Wyoming Range War

Wyoming Range War PDF Author: John W. Davis
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806183802
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Wyoming attorney John W. Davis retells the story of the West’s most notorious range war. Having delved more deeply than previous writers into land and census records, newspapers, and trial transcripts, Davis has produced an all-new interpretation. He looks at the conflict from the perspective of Johnson County residents—those whose home territory was invaded and many of whom the invaders targeted for murder—and finds that, contrary to the received explanation, these people were not thieves and rustlers but legitimate citizens. The broad outlines of the conflict are familiar: some of Wyoming’s biggest cattlemen, under the guise of eliminating livestock rustling on the open range, hire two-dozen Texas cowboys and, with range detectives and prominent members of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, “invade” north-central Wyoming to clean out rustlers and other undesirables. While the invaders kill two suspected rustlers, citizens mobilize and eventually turn the tables, surrounding the intruders at a ranch where they intend to capture them by force. An appeal for help convinces President Benjamin Harrison to call out the army from nearby Fort McKinley, and after an all-night ride the soldiers arrive just in time to stave off the invaders’ annihilation. Though taken prisoner, they later avoid prosecution. The cattle barons’ powers of persuasion in justifying their deeds have colored accounts of the war for more than a century. Wyoming Range War tells a compelling story that redraws the lines between heroes and villains.

Wyoming Range War

Wyoming Range War PDF Author: John W. Davis
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806183802
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

Get Book

Book Description
Wyoming attorney John W. Davis retells the story of the West’s most notorious range war. Having delved more deeply than previous writers into land and census records, newspapers, and trial transcripts, Davis has produced an all-new interpretation. He looks at the conflict from the perspective of Johnson County residents—those whose home territory was invaded and many of whom the invaders targeted for murder—and finds that, contrary to the received explanation, these people were not thieves and rustlers but legitimate citizens. The broad outlines of the conflict are familiar: some of Wyoming’s biggest cattlemen, under the guise of eliminating livestock rustling on the open range, hire two-dozen Texas cowboys and, with range detectives and prominent members of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, “invade” north-central Wyoming to clean out rustlers and other undesirables. While the invaders kill two suspected rustlers, citizens mobilize and eventually turn the tables, surrounding the intruders at a ranch where they intend to capture them by force. An appeal for help convinces President Benjamin Harrison to call out the army from nearby Fort McKinley, and after an all-night ride the soldiers arrive just in time to stave off the invaders’ annihilation. Though taken prisoner, they later avoid prosecution. The cattle barons’ powers of persuasion in justifying their deeds have colored accounts of the war for more than a century. Wyoming Range War tells a compelling story that redraws the lines between heroes and villains.

Violence in the West

Violence in the West PDF Author: Marilynn S. Johnson
Publisher: Waveland Press
ISBN: 1478623047
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
Generations of Americans have developed an image of violence in the “Wild West” through books and films. But what conditions really resulted in violence on the American frontier between the 1880s and 1910s? How frequently did violence occur, and what forms did it take? Johnson explores these questions through the lens of the mining and range wars that plagued the region during this period. The author opens with an introductory essay that situates violence within social, political, and economic circumstances of the time, considering smaller cases of interpersonal violence and larger conflicts. Documents are then presented to illuminate two case studies of collective violence—the Johnson County range war in northern Wyoming and the 1913–1914 coal strike in southern Colorado resulting in the Ludlow Massacre. The closing epilogue examines the role both incidents played in shaping the collective memory and cultural history of the American West. The book’s format provides readers with both a general understanding of the history of western violence and the context of specific historical cases that allow for more in-depth study and comparison.

The War on Powder River

The War on Powder River PDF Author: Helena Huntington Smith
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803251885
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Account of the Wyoming range war of the Johnson County Stock Growers Association against homesteading cowboys and small ranchers.

The Banditti of the Plains

The Banditti of the Plains PDF Author: A. S. Mercer
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 080618714X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
In 1894, when A. S. Mercer published this angry eyewitness account of the cattlemen’s invasion of Wyoming, the book was so thoroughly and ruthlessly suppressed that few copies of that edition remain today. Although historians have since questioned some of Mercer’s conclusions about the Johnson County range war, they have never controverted the facts of the cattlemen-homesteader struggle as he grimly reported them. With the intention of "executing" alleged rustlers and terrorizing the homesteaders, a band of fifty-two cattlemen and hired gunmen invaded Johnson Country, Wyoming, in April 1892. After besieging and killing "the bravest man in Johnson County," the raiders in turn found themselves besieged by the homesteaders and finally in the protective custody of the Untied States cavalry. Further legal and illegal maneuvering permitted the invaders to go unpunished, but the cattlemen never again attempted to retain their hold over the range with organized mob violence. In this new edition of The Banditti of the Plains the original text has been followed with the utmost fidelity, even including the illustrations. An informed and interesting foreword by William H. Kittrell has been added to the book.

