Chapter 13

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_ Chapter XIII

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 canon 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. _

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