Frontier Wars--_Armed Conflicts of Bodies of Men on the
Frontiers_--_Political Wars; Town Site Wars; Cattle Wars_--_Factional
Fights_.
The history of the border wars on the American frontier, where the
fighting was more like battle than murder, and where the extent of the
crimes against law became too large for the law ever to undertake any
settlement, would make a long series of bloody volumes. These wars of
the frontier were sometimes political, as the Kansas anti-slavery
warfare; or, again, they were fights over town sites, one armed band
against another, and both against the law. Wars over cows, as of the
cattle men against the rustlers and "little fellows," often took on the
phase of large armed bodies of men meeting in bloody encounter; though
the bloodiest of these wars are those least known, and the _opera
bouffe_ wars those most widely advertised.
The state of Kansas, now so calm and peaceful, is difficult to picture
as the scene of a general bloodshed; yet wherever you scratch Kansas
history you find a fight. No territory of equal size has had so much war
over so many different causes. Her story in Indian fighting, gambler
fighting, outlaw fighting, town site fighting, and political fighting is
one not approached by any other portion of the West; and if at times it
was marked with fanaticism or with sordidness, it was none the less
bitter and notable.
The border wars of Kansas and Missouri at the time immediately preceding
the civil war would be famed in song and story, had not the greater
conflict between North and South wiped all that out of memory. Even the
North was divided over the great question of the repeal of the Missouri
Compromise. Alabama, Arkansas, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia,
Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New
Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and
Virginia gave a whole or a majority vote for this repeal of the
Compromise. Against the repeal were Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts,
New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin.
Illinois and New Jersey voted a tie vote. Ohio cast four votes for the
repeal measure, seventeen against it.
This vote brought the territories of Kansas and Nebraska into the Union
with the option open on whether or not they should have slavery: "it
being the true intent and meaning of this act not to legislate slavery
into any territory, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people
thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their own domestic
institutions in their own way."
That was very well; but who were "the people" of these debated grounds?
Hundreds of abolitionists of the North thought it their duty to flock to
Kansas and take up arms. Hundreds of the inhabitants of Missouri thought
it incumbent upon them to run across the line and vote in Kansas on the
"domestic institutions"; and to shoot in Kansas and to burn and ravage
in Kansas. They were met by the anti-slavery legions along the wide
frontier, and brother slew brother for years, one series of more or less
ignoble and dastardly outrages following another in big or little,
murders and arson in big or little, until the whole country at last was
drawn into this matter of the domestic institutions of "bleeding
Kansas." The animosities formed in those days were bitter and enduring
ones, and the more prominent figures on both sides were men marked for
later slaughter. The civil war and the slavery question were fought out
all over the West for ten years, even twenty years after the war was
over. Some large figures came up out of this internecine strife, and
there were many deeds of courage and many romantic adventures; but on
the whole, although the result of all this was for the best, and added
another state to the list unalterably opposed to human slavery, the
story in detail is not a pleasant one, and adds no great glory to either
side. It is a chapter of American history which is very well let alone.
When the railroads came across the Western plains, they brought a man
who has been present on the American frontier ever since the
revolutionary war,--the land boomer. He was in Kentucky in time to rob
poor old Daniel Boone of all the lands he thought he owned. He founded
Marietta, on the Ohio river, on a land steal; and thence, westward, laid
out one town after another. The early settler who came down the Ohio
valley in the first and second decades of the past century passed the
ruins of abandoned towns far back to the east even in that day. The
town-site shark passed across the Mississippi river and the Missouri,
and everywhere his record was the same. He was the pioneer of avarice in
very many cases, and often he inaugurated strife where he purported to
be establishing law. Each town thought itself the garden spot and center
of the universe--one knows not how many Kansas towns, for instance,
contended over the absurd honor of being exactly at the center of the
United States!--and local pride was such that each citizen must unite
with others even in arms, if need be, to uphold the merits of his own
"city."
This peculiar phase of frontier nature usually came most into evidence
over the questions of county seats. Hardly a frontier county seat was
ever established without a fight of some kind, and often a bloody one.