The Great Range Wars

The Great Range Wars PDF Author: Harry Sinclair Drago
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803265639
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Harry Sinclair Drago writes with authority and a sense of drama about the bloodiest range conflicts in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Montana late in the nineteenth century. He details the background and events surrounding the Lincoln County War of New Mexico (1878-81), a violent struggle for economic supremacy between cattle barons and merchants; the ironically named Pleasant Valley War of Arizona (1886-92), a conflict between cattlemen and sheepmen complicated by personal vendettas and old family rivalries; and the Johnson County War of Wyoming (1892), a folly that turned bloody when big cattlemen rode against suspected and known thieves with orders to shoot. These pages are filled with some showy characters: cowmen Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving; the Grahams and Tewksburys, western counterparts of the Hatfields and McCoys; William Bonney, alias Billy the Kid, who cut a swath in the Lincoln County War; and Ella Watson, said to have been the notorious Cattle Kate Maxwell, after she was lynched for cattle rustling.

Cattle Kingdom

Cattle Kingdom PDF Author: Christopher Knowlton
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0544369971
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
“The best all-around study of the American cowboy ever written. Every page crackles with keen analysis and vivid prose about the Old West. A must-read!” — Douglas Brinkley, author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America The open-range cattle era lasted barely a quarter century, but it left America irrevocably changed. Cattle Kingdom reveals how the West rose and fell, and how its legacy defines us today. The tale takes us from dust-choked cattle drives to the unlikely splendors of boomtowns like Abilene, Kansas, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. We meet a diverse cast, from cowboy Teddy Blue to failed rancher and future president Teddy Roosevelt. This is a revolutionary new appraisal of the Old West and the America it made. “Knowlton writes well about all the fun stuff: trail drives, rambunctious cow towns, gunfights and range wars . . . [He] enlists all of these tropes in support of an intriguing thesis: that the romance of the Old West arose upon the swelling surface of a giant economic bubble . . . Cattle Kingdom is The Great Plains by way of The Big Short.” — Wall Street Journal “Knowlton deftly balances close-ups and bird’s-eye views. We learn countless details . . . More important, we learn why the story played out as it did.” — New York Times Book Review “The best one-volume history of the legendary era of the cowboy and cattle empires in thirty years.” — True West

Hell on the Range

Hell on the Range PDF Author: Daniel Justin Herman
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300168543
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
In this lively account of Arizona's Rim Country War of the 1880s--what others have called "The Pleasant Valley War"--Historian Daniel Justin Herman explores a web of conflict involving Mormons, Texas cowboys, New Mexican sheepherders, Jewish merchants, and mixed-blood ranchers. At the heart of Arizona's range war, argues Herman, was a conflict between cowboys' code of honor and Mormons' code of conscience.

Almost Pioneers

Almost Pioneers PDF Author: John Fry
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0762797169
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
In the fall of 1913, Laura and Earle Smith, a young Iowa couple, made the gutsy—some might say foolhardy—decision to homestead in Wyoming. There, they built their first house, a claim shanty half dug out of the ground, hauled every drop of their water from a spring over a half-mile away, and fought off rattlesnakes and boredom on a daily basis. Soon, other families moved to nearby homesteads, and the Smiths built a house closer to those neighbors. The growing community built its first public schoolhouse and celebrated the Fourth of July together—although the festivities were cut short because of snow. By 1917, however, the Smiths had moved back to Iowa, leasing their land to a local rancher and using the proceeds to fund Earle’s study of law. The Smiths lived in Iowa for most of the rest of their lives, and sometime after the mid-1930s, Laura wrote this clear, vivid, witty, and self-deprecating memoir of their time in Wyoming, a book that captures the pioneer spirit of the era and of the building of community against daunting odds.

A Vast Amount of Trouble

A Vast Amount of Trouble PDF Author: John W. Davis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780806136929
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Recounts the events leading up to the Spring Creek raid, the gripping trial that followed, and the trial's aftermath, which brought an end to Wyoming's violent range wars. Reprint.

War at the Margins

War at the Margins PDF Author: Lin Poyer
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824891813
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
War at the Margins offers a broad comparative view of the impact of World War II on Indigenous societies. Using historical and ethnographic sources, Lin Poyer examines how Indigenous communities emerged from the trauma of the wartime era with social forms and cultural ideas that laid the foundations for their twenty-first-century emergence as players on the world’s political stage. With a focus on Indigenous voices and agency, a global overview reveals the enormous range of wartime activities and impacts on these groups, connecting this work with comparative history, Indigenous studies, and anthropology. The distinctiveness of Indigenous peoples offers a valuable perspective on World War II, as those on the margins of Allied and Axis empires and nation-states were drawn in as soldiers, scouts, guides, laborers, and victims. Questions of loyalty and citizenship shaped Indigenous combat roles—from integration in national armies to service in separate ethnic units to unofficial use of their special skills, where local knowledge tilted the balance in military outcomes. Front lines crossed Indigenous territory most consequentially in northern Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands, but the impacts of war go well beyond combat. Like others around the world, Indigenous civilian men and women suffered bombing and invasion, displacement, forced labor, military occupation, and economic and social disruption. Infrastructure construction and demand for key resources affected even areas far from front lines. World War II dissolved empires and laid the foundation for the postcolonial world. Indigenous people in newly independent nations struggled for autonomy, while other veterans returned to home fronts still steeped in racism. National governments saw military service as evidence that Indigenous peoples wished to assimilate, but wartime experiences confirmed many communities’ commitment to their home cultures and opened new avenues for activism. By century’s end, Indigenous Rights became an international political force, offering alternative visions of how the global order might make room for greater local self-determination and cultural diversity. In examining this transformative era, War at the Margins adds an important contribution to both World War II history and to the development of global Indigenous identity.