Better Be Prepared To Defend That Home On The Range

Harry Sinclair Drago's The Great Range Wars details the various conflicts in the American West from the mid-1800s until the end of the 19th century, roughly. He breaks the book into sections, each section tending to deal with a general area and the struggles therein. As cattle were a major part of that, cattlemen tend to be mixed up in each conflict. Sometimes they're dealing with Native Americans or rustlers. Other times it's sheepmen or farmers (or "nesters", as they were called). Eventually it becomes big cattlemen versus little cattlemen, at least in Wyoming, where the book ends.

The end of the book itself is a bit strange, as Drago doesn't bother with any summation chapter. The final chapter deals with the Johnson County Invasion of 1892, details how the big cattlemen responsible likely bought themselves out of the trouble they were in*, and simply ends by stating that by perhaps the Wyoming Stock Growers' Association may have learned something from the scene, as their newspapers started referring to rustlers as citizens. That's the last line. I wouldn't say there's a clearly defined connecting tissue between sections, at least nothing explicitly stated by Drago. The book does progress from the early attempts to raise cattle and make trails to places to sell them, to dealing with people using money for political influence, to people using it to shape public opinion (the Wyoming SGA controlling some of the major newspapers in the state). So you could say the battle evolved over time, though much of it still came down to men shooting and hanging each other, often on flimsy pretext.

Drago's style is a bit contradictory. At times he seems determined to wipe away the myths and stick to facts, as when he points out many of the conflicts described as "wars" are in no way deserving of that description. At the same time, he's prone to describing men as 'fearless' or 'redoubtable', which feels a bit like mythologizing to me. He'll say that there had probably never been so many cattle in one place as there were in such-and-such in those days, or never so many lynchings, and so on. Whatever is being described is the most of it that ever happened. He tries to be even-handed about things frequently, such as his discussion of the Tewksbury-Graham feud of the Pleasant Valley War, but he still can't help editorializing a little, usually with regard to hired gunmen. The Wyoming SGA hired a Frank Canton to be a detective for them (though he also got himself hired as a sheriff by people who didn't know about the first occupation), and Drago described him thusly:

'Before, during, and after his career in Wyoming, Frank Canton was a merciless, congenital, emotionless killer. For pay, he murdered eight - very likely ten men. When a compiler of one of the so-called "galleries of gunfighters" turns the spotlight on Wyoming, the celebrated Tom Horn, of a somewhat later day, is given the full treatment. Little attention is given to Frank Canton. Perhaps that is because there was nothing glamorous about Canton. Even Jesse James was kind to his mother.'

That last line kills me. The writing is probably a product of its time (the book was published in 1970), but it's at least an engaging style, and keeps things interesting. As I read the book, I recognized the effect Westerns have had on me, as I kept expecting the various players, especially those who seemed to be manipulating the law for their benefit (Laurence G. Murphy and James J. Dolan of Lincoln County, New Mexico Territory, for example), to be felled by vengeful (righteous?) gunfire. Never really happened. The movers and shakers all know how to stay far enough back to not get hit.

* The plan was to send a large quantity of cattlemen, their employees, mercenaries into Johnson County, disarm the local militia, then kill any known or suspected rustlers. Of course, suspected could include simply having been seen talking with a known rustler, so clearly these were men a bit drunk on power. Fortunately, they were also basically incompetent about it, which minimized the death toll.