A Timely Political Aftermath

The November 1892 election in Wyoming was a disaster for the Republican party, whose leadership, right up to the state’s governor, was implicated in the Invasion of Johnson county. Moreover, the press campaign by the cattlemen to paint settlers as outlaws had caused a decline in immigration and investment into the state, so when the Panic of 1893 (the US’s worst economic depression to date) arrived, Wyoming was hit especially hard. Then, as today, the party that had just been voted out seized the moment to turn the blame for the economic troubles on the newly-elected Democratic leaders. And it worked: in the election of 1894, the Republicans swamped the Democrats, winning a large majority of the state’s legislative seats and the its two senate seats.

It can be argued that the Democratic government earned their defeat through scandal and infighting. The sale of their largest newspaper, the Cheyenne Daily Leader, in 1894, was no doubt a factor. Nonetheless, as John Davis points out, the Republican leadership recognized that Wyomingites “would not tolerate shenanigans such as the Johnson County invasion.” And though more lynchings and murders would happen as a result of fights over the Wyoming range in the coming decades, never again did leaders of the state make attempts to defend or justify such actions. So in Wyoming, anyway, 1892 marked the effective end of the rule of Judge Lynch.

Source-
Davis, John W. Wyoming Range War. University of Oklahoma Press, 2010.