Sections for easy browsing:

• Cattle and Sheep
• Cattlemen and Sheepmen Rampant
• Predatory Animals
• Range Conflicts
• Tom Horn

CATTLE AND SHEEP

Frederick Jackson Turner said in 1893:

“Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file- the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur-trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer—and the frontier has passed by. Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a century later and see the same procession with wider intervals between.”

Turner adhered to the conventional wisdom in regarding Wyoming cattlemen as merely the advance guard of the farmers. Many people in the East thought it inevitable that farmers would supersede the stockmen in Wyoming. Quite a few people in Wyoming thought so, too.

The inroads of farmers were certainly annoying to many ranchers. While the total acreage appropriated by the farmers, wet and dry, was less than 3 per cent of the state’s total by 1910 and may appear trivial, the farmers distressed the livestock men more than the acreages and percentages suggest. For one thing, the farmers often took over winter grazing grounds and watering places, which upset traditional patterns.
For another, some of the farmers placed a few cattle or sheep on the open range in competition with the stockmen. And still again, as had been the case since the 1870’s, the big cattlemen suspected the settlers of rustling and mavericking.

In 1905 the Board of Live Stock Commissioners dropped the long-standing practice of arranging official cattle roundups. There had been so much fencing (some of it by the cattlemen themselves) that cattle could no longer stray great distances. The veteran cattleman John Clay, in My Life on the Range (1924), recalled that the great Swan Land and Cattle Company disposed of its cattle in 1910. “The settlers,” he said, “were too much for them.” And he said also that “you can fight armies or disease or trespass, but the settler never. He advances slowly, surely, silently… pushing everything before him.” And yet Wyoming cattlemen were found to have deeper roots than most people gave them credit for. Mainly because of the state’s aridity, the farmers did not overwhelm the cattlemen as they were expected to do in the years 1898—1914. The most severe challenge for the cattlemen came, not from farmers, but from sheepmen.

Although land filings were stepped up, the total acreage filed on for all purposes in the seventeen-year period under scrutiny amounted to less than 8,400,000 acres and the total acreage patented less than 2,500,000 acres. Cattlemen and sheepmen, as well as farmers, were involved in these land entries. Five-sixths of the land in the state was still publicly owned in 1914, and most of the privately owned land was grazing land. Large ranches, for the most part, were not being broken up into small farms in these years.

CATTLEMEN AND SHEEPMEN RAMPANT

In Washington at the turn of the century the stockmen were well served by United States Senator Francis E. Warren, with occasional assistance from Senator Clarence D. Clark and Representative Frank W. Mondell. Edward N. Wentworth, in America’s Sheep Trails, credits Warren with being “the author, or principal instigator, of legislation protective to the sheep growing industry for over a quarter of a cen-tury.” Warren did not neglect the cattlemen, for he fought to retain high tariffs on hides as well as on wool. His achievements for the wool industry, it is true, were especially noteworthy. Senator J. P. Dolliver of Iowa in June, 1909, twitted Warren about being the largest single beneficiary of his successful efforts for the wool industry, calling him “the greatest shepherd since Abraham.” Such slurs troubled Warren very little. He seems to have lost no sleep over conflict-of-interest problems. Useful also to Wyoming stockmen in this period was William A. Richards, former governor, who served as Assistant Commissioner of the General Land Office from 1899 to 1903 and as Commissioner from 1903 to 1907.

Floored by the winter of 1886-1887, Wyoming cattlemen had recovered slowly. The Johnson County War and the long depression of the 1890’s prolonged the convalescence. By 1898, however, the cattlemen were on their feet and ready to mix it up with the onrushing sheepmen.

The bulletin “Wyoming Agricultural Statistics,” published jointly in 1925 by the United States Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Agriculture and Economics, and the Wyoming Department of Agri-culture, offers the following estimates for cattle and sheep numbers in the period under discussion:

These figures are probably low, but they are the best available. The bulletin placed the “farm value” of the cattle higher than that of the sheep for all of these years except 1908 and 1910.

