The Mammoth Book of the West (29 page)

Champion stayed inside as long as he could. With the flames roaring around him, he wrote a final entry in his diary:

Well, they have just got through shelling the house like hell. I heard them splitting wood. I guess they are going to fire the house tonight. I think I will make a break for it when night comes, if alive. It’s not night yet. The house is all fired. Goodbye, boys, if I never see you again.

Putting the book in his vest pocket and holding his Winchester in his hand, Champion rushed out the back of the cabin. The final moments of Nathan Champion were described by Sam Clover, one of the war correspondents with the Regulators:

The roof of the cabin was the first to catch on fire, spreading rapidly downward until the north wall was a sheet of
flames. Volumes of smoke poured in at the open window from the burning wagon, and in a short time through the plastered cracks of the log house puffs of smoke worked outwards. Still the doomed man remained doggedly concealed . . . “Reckon the cuss has shot himself”, remarked one of the waiting marksmen. “No fellow could stay in that hole a minute and be alive.”

These words were barely spoken when there was a shout, “There he goes!” and a man clad in his stocking feet, bearing a Winchester in his hands and a revolver in his belt, emerged from a volume of black smoke that issued from the rear door of the house and started off across the open space surrounding the cabin into a ravine, fifty yards south of the house. But the poor devil jumped square into the arms of two of the best shots in the outfit, who stood with levelled Winchesters around the bend waiting for his appearance.

Champion saw them too late, for he overshot his mark just as a bullet struck his rifle arm, causing the gun to fall from his nerveless grasp. Before he could draw his revolver a second shot struck him in the breast and a third and fourth found their way to his heart.

Nate Champion, the king of cattle thieves, and the bravest man in Johnson County, was dead.

The Regulators stood around their fallen foe, more in awe than in triumph. Wolcott, looking at the lifeless Nate Champion, was moved to exclaim, “By God, if I had fifty men like you, I could whip the whole state of Wyoming!”

Champion’s pocket diary was found and read. The dead homesteader had recognized some of his besiegers, including Frank Canton, and these names were removed with a sharp knife. The diary was thrown back on the corpse, to be picked up by Sam Clover and later published on the front page of the
Chicago Herald
.

After pinning a card saying “CATTLE THIEVES BEWARE” to Champion’s vest, the Regulators lined up behind Wolcott and moved out towards Buffalo, 50 miles to the north.

In Buffalo, at that same moment, a citizens’ army was being raised to resist the Regulators. Wild rumours of invasion had been flying into the office of Sheriff “Red” Angus all day, which had finally been substantiated on the arrival of Black Jack Flagg and his stepson. A leading merchant of the town, the venerable white-haired Robert Foote, rode up and down the street on a stallion exhorting the men to arms. “If you have no arms,” Foote shouted, “come to my store and get them free of charge.” Meanwhile, Sheriff Angus dispatched two deputies, E. U. Snider and Arapaho Brown, to summon outlying homesteaders.

At dawn on 10 April, Sheriff Angus rode out of Buffalo at the head of a 300-strong posse, whose ranks of volunteer citizens even numbered armed clergy. As it marched south, the giant posse was soon noticed by an advance Regulator scout who galloped back to warn Wolcott, now only 14 miles from town. Wolcott ordered a rapid retreat to the TA Ranch on Crazy Woman Creek, where the Regulators hurriedly built a barricade and prepared for a siege.

The battle lasted two days. Towards the evening of the second day, the homesteaders built an ark of safety or “go-devil”, a moveable breastwork of logs six feet high attached to the front of a wagon. The plan was to push the ark close enough to the TA ranch house for men sheltered behind it to throw dynamite bombs. On the morning of 13 April, as the ark was being pushed into effective range, a bugle suddenly sounded over the hill.