It has chanced that the author has been in and around a few of these
clashes between rival towns, and he may say that the vehemence of the
antagonism of such encounters would have been humorous, had it not been
so deadly. Two "cities," composed each of a few frame shanties and a set
of blue-print maps, one just as barren of delight as the other, and
neither worth fighting over at the time, do not seem typical of any
great moral purpose; yet at times their citizens fought as stubbornly as
did the men who fought for and against slavery in Kansas. One instance
of this sort of thing will do, and it is covered in the chapter
describing the Stevens County War, one of the most desperate and bloody,
as well as one of the most recent feuds of local politicians.
For some reason, perhaps that of remoteness of time, the wars of the cow
men of the range seem to have had a bolder, a less sordid and more
romantic interest, if these terms be allowable. When the cow man began
to fence up the free range, to shut up God's out-of-doors, he intrenched
upon more than a local or a political pride. He was now infringing upon
the great principle of personal freedom. He was throttling the West
itself, which had always been a land of freedom. One does not know
whether all one's readers have known it, that unspeakable feeling of
freedom, of independence, of rebellion at restraint, which came when one
could ride or drive for days across the empire of the plains and never
meet a fence to hinder, nor need a road to show the way. To meet one of
these new far-flung fences of the rich men who began to take up the West
was at that time only to cut it and ride on. The free men of the West
would not be fenced in. The range was theirs, so they blindly and
lovingly thought. Let those blame them who love this day more than that.
But the fence was the sign of the property-owning man; and the
property-owning man has always beaten the nomad and the restless man at
last, and set metes and bounds for him to observe. The nesters and
rustlers fought out the battle for the free range more fiercely than was
ever generally known.
One of the most widely known of these cow wars was the absurd Johnson
County War, of Wyoming, which got much newspaper advertising at the
time--the summer of 1892--and which was always referred to with a
certain contempt among old-timers as the "dude war." Only two men were
killed in this war, and the non-resident cattle men who undertook to be
ultra-Western and do a little vigilante work for themselves among the
rustlers found that they were not fit for the task. They were very glad
indeed to get themselves arrested and under cover, more especially in
the protection of the military. They found that they had not lost any
rustlers when they stirred up a whole valley full and were themselves
besieged, surrounded, and well-nigh ready for a general wiping out. They
killed a couple of "little fellows," or, rather, some of their hired
Texas cowboys did it for them, but that was all they accomplished,
except well-nigh to bankrupt Wyoming in the legal muddle, out of which,
of course, nothing came. There were in this party of cattle men a member
of the legislature, a member of the stock commission, some two dozen
wealthy cattle men, two Harvard graduates, and a young Englishman in
search of adventure. They made, on the whole, about the most
contemptible and inefficient band of vigilantes that ever went out to
regulate things, although their deeds were reported by wire to many
journals, and for a time perhaps they felt that they were cutting quite
a figure. They had very large property losses to incite them to their
action, for the rustlers were then pretty much running things in that
part of Wyoming, and the local courts would not convict them. This
fiasco scarcely hastened the advent of the day--which came soon enough
after the railroads and the farmers--under which the home dweller
outweighed the nomad.[G]
[Footnote G: See "The Story of the Cowboy," by E. Hough. D. Appleton &
Co.]
Wars between sheep men and cattle men sometimes took on the phase of
armed bodies of men meeting in bloody encounter. The sheep were always
unwelcome on the range, and are so to-day, although the courts now
adjust such matters better than they formerly did. The cow baron and his
men often took revenge upon the woolly nuisances themselves and killed
them in numbers. The author knows of one instance where five thousand
sheep were killed in one box cañon by irate cow men whose range had been
invaded. The sheep eat the grass down to the point of killing it, and
cattle will not feed on a country which sheep have crossed. Many wars of
this kind have been known all the way from Montana to Mexico.
Again, factional fights might arise over some trivial matter as an
immediate cause, in a community or a region where numbers of men fairly
equal were separated in self-interest. In a day when life was still wild
and free, and when the law was still unknown, these differences of
opinion sometimes led to bitter and bloody conflicts between factions.