The secretary of the Board of Sheep Commissioners in October, 1899, reported that even though the ranges were already crowded, “hundreds of parties are going into the sheep business and those already in are buying more.” Sheep thus overcrowded the public lands in the years 1899—1901 [Note: This is a debatable statement by the author not supported by any facts the Association has in it’s possession but is included here in it’s published form in order to provide the authors complete thoughts]. In the hands of capable herders, sheep could adjust more readily to the diverse grazing conditions than could cattle. They could make better use of the browse type of forage. They could thrive in the Red Desert in winter or on the high mountain slopes in summer.

Many of the flockmasters of the period were leading citizens of the state, men such as B. B. Brooks; Thomas A. Cooper; John and Thomas Cosgriff; W. W. Daley; J. A. Delfelder; Frank A. Hadsell; John W. Hay; W. T. Hogg; Frank, Bert, and Joe King; Tim Kinney; John Mahoney; W. P. Noble; J. D. Noblitt; J. B. Okie; P. J. Quealy; Pat Sullivan; George Taylor; L. E. Vivion; Francis E. Warren; Dr. J. M. Wilson; and j. D. Woodruff. Socially, the flockmasters were on a par with the cattlemen. One of them, J. B. Okie, in 1898 built a palace, said to have cost $100,000, for his ranch home at Lost Cabin. The state’s position in the nation’s wool industry in the period is indicated by the selection of Senator Warren as president of the National Wool Growers Association, 1901-1907, and Dr. J. M. Wilson of Douglas as vice-president in 1906.

Owners of the great herds of cattle and flocks of sheep were con-fronted by several formidable challenges, not all of their own making. The weather at times was awesome. The winter of 1898-1899 was a bad one. The growing practice of winter feeding held down the losses, yet the United States Department of Agriculture estimated Wyoming cattle losses from exposure and disease in the year ending April 1, 1899, at 46,599 and sheep losses at 236,683. The cattle losses that year were the greatest since 1886-1887 and the sheep losses the greatest for any year up to that time.

PREDATORY ANIMALS

Wolves and coyotes preyed on herds and flocks. The state, through a system of bounties, waged all-out war on the predators. “Every civilized country has recognized the necessity of state aid in the exter-mination of predatory wild animals,” said Governor DeForest Richards to the legislature in 1901. In the decade beginning in 1895, state outlays in bounties ranged from $5,613.50 in 1897 to $25,177 in 1904. Normally in these years the state spent more for killing wolves and coyotes than it did for supporting the state university (not counting federal aid to the university). Some counties added their own bounties. Wyoming paid more generous bounties than surrounding states, with the result that, despite threats of penalties for false affidavits, the state seems to have been paying for imported pelts.

Edward N. Wentworth has written that “bounty payments in the West never eradicated predators and normally failed even to restrict them after the first few years.” Yet Governor DeForest Richards in 1903 and Governor B. B. Brooks in 1905 thought some progress was being made against the predators. The 1905 legislature, however, appealed to the United States Congress for help.

While they waited for federal aid, the stockmen regularly obtained bounty laws from the legislature. Governor Carey vetoed one in 1911 and another in 1913. Before the end of the 1913 session, however, he relented and approved another bounty bill which included certain safeguards that he had required. Eventually, federal hunters, trappers, and poisoners appeared in the state in response to various appeals for aid. Still later, the beneficiaries assumed more of the burden by organiz-ing predatory-animal districts and approving mill-levy assessments on sheep.

Poisonous plants, such as woody aster, larkspur, and loco, took their toll. Wyoming Experiment Station Preliminary Bulletin No. 88 (April 1911), blamed woody-aster plants for sheep losses running into millions of dollars a year. A station specialist estimated that woody aster caused twice as many sheep losses as coyotes did. Later studies have established that sheep will eat woody aster only when starved to it.

