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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.
Background
The dramatic events of 1892 took place against a background of violent conflict over land use that stretched from 1889 to 1909. Historian Richard Maxwell Brown refers to the events in Wyoming as part of a wider "Western Civil War of Incorporation."
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, concerned about this practice, forbade their employees from owning cattle and aggressively defended against rustling.
The situation 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; apparently agents of the larger ranches killed several alleged rustlers. A number of lynchings of alleged rustlers took place in 1891, including the double lynching of innocents Ella Watson and Jim Averell.
Events of 1892
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 killers from Texas; an expedition of 50 men was organized, which proceeded by train from Cheyenne to Casper, Wyoming, then toward Johnson County, intending to eliminate alleged rustlers and also, apparently, to replace the government in Johnson County. To prevent an alarm, the telegraph lines out of Buffalo were cut. 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. Two passers-by noticed the ruckus and rode to Buffalo, where the sheriff of Johnson County raised a posse of 200 men and set out for the KC. Back at the ranch, the cabin was set on fire, and when Nate Champion emerged he was gunned down.
The following day the posse led by the sheriff besieged the invading force at the TA Ranch on Crazy Woman Creek. After two days, one of the invaders escaped and was able to contact the acting Governor of Wyoming, Amos W. Barber. Frantic efforts to save the besieged invaders ensued, and telegraphs to Washington resulted in intervention by the President of the United States, Benjamin Harrison. The Sixth Cavalry from Fort McKinney was ordered to proceed to the TA ranch and take custody of the invaders and save them from the posse.
In the end the invaders went free after the court venue was changed and the charges dropped.
Political implications
Although many of the leaders of the invaders, such as W. C. Irvine, were themselves Democrats, the ranchers who had hired the Invaders were tied to the Republican party, and their opponents were mostly Democrats. A scandal was caused by the rescue of the Invaders at the order of President Harrison, a Republican, and the failure of the courts to prosecute them. As a result of the scandal, Wyoming went Democratic for a time.
Later events
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 assassin Tom Horn was convicted of murder and suffered the death penalty in 1903. 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).
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 ranchers, and creating a highly mythologized tale that bears little resemblance to the actual events. Perhaps because of this, the novel struck a strong chord with the public, and it was later made into no less than six film versions (in 1914, 1923, 1929, 1946, 1962, and 2000). There have been many later movies dealing with the Johnson County War, taking the side of the settlers, including Shane (1953), and Heaven's Gate (1981), and a TV movie called The Johnson County War (2002).
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.
See also
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.)
External link
History of Wyoming | History of the American West | Rebellions in the United States
"Johnson County War"