Hornswogglers, Fourflushers & Snake-Oil Salesmen (30 page)

The story of Henry Plummer and his alleged misdeeds is still one of the long-bandied and much-debated stories of the Old West. Was he or wasn't he the ringleader of the gang of thieves who swindled their fellow townsmen out of their hard-earned gold? If he was that bad man, as had been popularly believed for more than a century, then he ranks as one of the scurviest swindlers to walk bowlegged down the penny-pinching pike.

If he wasn't . . . well, revisionists have devoted much ink to the idea that a number of the men who were hanged for the crimes were, if not entirely innocent, certainly not deserving of having their necks stretched. That they did not receive a fair trial is an unfortunate misstep, to be sure. But the jury—despite the lack of one—is still out on that score, as irrefutable evidence has yet to be established.

For the sake of argument, let's say that the revisionists are correct and Plummer himself was innocent of the charges piled atop his moldering corpse. That doesn't mean there wasn't a murderous, deceiving gang whose members called themselves the “Innocents.” A gang rumored to be responsible for drygulching and murdering 102 miners.

I
n 1872 a number of large ranchers in Wyoming formed the Wyoming Stock Growers Association. In its early years it was strictly a social group that convened for functions at the Cheyenne Club. But this was no hayseed affair—members of the WSGA were among the richest residents of Wyoming Territory. And then, as now, wealth equated with power.

Under the guise of protectionism, of keeping safe their investments, these wealthy, powerful men spent years riding roughshod over anyone they deemed a threat to their livelihood, especially after the disastrous winter of 1886–87, also known as the Great Die-Up, when tens of thousands of head of cattle and other livestock froze to death all over the Upper West.

The members of WSGA carried their unrepentant zeal to such a degree that they instigated what has come to be called the Johnson County War, a protracted mess in which they cheated small ranchers out of their property any way they could.

On the morning of April 5, 1892, in what less than a century later would resemble a scene in dozens of Hollywood Westerns, fifty-two heavily armed men dis-embarked from a private, special train just north of the bustling cattle burg of Cheyenne, Wyoming. They mounted up on healthy, well-rested steeds led there specifically for them, to carry them northward to the Johnson County seat of Buffalo. Grim-faced to a man, these fifty-two had no interest in taking in the scenery. Of them, twenty-three were not cattlemen nor cattlemen's top hands. They were hired guns, raw killers who were good at their chosen profession.

They were all there to deal in the harshest terms with the seventy men whose names appeared on the “kill list” tucked in the breast pocket of Frank Canton, one of the men leading the grisly expedition. Until recently he had been the sheriff of Johnson County, Wyoming. He'd left that office for this more fruitful employment at the urging of Frank Wolcott, a big-money rancher of the North Platte region and mover and shaker within the big rancher's Wyoming Stock Growers Association. Wolcott was also the man who'd drawn up the kill list of the men he wanted shot, hanged, stabbed, clubbed—he didn't much care which as long as they ended up dead and no longer a burr under his wide saddle.

This brutal force felt secure in the knowledge that their impending heinous deeds, if not sanctioned by the law, at least would be cloaked in the obscuring smoke and thunder of Wolcott and his cronies' clout and cash. They also had the power of the press on their side, however yellow the various Cheyenne papers were. By printing falsehoods that claimed Buffalo was awash in “range pirates” and “the most lawless town in the country,” the papers painted a grim picture. They depicted every small-time operator as a ruthless cattle thief bent on destroying the livelihoods the cattle barons had worked so hard and long to build.

History shows that nothing could be further from the truth. By the mid-1880s the cattle barons, sitting fat and happy, saw little reason to slow their range-devouring ways. They wanted a lock on the market, especially after the early 1880s when beef prices soared. They overpopulated the rangelands with cattle, greed overriding reason, telling themselves that more was better. This resulted in an inevitable glut of beef, which naturally affected the wallets of the barons. Then a drought in the summer of 1886 was followed by a drastic winter that became known as the Great Die-Up, when tens of thousands of cattle and other livestock across the upper West froze to death. Feeling the resultant pinch, the greedy barons couldn't stand—or afford—the idea of further alteration to their income.

Concurrent with the earlier rise in beef prices, a number of newcomers were attracted to the region. These smaller ranchers, called “mavericks,” began establishing their own modest spreads, running cattle on the same land—open range that belonged to no one and to everyone. But the barons didn't see it that way. They reasoned that since they were there first, why should they share their own (overcrowded) range, land that they felt they all but owned? The appearance of yet more ranchers, even small upstarts, was not to be tolerated. The number of cattle the small-time operators turned loose on open range was miniscule compared with the massive numbers the barons ran.