That sheep were starved into eating poisonous plants is a com-mentary on overgrazing, which was widespread on the public grazing lands and which was accepted as inevitable by informed observers of the period. It was a constant problem. B. C. Buffum and W. H. Fair-field of the University of Wyoming Experiment Station wrote in the 1900 report of the station: “The natural ranges have greatly deteriora-ted through overstocking, which has prevented the best grasses from reseeding themselves for so long a time that they have run out.” [Note: Again, the author makes reference to “overgrazing”, but the source of the overgrazing is debatable. The WWGA recognizes that during this period, some ranges in Wyoming were overstocked, which is the reason the WWGA took the lead in Washington D.C. for passage of the Taylor Grazing Act, which resulted in a systematic, controlled approach to stocking of federally-controlled lands] They reported that many ranchers had bought sacaline and Australian saltbush with which to improve their ranges. They advised that sacaline had proved “absolutely valueless” and that the Australian saltbush was a tropical plant which would not flourish in the Wyoming climate.

RANGE CONFLICTS

State engineer Elwood Mead had reported in 1897 that range con-flicts were threatening the peace and prosperity of many communities. As the sheep multiplied at the turn of the century and were trailed onto public lands used previously only by cattlemen, the conflict became so violent that it must be rated as a major theme of the state’s history.

Cattlemen claimed that they had been in Wyoming first, which was true, generally speaking, although there had been a few pioneer sheep-men in the early years of the territory. The newcomers replied that no legal rights had been established by prior use and that the free public grazing lands were open to one and all. The pattern of conflict was complicated by the fact that many cattlemen switched to sheep when they appeared to be more profitable, and sometimes vice versa.

George Rollins, in his 1951 University of Utah doctoral dissertation, “The Struggle of the Cattlemen, Sheepmen and Settler for Control of Lands in Wyoming, 1867-1910,” noted that range wars in Wyoming usually followed a set pattern: first, warnings by cattlemen to sheep-men to keep sheep out of a certain area; second, announcement of a dead line which sheep must not cross; third, confrontations, often ending in destruction of flocks and assaults on the herders. Sheepmen stubbornly persisted. The controversy was exacerbated by religious prejudice against Mormon sheepmen, by charges that Utah sheepmen were introducing scab-infected sheep, and by further charges (often true) that transient sheep escaped Wyoming taxation.

Sheepherders and sheep for a time were sitting ducks for the bellicose cattlemen, since a herder normally was alone with his band of two thousand or so sheep. Bullets might or might not be used. Hundreds of incidents were reported in the newspapers, and presumably others were not reported. For instance in May, 1897, cattlemen of Jackson Hole appointed a committee of safety and published a notice that “no sheep will be allowed to pass through Jackson’s Hole…under any circum-stances.” Let one other example suffice. In July, 1902, about fifteen herds of sheep belonging to Rock Springs parties crossed a dead line in the New Fork country of the Green River Valley and were attacked by 150 masked men. At least two thousand sheep were destroyed, one herder was killed, and the other herders were driven out of the country and their herds scattered.

And so it went year after year, with the sheepmen advancing on many fronts and the cattlemen offering vigorous resistance. Arrests and convictions were rare, because it was almost impossible to identify the masked men, who were together only briefly before dispersing. The sheepmen, however, were getting more numerous and more influential every year. Even as the cattlemen had organized in the 1870’s to com-bat thieves, so the sheepmen now organized to combat the masked men, although this was not the only reason for forming a state association. They also needed to unite to fight sheep scab and to improve their lobbying in Cheyenne and Washington.

Representatives of ten county associations at a meeting in Cheyenne on March 27, 1902, failed to form a state association. Finally, however, in Cheyenne, April 10-13, 1905, the wool growers were able to organize the Wyoming Wool Growers Association. Dr. J. M. Wilson was elected first president, John Hay vice-president, and George S. Walker secretary and treasurer. A board of trustees of thirteen members, one from each county, was provided for, with the president and vice-president ex officio members of the board.

