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Frontier Wars |
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This peculiar phase of
frontier nature usually came most into evidence over the questions of
county seats. Hardly a frontier county seat was ever established without a
fight of some kind, and often a bloody one. It has chanced that the author
has been in and around a few of these clashes between rival towns, and he
may say that the vehemence of the antagonism of such encounters would have
been humorous, had it not been so deadly. Two "cities," composed each of a
few frame shanties and a set of blue-print maps, one just as barren of
delight as the other, and neither worth fighting over at the time, do not
seem typical of any great moral purpose; yet at times their citizens
fought as stubbornly as did the men who fought for and against slavery in
Kansas.
One instance of this sort of thing will do -- the
Stevens County War, one of the most
desperate and bloody, as well as one of the most recent feuds of local
politicians.
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Heading for Timber, by Frederic Remington,
1917 |
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For some reason, perhaps
that of remoteness of time, the wars of the cow men of the range seem to
have had a bolder, a less sordid and more romantic interest, if these
terms be allowable. When the cow man began to fence up the free range, to
shut up God's out-of-doors, he entrenched upon more than local or a
political pride. He was now infringing upon the great principle of
personal freedom. He was throttling the West itself, which had always been
a land of freedom. One does not know whether all one's readers have known
it, that unspeakable feeling of freedom, of independence, of rebellion at
restraint, which came when one could ride or drive for days across the
empire of the plains and never meet a fence to hinder, nor need a road to
show the way. To meet one of these new far-flung fences of the rich men
who began to take up the West was at that time only to cut it and ride on.
The free men of the West would not be fenced in. The range was theirs, so
they blindly and lovingly thought. Let those blame them who love this day
more than that.
But the fence was the
sign of the property owning man; and the property-owning man has always
beaten the nomad and the restless man at last, and set metes and bounds
for him to observe. The nesters and rustlers fought out the battle for the
free range more fiercely than was ever generally known.
One of the most widely
known of these cow wars was the absurd
Johnson County War,
of
Wyoming,
which got much newspaper advertising at the time -- the summer of 1892
--and which was always referred to with a certain contempt among
old-timers as the "dude war." Only two men were killed in this war, and
the non-resident cattle men who undertook to be ultra-Western and do a
little vigilante work for themselves among the rustlers found that they
were not fit for the task. They were very glad indeed to get themselves
arrested and under cover, more especially in the protection of the
military. They found that they had not lost any rustlers when they stirred
up a whole valley full and were themselves besieged, surrounded, and
well-nigh ready for a general wiping out. They killed a couple of "little
fellows," or, rather, some of their hired
Texas
cowboys
did it for them, but that was all they accomplished, except well-nigh to
bankrupt
Wyoming in
the legal muddle, out of which, of course, nothing came. There were in
this party of cattle men a member of the legislature, a member of the
stock commission, some two dozen wealthy cattle men, two Harvard
graduates, and a young Englishman in search of adventure. They made, on
the whole, about the most contemptible and inefficient band of vigilantes
that ever went out to regulate things, although their deeds were reported
by wire to many journals, and for a time perhaps they felt that they were
cutting quite a figure. They had very large property losses to incite them
to their action, for the rustlers were then pretty much running things in
that part of
Wyoming, and
the local courts would not convict them. This fiasco scarcely hastened the
advent of the day— which came soon enough after the railroads and the
farmers -- under which the home dweller outweighed the nomad.
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The many range wars of the American West were
often depicted in old western films.
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Wars between sheep men
and cattle men sometimes took on the phase of armed bodies of men meeting
in bloody encounter. The sheep were always unwelcome on the range, and are
so to-day, although the courts now adjust such matters better than they
formerly did. The cow baron and his men often took revenge upon the woolly
nuisances themselves and killed them in numbers. The author knows of one
instance where five thousand sheep were killed in one box canon by irate
cow men whose range had been invaded. The sheep eat the grass down to the
point of killing it, and cattle will not feed on a country which sheep
have crossed. Many wars of this kind have been known all the way from
Montana to
Mexico.
Again, factional fights
might arise over some trivial matter as an immediate cause, in a community
or a region where numbers of men fairly equal were separated in
self-interest. In a day when life was still wild and free, and when the
law was still unknown, these differences of opinion sometimes led to
bitter and bloody conflicts between factions.
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Added August, 2007
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About the Author: Excerpted from the book The Story of the
Outlaw; A Study of the Western Desperado, by Emerson Hough, The
Outing Publishing Company, New York, 1907. (now in the public domain)
About the Author: Emerson Hough (1857–1923).was an
author and journalist who wrote factional accounts and historical novels
of life in the
American
West. His works helped establish the Western as a popular genre in
literature and motion pictures. For years, Hough wrote the feature "Out-of-Doors" for the Saturday
Evening Post and contributed to other major magazines.
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Great American Bars and Saloons
 By
Kathy Weiser
Owner/Editor of Legends of America
Kathy Weiser's first venture into the publishing world takes you into the
many watering holes of America's past, particularly the numerous
saloons
that sprouted up during our nation's
Wild West
days. This great
photographic review displays hundreds of
vintage photographs from
California
to
Arizona, the mining camps of
Colorado, all the way to New
York and its turbulent days of
Prohibition.
Hardcover, 2006, 224 Pages.
Signed by the author!!
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