Open Range and the Johnson County War
Wyoming
In the eighteen eighties, the Wyoming cattle industry reached a kind of brutal zenith. Eastern investors and Scottish and English capital had poured into the territory, creating enormous ranches that claimed tens of thousands of acres of open federal range. The Wyoming Stock Growers Association, headquartered in Cheyenne, wielded political power that rivaled the territorial government itself.
In good years the returns were extraordinary. Then came the winter of eighteen eighty-six and eighteen eighty-seven. The great die-up, as cattlemen called it, was one of the worst winters in recorded memory on the northern plains.
Temperatures fell to sixty below zero in some locations. Blizzard followed blizzard. Cattle drifted before the wind until they piled up against drift fences or fell into coulees and froze.
Estimates suggest that between fifteen and seventy-five percent of the cattle on the northern range died that winter. The big outfits never fully recovered. In the aftermath, tensions between the cattle barons and smaller ranchers and homesteaders reached a crisis.
The large operators accused small ranchers and settlers of rustling, sometimes on evidence that amounted to nothing more than running a small herd on land the big outfits claimed by habit. The conflict came to a head in April of eighteen ninety-two in Johnson County. A party of roughly fifty armed men, hired Texas gunfighters and Wyoming cattlemen, invaded Johnson County under a death list supplied by the Stock Growers Association.
They killed two men and were subsequently surrounded by a force of several hundred county residents before being rescued by United States cavalry dispatched on orders from President Benjamin Harrison. No one was ever convicted of the killings. The story became one of the defining myths of the American West, told and retold in dime novels, films, and most famously in Owen Wister's novel The Virginian, published in nineteen oh two.
We should note: the full extent of the death list and how many names it originally carried has never been confirmed to the satisfaction of historians.