The Wyoming Wool Growers Association flourished, as might be expected from the events of the decade. Starting out with 40 charter members, the association picked up new members fast. At its second meeting eight months later in Casper, 271 members answered to the roll call. By January, 1909, the association had 541 members (646, the highest ever, a year later) and claimed to be the largest organization of its kind in the country. County associations were active in ten counties- all except Laramie, Fremont, and Crook. Secretary George S. Walker’s report to the governor in December, 1908, showed that Wyoming led all states in wool production, both in the grease and scoured. It is not unreasonable to rate wool as the state’s leading industry in the years 1908-1910.

Nevertheless, attacks on sheep and their herders continued. The executive committee of the Wool Growers Association, meeting in April, 1907, at Cheyenne, offered a reward of one thousand dollars for the conviction o f sheep-camp raiders and decided raise a fund of fifty thousand dollars to be used for several purposes. The order in which the purposes were listed in newspaper reports may not have been entirely fortuitous: the fund was to be used “in combating sheep camp raiders, combinations against wool growers, Pinchot’s forest reserve policy and President Roosevelt’s land leasing policy.”

The climactic events in the long range war between cattlemen and sheepmen occurred in 1909. In April., fifteen or more masked men attacked a sheep camp on Spring Creek, a branch of the Nowood, near Tensleep in the Big Horn Basin. They killed in cold blood two wealthy wool growers, Joe Allernand and Joe Emge, and one of their herders, Joe Lazier. Big Horn County Prosecuting Attorney Percy Metz and Sheriff Felix Alston began a thorough investigation. The county wool growers association and the state association each offered rewards of one thousand dollars for the capture of the murderers. Other money was contributed, and the National Wool Growers Association an-nounced that it was ready to support the prosecution with twenty thousand dollars. While a grand jury was considering evidence, one of the witnesses committed suicide, leaving three letters implicating prominent cattlemen of the area. Seven men were arrested in May: George Sabin, M. A. Alexander, Thomas Dixon, Herbert Brink, Charles Fans, Albert F. Keys, and Ed F. Eaton. While they were awaiting trial, Keys and Fans turned state’s evidence. The other five under arrest then pleaded guilty and received penitentiary sentences varying from three years to life. For the wool growers, the combination of organization, money, energetic prosecution by county officials, and luck had finally paid off. Detectives employed by the Wyoming Wool Growers Association were a deterrent to raids thereafter, and cattlemen quit murdering sheepmen and herders.

An observer of the events of 1909 might with some reason have ven-tured the opinion that cattlemen were on the run and that sheepmen would soon dominate the ranges of the state. This was not to be the case. Overgrazing, drought, dry farmers, a destructive winter (1911-1912), and loss of the tariff on wool in 1913 withheld the fruits of victory from the flockmasters. Although the cattlemen suffered several anxious years, they could not be dislodged. In Wyoming’s cattle-sheep conflict, 1897-1909, fifteen men and a boy, and perhaps ten thousand sheep, were killed.¹ Men working on the range, however, were really in less danger than those who worked in the coal mines or on the Union Pacific Railroad.

TOM HORN

Mingling with the many amateur regulators who tried to control the Wyoming range at the turn of the century was a professional killer: Tom Horn. Before coming to Wyoming, Horn had worked in New Mexico and Arizona territories as Indian scout and stock detective and for a time in Colorado as Pinkerton detective. It is sometimes asserted that he was in Wyoming as early as 1892 and had a hand in the Johnson County Invasion. Probably, however, he did not come to Wyoming before 1894.

Horn’s first employment in Wyoming seems to have been in some capacity with the Swan Land and Cattle Company and then as a stock detective for the Wyoming Stock Growers Association. J. M. Carey, chairman of the association’s secret committee in charge of the detec-tive work, is said to have dismissed Horn as soon as he learned that he was more interested in liquidating men than in getting evidence for use in court. After Horn’s dismissal by the association, some of the big cattlemen hired him to assassinate their enemies at five hundred dollars per head. John C. Coble and Ora Haley have often been identified as Horn’s employers by hearsay, though not by any valid proof.