On the very brink of annihilation, the Regulators were saved by the timely appearance of Troops C, D and E of the Black Sixth Cavalry Regiment under Colonel J. J. Van
Horn. During the previous night, Wolcott had succeeded in sending a messenger through the homesteaders’ lines and the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association had then called on the sympathetic Republican Acting Governor Amos W. Barber for help. Barber, in turn, had sent telegram after telegram to Washington D.C. urging President Harrison to send Federal troops to the relief of the Regulators at the TA Ranch.

Colonel Van Horn gave Wolcott and his men protective custody and escorted them to safety at Fort D.A. Russell. Sheriff Angus was left to fume, “I had them [the Regulators] in my grasp, and they were taken from me.”

None of the Regulators was ever brought to court, and the killings of Nate Champion and Nick Ray went unpunished. Farcically, all expenses (amounting to some $18,000) for the imprisonment of the Regulators while they awaited trial was charged against Johnson County, leading to the county treasury running dry. The county could not afford to prosecute. Moreover, the two trappers who witnessed the murders were spirited out of the state by friends of the Regulators and bribed into silence. With no money and no witnesses, the prosecution had no option but to move for dismissal of the case. In January 1893 the Regulators went free, and the Johnson County War was over.

Almost. Traces of fallout from the invasion continued to descend for years. The cattle barons and their dominant Republican machine lost much of their influence, especially when a former ally, Asa Shinn Mercer, publisher of the
Northwestern Livestock Journal
, left their camp. In 1894 Mercer published a little book with a long title,
The Banditti of the Plains, or the Cattlemen’s Invasion of Wyoming in 1892
, which did much to expose the machinations of the “Cheyenne ring”.

And, while it was clear to all that the era of open range had come to an end, the stock growers did not simply
drop their campaign against rustlers. They only changed tactics. Instead of promulgating openly violent vigilantism, they paid bounty hunter Tom Horn to murder cattle thieves with stealth. Not cut short until 1903, Horn’s homicidal career marked a last throe of wildness on the Wyoming range.

The Johnson County War was the starkest encounter between big ranchers and small farmers in the history of the West. Many of its events passed into popular stories and songs, among them “The Ballad of Nate Champion”. Inspired by Champion’s diary, the ballad became a favourite of settlers and cowboys everywhere, and ensured his status as one of the frontier’s greatest folk heroes.

It was a little blood-stained book which a bullet had torn in twain.

It told the fate of Nick and Nate, which is known to all of you;

He had the nerve to write it down while the bullets fell like rain.

At your request, I’ll do my best to read those lines again.

“Two men stayed with us here last night, Bill Jones and another man,

Went to the river, took a pail, will come back if they can.

I told old Nick not to look out, there might be someone near,

He opened the door; shot to the floor, he’ll never live, I fear.

Two hours since the shots began, the bullets, thick as hail!

Must wait on Nick, he’s awful sick, he’s still alive but pale.

At stable, river and back of me, men are sending lead.

I cannot get a shot to hit, it’s nine and Nick is dead.

Down at the stable I see a smoke, I guess they’ll burn the hay.

From what I’ve seen they do not mean for me to get away.

It’s now about noon, I see a rope thrown in and out the door.

I wish that duck would show his pluck, he’d use a gun no more.

I don’t know what has become of the boys that stayed with us last night.

Just two more boys with me and we would guard the cabin right.

I’m lonesome, boys, it’s two o’clock, two men just come in view,

And riding fast, as they went past, were shot at by the crew.

I shot a man down in the barn, don’t know if I hit or not.

Must look again, I see someone, it look like there’s a blot.

I hope they did not get those men that across the bridge did run.

If I had a pair of glasses here, I think I’d know someone.

They’re just through shelling the house, I hear the splitting wood;

And I guess they’ll light the house tonight, and burn me out for good.

I’ll have to leave when night comes on, they’ll burn me if I stay;

I guess I’ll make a running break and try to get away.

They’ve shot another volley in, but to burn me is their game,

And as I write, it’s not yet night, and the house is all aflame.

So good-bye boys, if I get shot, I got to make a run,

So on this leaf I’ll sign my name, Nathan D. Champion.”

