Cattlemen and “Rustlers”

By the late 1880s, the big cattlemen of Wyoming recognized that they had a problem on their hands: more and more settlers were taking up government land through Lincoln’s Homestead Act. Often they settled in areas which the owners of large ranches had long considered their own. The vast ranges they had virtually had to themselves were getting peopled and fenced. The settlers, many of them out-of-work cowboys, tried to make their way by starting small ranches. The WSGA responded to this almost always by blacklisting the small ranchers, meaning that they were barred from membership to the association, and therefore were forbidden from participating cattle drives. This mostly spelled ruin for the small ranchers, who had few other ways to get their beef to the markets.

And blacklists weren’t the only weapons employed by the big cattlemen. They had early on started a press campaign to spin stories about “rustlers” that needed to be run off of the range. They saw the herds of small ranchers as proof that they (the small ranchers) must be stealing cattle from the WSGA herds. In the absence of facts, they spread unfounded rumors of how these small ranchers’ herd could only have increased in size through rustling or “mavericking” – the appropriation of unbranded calves – when, in fact, many of the publicized accusations by cattlemen could be shown as a herd’s natural increase.

It’s hard these days to comprehend the cattlemen’s anti-rustler zealotry and the insane actions that it led to in 1889-1892. How the awful facts of the “Cattle Kate” murders could have been known (as they were at the time) and tolerated by a relatively large portion of the population is proof of the cattlemen’s power to influence popular opinion. For most of that time, they controlled the editorial boards of the largest newspapers in the state, and forwarded, along with outright lies, a party line that justified the extra-judicial killing of their enemies, no matter if their victims were rustlers or innocent settlers trying to make a livelihood. In any case, their victims were always painted as rustlers.

And the cattlemen’s tactics worked, right on through the invasion of Johnson County in April 1892. But Johnson County and its settlers would prove, in the end, to be formidable beyond the hubristic expectations of the cattle barons.

Two local men worked hard to identify and persecute individuals they saw as rustlers. One was an Englishman named Fred Hesse, a landowner associated with a large ranching interests. The other was the former sheriff of Johnson County, Frank Canton (a.k.a. Joe Horner). Joe Horner was a Texas outlaw who reinvented himself in Wyoming as Frank Canton. Voted out of his sheriff position in 1887 largely because of his heavy-handed tactics and lack of personal charm, he found work as a WSGA stock detective. Canton was bitter toward the residents of Johnson County, especially when they elected William G. “Red” Angus – a man he saw as part of the saloon and brothel crowd, not as a law man. But this would show his growing disconnect with the community of Buffalo, Johnson County’s seat, for Red Angus would prove from the beginning to take his duties as sheriff very seriously. He was widely admired, even by Joe Elliott, whom Angus would arrest in February of 1892 for the attempt on the lives of Nate Champion and Nick Ray the previous November.

Canton found in his cattlemen friends ready ears for stories of Angus’ laxity when it came to arresting cattle thieves, and his complaints of Angus’ and the settlers’ sympathies with rustlers and their reluctance to make convictions. The truth was that there had been few rustling cases brought before the county’s courts, and juries were known to judge the existing cases on the basis of evidence rather than prejudice. But this isn’t the kind of intelligence that the cattlemen wanted, and Canton knew this. He knew what information served them, and in serving them he served himself.

These are the men who brought in Joe Elliott, a former cowboy recently hired on as a stock detective, to work for them in 1891, when it became clear that certain Johnson County residents were becoming a problem for the cattlemen.

That spring, the big cattlemen had confiscated the herds of some of the small ranchers around Buffalo who had defied the WSGA’s boycott and participated in the drive with their own wagons. The big ranchers were sending the clear message that they were the law, and despite their propaganda that the confiscated herds were made up of stolen cattle, the residents of Buffalo knew better. The men branded as “rustlers” were some of Buffalo’s prominent citizens, known for their integrity and civic responsibility. They were men in their 20s and 30s trying to make homes and a stable community in a beautiful place. They had acquired their land legally and with no small amount of investment. None of them had ever been accused of rustling, and they weren’t going to be slandered and bullied by the likes of Frank Canton, a man they knew, and whom they clearly saw as the attack dog of their powerful enemies. So throughout 1891, they fought the confiscation of their cattle in the courts, and their side was defended in the editorial pages of the Buffalo press – unlike the Cheyenne press, which mostly parroted the party line of the big cattlemen.

It was this community effort to protect and assert the rights of its members that so rankled the big cattlemen, and it made them come to see virtually all of the county’s residents as their enemies. They became determined to teach the settlers a lesson.

Statewide, the cattlemen were beating the drum of the rustler problem, among themselves and in editorial columns. The rustlers had become so numerous, and settlers so sympathetic to the rustlers, that cattlemen started openly advocating lynching as a way to deal with suspected rustlers. But rustling was never as widespread as they claimed. The record shows that the people most persecuted by the anti-rustler campaigns of the time were honest settlers. Most got the message and left, but there were also a few high-profile lynchings. And though the communities decried these injustices, their voices were drowned out by the cattlemen’s control of public opinion through the Cheyenne press, whose columns were reprinted in newspapers all over the state.

So why would the cattlemen need to create these lies? Doesn’t it seem feasible that they would have recognized that times were changing, settlement was inevitable, and that they would also need to adapt? They didn’t seem to see this. To them, to adapt would mean to become more like the settlers: range their cattle on smaller pieces of land, spend money on hay for the winter, and accept the fencing of the range. There were a couple of reasons for their resistance to this change, which were philosophical as well as economical.

For many of the educated elite of the late 19th century, a kind of social Darwinism ruled the day. They took the idea of “survival of the fittest” to justify a might-is-right approach in the world. They looked at themselves, by virtue of their positions in society, as superior to, and therefore “fitter” than, settlers and homesteaders whom they felt they could either control or chase from “their” land at will. It is akin to the Nazi’s appropriation of the Nietzschian concept of the Übermensch (superman) to justify the extermination of Jews, minorities, gays, the handicapped, etc. Most of them knew better than to be too open about this belief in their own superiority, but it undoubtedly drove them in their ruthless scapegoating of homesteaders and small ranchers, even when they knew they (the homesteaders) weren’t rustling cattle.

One large economic reason for this scapegoating had to do with the hard winter of 1886-87, which killed about half of all the cattle on the Wyoming range, from small and large ranches alike. Many of the largest ranches went under, or were forced into buyouts by other outfits. No doubt many of the owners and overseers of such ranches came under a lot of pressure from their investors, who were often headquartered in the East, and as far away as England. These remote owners and investors became impatient and fearful, and probably tired of hearing about a natural disaster, the extent of which they could scarcely comprehend. As time went on, the cattlemen of Wyoming began to see in “the rustlers” a new, multi-purpose excuse for their depleted herds. The new influx of settlers, and the problems they posed for the cattlemen, set the stage for an the epic conflict – and new level of fabrication by the cattlemen when it came to the “rustler problem.”