The 1895 murders of two small ranchers living on Horse Creek in the Laramie Mountains are usually credited to Horn. William Lewis was shot in the back three times in August, and Lewis’ neighbor Fred Powell was shot from ambush the following month. Both had been suspected of stealing cattle. Horn was questioned about these deaths, but neither he nor anyone else was arrested. Two murders in Brown’s Park, Colorado, in 1900 were also attributed to Horn by hearsay evidence. Then in July, 1901, Willie Nickel, a thirteen-year-old boy, was shot to death from ambush in the Iron Mountain section of the Laramie Mountains. Willie’s father, Kels P. Nickel, carried two bad marks on his escutcheon: in a fight in 1890 he had slashed John C. Coble with a knife, and later be had introduced sheep into the cattle country around Iron Mountain. Apparently, the son was mistaken for the father. The son was large for his age, was wearing his fathers hat and coat, was riding his father’s horse, and was killed in the poor light of early dawn. A week after Willie was dry-gulched, the father, Kels Nickell was shot in arm and hip from ambush. A few days after that, some of his sheep were clubbed.

Six months later, under the influence of liquor, Horn boasted to Deputy United States Marshal Joe LeFors that be had killed Willie Nickel. Unknown to Horn, two witnesses, Deputy United States Marshal Les Snow and court stenographer Charles J. Ohnhaus, were listening through a crack in the door; Ohnhaus made a stenographic record of the LeFors-Horn conversation. On the strength of this unsigned “confession,” Horn was found guilty sad was hanged in the Laramie County jail in November, 1903. The best legal talent in the state (John W. Lacey, Timothy F. Burke, R. N. Matson, T. Blake Kennedy, Nellis B. Corthell) could not save him. Looking back on the affair a half-century later, Federal Judge T. Blake Kennedy confided in his memoirs that, while he did not like to lose the case, “probably it was good riddance.”

There was much excitement in southeastern Wyoming at the time of the Horn trial, imprisonment, and execution. Many people thought his employers could not afford to let him hang, lest in his last moments he name them. In his memoirs, Fenimore Chatterton, who was acting governor during Horn’s last months, recalled that he received many letters threatening his life if he did not commute the sentence, that prominent politicians and cattlemen pleaded with him for commuta-tion, and that one “emissary of the cattlemen” said: “Governor, there is a hundred thousand dollar fund ready to defeat any political ambition you have, if you do not commute the sentence.” Horn escaped once, but was recaptured. He never named his employers, although it was common knowledge that John C. Coble was the “pay-off man,” as Chatterton called him.

¹ Professor Harold E. Briggs, in his generally excellent book Frontiers of the Northwest (New York: Appleton-Century, 1940), has made the cattlemen-sheepmen conflict, bad as it was, appear much worse. He writes: “The mountain gorges and plains of Wyoming contain the bones of many a sheep herder who was murdered at night as he slept in his isolated wagon or tent and the evidence hidden as the camp was burned or the body thrown into some deep valley or chasm.” He adds: “One reliable writer states that in the years from 1893 three scores of men were killed and five times that number were wounded in the conflict that extended pretty well over the state.” Briggs identifies the “reliable writer” as Clara M. Love, whose article “History of the Cattle Industry in the Southwest” appeared in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly in two parts (XIX, 4 [April 1916] and XX, 1 [July 1916]). On p. 13, Vol. XX, of the Quarterly we read: “From 1893 to 1903 a score of men were killed and five times that number wounded in this series of petty wars, which extended pretty well over the grazing states.” Briggs erred remarkably in reading a score as ““three scores” and “the grazing states” as “the state.” Miss Love’s statement in its original form is plausible enough, but, like all historians, she nodded occasionally, judging by her inclusion of this whopper: “On one occasion 800,000 sheep were driven from Utah and Wyoming into Colorado. The cattle men there took the herders and held them until every sheep was killed, after which they warned the herders not to return.”