The light is out, the curtain drawn, the last sad act is played.

You know the fate that met poor Nate, and of the run he made.

And now across the Big Divide, and at the Home Ranch door

I know he’ll meet and warmly greet the boys that went before.

“There is no Sunday west of Newton, and no God west of Pueblo.”

There were many things which conspired to make the West wild, a violent arena where the law of the gun was paramount. As settlement moved west, frontiersmen used firearms for ousting the Indians, becoming brutalized in the process. Settlements were often ahead of regular courts of law, beyond the reach of peace officers, leaving pioneers to settle disputes themselves, sometimes bloodily. Then there was the Civil War, which lit hatred along the Kansas–Missouri border, and generated bands of outlaws, among them the James–Younger gang, the Logan brothers and the McCarty brothers, the latter giving Butch Cassidy of the Wild Bunch his apprenticeship in crime. Civil War frustrations also burned bright in Texas, leading afterwards to a spate of White–Black killings (a forgotten amount of Western violence was inter-ethnic). When Texan cowboys went up the great cattle trails, they often took the “lost cause” with them and baited cowtown lawmen, who were predominantly Northerners. Economics, too, played its part. Big ranchers in Wyoming hired gunmen to kill homesteaders in the Johnson County War. When the Southern Pacific Railroad wished to evict farmers from Mussel Slough Valley in California they
purchased the services of a gunfighter called Walter J. Crow, a man with seven kills already notched on his tally stick; the ensuing, little-known “Mussel Slough Shoot-out’ on 11 May 1880 saw Crow kill five men, a record for a single-incident gunfight unsurpassed in the west, save for that of a Captain Jonathan R. Davis who was attacked by eleven robbers on a mountain trail near Placerville, California, in 1854. Davis shot down seven of his assailants and, for good measure, knifed to death another three. The last bandit escaped, pitifully wounded.

Underpinning violence, and even making it socially acceptable, was a set of mental beliefs which comprised the Code of the West. By the Code a man was required to personally redress wrongs done to him, to stand his ground in any conflict situation (in the words of the folk song, “I ain’t no hand for trouble / But I’ll die before I run”) and violently avenge any insult. A classic example of how allegiance to the Code – particularly the latter clause – could produce a gunfight was witnessed by cowboy Andy Adams, when his trail crew visited Dodge City:

Quince Forrest was spending his winnings as well as drinking freely, and at the end of a quadrille gave vent to his hilarity in an old-fashioned Comanche yell. The bouncer of the dance hall of course had his eye on our crowd, and at the end of a change, took Quince to task. He was a surly brute, and instead of couching his request in appropriate language, threatened to throw him out of the house. Forrest stood like one absent-minded and took the abuse, for physically he was no match for the bouncer, who was armed, moreover, and wore an officer’s star. I was dancing in the same set with a redheaded, freckle-faced girl, who clutched my arm and wished to know if my friend was armed. I assured her that he was not, or we would have had notice of it before the bouncer’s invective was
ended. At the conclusion of the dance, Quince and The Rebel passed out, giving the rest of us the word to remain as though nothing was wrong. In the course of half an hour, Priest returned and asked us to take our leave one at a time without attracting any attention, and meet at the stable. I remained until the last, and noticed The Rebel and the bouncer taking a drink together at the bar, – the former apparently in a most amiable mood. We passed out together shortly afterward, and found the other boys mounted and awaiting our return, it being now about midnight. It took but a moment to secure our guns, and once in the saddle, we rode through the town in the direction of the herd. On the outskirts of the town, we halted. “I’m going back to that dance hall,” said Forrest, “and have one round at least with that whore-herder. No man who walks this old earth can insult me, as he did, not if he has a hundred stars on him. If any of you don’t want to go along, ride right on to camp, but I’d like to have you all go. And when I take his measure, it will be the signal to the rest of you to put out the lights. All that’s going, come on.”