The TA Ranch and the Johnson County War

The land around you here south of Buffalo holds the only intact battlefield from one of the strangest episodes in American history. The Johnson County War of eighteen ninety-two pitted wealthy cattle barons, who hired an army to invade their own state, against small ranchers they branded as rustlers.

The conflict had been building for years. The Wyoming Stock Growers Association, backed by eastern capital and political connections all the way to the United States Senate, resented homesteaders and small operators who competed for open range. When a stock detective named Joe Elliott was about to go to trial for attempted murder, and when a small rancher named Nate Champion had supplied the key testimony against him, the cattlemen made their decision. In early April of eighteen ninety-two, they loaded about fifty men, including twenty-three hired Texas gunmen, onto a private train from Cheyenne, cut the telegraph lines, and moved north.

They struck the KC Ranch on April ninth, killing Champion and a companion named Nick Ray after an all-day siege. Champion scrawled diary entries from inside the burning cabin, some of the most remarkable documents of the frontier era, and these were found on his bullet-riddled body. The invaders then moved south toward Buffalo, but word had spread. Farmers, ranchers, and townspeople organized, and a few hundred of them cornered the hired army right here at the TA Ranch on April eleventh.

The defenders fortified the barn. You can still see the gun ports cut into the upper walls, and the trenches dug by both sides remain visible today. The siege lasted three days. The locals were building a rolling cannon to end it when three companies of United States Cavalry arrived from Fort McKinney, summoned by the governor at the request of Wyoming's two United States senators, who were themselves leaders of the cattle syndicate. The invaders surrendered to the Army, not to local justice, and were never convicted of any crime.

The TA Ranch stands today as the only place where the physical scars of that confrontation, the trenches, the gun-scarred barn, the earthworks, are still visible. It is a rare unaltered witness to the moment when corporate power and democratic resistance collided on the Wyoming range.