So why make a fuss over it? Did the barons really feel threatened by the small-time operators? Many of these newcomers were known to the barons, having worked for them as cowboys. Others were newly arrived settlers looking to build up herds and ranches of their own. As was allowed by law, they established homesteads to which they had legal claim, and in doing so they settled on some of the choicest locations on that range.

Toss into this boiling stew the long-running practice of mavericking, or marking unbranded calves for one's own. The legal procedure allowed anyone with a registered brand to obtain legal ownership over any unbranded young stock, no matter whose cattle had birthed them.

So what did the big cattlemen of Wyoming do about this perceived threat? They began a long and brutal public smear campaign, claiming in simple but emphatic terms that the small ranchers were little more than opportunistic rustlers intent on stealing every critter on the range, branded or no. As the barons had the press in their back pockets, their smear campaigns were most effective. It wasn't long before the press cooked up far-fetched, sensational stories about a lawless element running amok in Johnson County, where cattle rustlers were ruining the very lives of the kindly cattle barons.

In addition, since the WSGA also had the governor of Wyoming—and even the president of the United States—in their other back pockets, the cattle barons began introducing and implementing new laws regarding mavericks and roundups, laws that overwhelmingly favored the good old boys.

As expected, the small ranchers protested, claiming the barons were greedy and sought the entire range for themselves. With all their purchased public and political support, the Wyoming Stock Growers Association felt as though they had the perceived culprits sighted in and just had to pull the trigger. So they settled on that timeless solution—violence—to rid themselves of their nuisances. And then the reign of killing began.

On July 20, 1889, the cattlemen lynched a woman named Ella Watson. Known as “Cattle Kate,” she along with her fiancé, Jim Averell, a local merchant in Rawlins, were also small holders, working homesteads to build up their own herds of cattle. Their land happened to control a mile of valuable frontage on Horse Creek. One of the biggest cattlemen, Albert John Bothwell, tried several times to purchase their land from them, but they declined. These and other tensions between Watson, Averell, and the WSGA ranchers escalated, culminating in accusations by the WSGA that Watson and Averell had rustled cattle, specifically from Bothwell, rebranding them as their own. Bothwell dispatched a handful of his own men to arrest the lovers and bring them to Rawlins. But they never intended to bring them to town. Instead they strung them up from a roadside tree.

The barons' claims, that the pair were rustlers, couldn't be proven. But a glimmer of hope glowed from the savage incident. The event was seen by four witnesses. However, before anything of consequence could come up in court, one witness was poisoned, two more disappeared, and another was paid off and fled the country.

More determined now than ever to rid themselves of this annoying menace to their nefarious livelihoods and rampant greed, the cattlemen hired stock detectives, a misleading appellation given to private gunmen who operated in a gray area of the law, which allowed them to “investigate” as long as they were hired by a legitimate rancher. In this case, it was the collective known as Wyoming Stock Growers Association. The directive given the stock detectives was simple: Get rid of the small ranchers any way necessary.

These early detectives in the employ of the WSGA came in the form of rough characters disguised as quasi-lawmen. The first, Frank M. Canton, had barely escaped Texas as an outlaw and was known to them as the recent sheriff of Johnson County. His two cohorts, Joe Elliott and Tom Smith, also had checkered Texas pasts. Not long after, on June 4, 1891, certain of these stock detectives paid a visit to local horse rancher Tom Waggonner and dragged him off at gunpoint while his wife and children looked on. A few miles down the road, they strung him up until he stopped thrashing and swung dead. As the hired killers worked their way down the kill list, they came to Nate Champion.

Of all the small-time operators in the Powder River region at the time, Champion rose to prominence head and shoulders above the others. It was not because he sought a leadership position among his fellows, but because he could not allow such blatant oppression to exist. And so it was in 1891 that Nate Champion rose to local prominence and an unofficial position as voice for the downtrodden ranchers.

Originally from Texas, Champion arrived in the Powder River region as a young man and quickly became known as a popular and dependable roundup foreman for a number of the big ranchers. All went well until Champion, an ambitious young man, saw a legal opportunity to expand his own fortunes, to build a life for himself. He dared to dream and so in his spare time began mavericking unbranded calves as he found them.

The barons retaliated by blacklisting him, preventing him from making a living doing what he did best—cowboying. They hoped this would convince him to skedaddle back to Texas. But it only made their problem worse—Champion was not a man to be pushed around.

Sadly, neither were the barons. They decided Champion would be the ideal man to make an example of. And on November 1, 1891, they made their play—but they didn't reckon on Champion besting them.

Nate Champion and a friend were holed up in what was known locally as the Hall Cabin, hard by the Middle Fork of the Powder River, in the heart of Wyoming's infamous Hole-in-the-Wall country. . . .