the failure of the courts to prosecute them a serious political scandal with overtones of a class war. As a result of the scandal, Wyoming went Democratic for a time.
From 1885 to 1909, fifteen supposed rustlers were killed by mobs. Starting in 1892, ranchers began to hire individual paid assassins. The killers, and the ranchers who hired them, were shielded by corrupt elected officials, and coroners' juries tended to praise the killers and dwell on the supposed evil reputations of the victims. Some newspapers followed this lead, but for example the Cheyenne Sun wrote concerning the 1885 murder of Si Partridge, "How far lynch law may be given the support of public opinion is going to be a question for the western country to determine some day" (Cheyenne Sun, quoted in the Laramie Boomerang, August 13, 1885, quoted in Pfeifer 2004). After the turn of the century, public tolerance for the violence decreased. The end of the violence was enforced by public disgust at the 1909 Tensleep Raid, in which three sheep workers were killed by fifteen masked men (Pfeifer 2004).
[edit] Popular culture
The Johnson County War, with its overtones of class warfare, and intervention of the President of the United States to save the lives of a gang of hired killers and set them free, does not fit in well with the American myth of the west. The Virginian, a seminal 1902 western novel, solved the problem by taking the side of the wealthy ranchers, creating a highly mythologized tale dealing with the themes of the Johnson County war but bearing little resemblance to the actual events. The novel was popular, striking a strong chord with the public and later made into no less than six film versions (in 1914, 1923, 1929, 1946, 1962, and 2000). However, there have been other movies made dealing with the strong themes associated with the Johnson County War and taking the side of the settlers, including Shane (1953), and Heaven's Gate (1981), and a TV movie called The Johnson County War (2002).
[edit] The Banditti of the Plains
In 1894, eyewitness Asa Shinn Mercer published an indignant account of the war, titled The Banditti of the Plains. The book was effectively suppressed for many years.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Pfeifer, Michael J. "Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society: 1874-1947." University of Illinois Press, Chicago. 2004. (This is a cross-regional study of lynching, with one of the regions studied being Wyoming during the Johnson County War.)
