The Johnson County War

In the summer of eighteen eighty-nine, a woman named Ellen Watson and her partner Jim Averell were abducted from their homestead on Horse Creek and hanged by a group of ranchers led by Albert Bothwell. Watson had filed a legitimate homestead claim, purchased cattle legally, and registered her own brand. The Cheyenne Daily Sun ran accounts calling her a prostitute and cattle rustler; witnesses who might have testified disappeared one by one before any trial could begin. No one was ever charged.

That lynching was a prelude to something larger. By eighteen ninety-two, the Wyoming Stock Growers Association had drawn up a list of men it designated as rustlers and organized an armed expedition to address them. In early April of that year, roughly fifty hired gunmen, recruited from Texas and organized by Frank Canton, traveled north by special train from Cheyenne. The operation had the knowledge, if not the formal blessing, of Wyoming's governor Amos Barber.

At the KC Ranch in Johnson County, the force surrounded a cabin held by Nate Champion, a small rancher who had become the homesteaders' most visible spokesman. The siege lasted a full day. Champion kept a journal through the hours of gunfire. His final entry read: Well, they have just got through shelling the house like hail. The house is all fired. Goodbye, boys, if I never see you again. He emerged from the burning cabin and was shot twenty-eight times.

When news reached Buffalo, Wyoming's county seat, the local sheriff organized a posse of hundreds. The invaders were pinned down at the TA Ranch. President Benjamin Harrison ordered the Sixth Cavalry from Fort McKinney to relieve them. The gunmen were taken into custody. Charges were subsequently dropped. No one was convicted of the killings.

Historians read the war as the last effort by a concentrated economic elite to govern by force a territory that had outgrown their control.