Nebraska History

Next Case Goes Up a Tree: The Vigilantes of Wyoming and Nebraska – Part II

By Pippi Van Slooten

This two-part article, the first of which appeared in the February issue of the Nebraska Cattleman, compares the development of vigilante groups in early Nebraska and Wyoming. Research indicates that Nebraska may have had a quicker restoration of law and order due to its less “colorful” population. While Nebraska was for the most part settled by farmers looking to build a stable community, Wyoming was settled by fortune seekers, rebels and outlaws brought by the expansion of the railroad.

Just as in Nebraska, Wyoming was settled by homesteaders moving westward and cattlemen moving northward. Adding to the motley blend in Wyoming were British investors in the growing cattle industry as well as ex-Confederate soldiers looking for a fresh start out West. During the late Victorian period, British capitalists were seeking places for investment.

Unlike the French or the Germans, the British weren’t preoccupied with internal political turmoil, which can exhaust treasuries. Between 1842 and 1850, the British lowered tariffs on beef imports, causing a minor pre-Civil War market shift from pork in the Midwest. This was a main factor in establishing the beef-packing industry in the West. Cincinnati was a major pork-packing center, but once the British became interested in American beef, Chicago’s became more attractive with its access to Western cattle routes and with the growing importance of the railroad.

British traveled to the American West during this time, lured by the stories of rugged life on the wild frontier. Many such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde and Rudyard Kipling were tourists and sightseers using the expanding railway system. But the West was changing as Indians were moved to the reservations and territories became states. English investors had heard tales of 35 and 40 percent annual return from the Wyoming cattle ranchers. Entrepreneurs chose to participate in the benefits of an expanding economy and were no longer content with smaller stock-raising profits at home. There was no where else where cattle could be fattened at a small cost. Cheap grazing land seemed inexhaustible and for a meager investment, money was being made hand over fist; then came the homesteaders and small farmers.

The Transcontinental Railroad project also brought Confederate soldiers out West. From 1848 (the end of the Mexican War) to 1860 (near the start of the Civil War), Indians attacked cattle drives to the miners and settlers in California so Texas began driving to northern markets. But with the outbreak of the Civil War, President Lincoln declared a blockade of Texas and southern states, banning trade with them. The Texas cattle population flourished and yet languished. In 1864 the full-scale Indian War raged through the thinly populated Western states.

What spurred the use of Confederate POWs out West was the Indian War in Minnesota in 1862. Indians were taking advantage of a Union Army weakened by war, draft riots in the north and Peace groups inciting sabotage. “Galvanized Yankees” were Confederate Army prisoners of war who swore allegiance and service to the U.S. Army in exchange for freedom from POW camps where death and disease were rampant. They were sent out West so they would not have to battle former comrades in the South. Among the first enlisted were the foreign-born, mainly of Irish and German descent. Six regiments were active out West and their duties included restoring mail and stagecoach service disrupted due to Indian raids, escorting supply trains, rebuilding telegraph lines destroyed by Indians, guarding telegraph stations and isolated Union outposts and protecting surveying parties for the Union Pacific railroad.

After the war, no Southern state would claim these “Yankees,” so some chose new identities and decided to remain out West. Of those remaining, some became solid citizens, others became gunfighters, rustlers and highwaymen and some continued to work for the railroad. In the aftermath of the Civil War, politicians worked to end the sectional and racial divides in the country. The Transcontinental Railroad was to be a part of this process.

Wyoming became a territory the same year the Transcontinental Railroad was completed. The growth of the population in Wyoming was largely due to the Union Pacific railroad. Immigrants came to Wyoming from all over the world to work on the railroad. In Cheyenne, Wyo., in 1867 and throughout the West, the U.S. Army protected Union Pacific workers from attack by both Indians and whites. The Union Pacific brought boomtowns to Wyoming. In these “hell on wheels” days, most men carried guns, which newspaper editors advised them to do for their own safety. As long as guns were commonly worn, ideas about individuality, “justice” and the influence of alcohol led to gunfights.

In the early 1880s, the failure of the courts to punish severely in homicide cases caused growing resentment. It had been regarded as less dangerous to kill a man than to steal a horse. The Union Pacific, with the help of the U.S. Army, enforced its authority in 1867. Soldiers from Ft. Russell destroyed homes set up by squatters on railroad land. But the Union Pacific only “protected” its own property, leaving regular police protection to the city government, which was non-existent in most early cases.

The soldiers themselves were a growing community problem as well. National Archive records show that commanding officers spent more time worrying about internal problems of their commands than they did about the troubles of the Union Pacific. Guard houses were usually filled with deserters and alcoholics aided and abetted by local ranchers and saloons. Ranchers on the plains trafficked in whiskey and guns and they often concealed deserters and bought horses, guns and other government property from them. Wyoming’s first vigilante activity appeared in Cheyenne in 1868. Vigilantes primarily drove undesirables out of town, lynched stock thieves and “recovered” stolen money. One sign attached to a victim who was tied to a tree read:

“$900 stole ... $500 recovered ... Next case goes up a tree. Beware of Vigilance Committee.”

Cheyenne’s mayor announced he would not tolerate any vigilante activity, but in 1868 a group of masked men lynched two men acquitted of murder and stealing mules. In Laramie, the mayor argued that a weak government soon deteriorated into no government at all. Laramie’s vigilantes were better organized than Cheyenne’s and they tried to hide in law enforcement. They gained positions as marshals and justices of the peace and used these positions to give the color of legality to their vigilante activities. Working both sides of the legal “street” was common in Laramie and wasn’t as prevalent in Nebraska.

Unfortunately, there was little to no oversight on what was going on in Wyoming. Laramie County’s only representative in the 1868 legislature rarely attended sessions and, after missing 30 days of a 40-day session, was refused a seat, so his constituents had no redress for their problems with vigilantes and corrupt law enforcement. The mayor of Cheyenne and the territorial secretary pleaded with the vigilante mobs to let the law take its course, but the lynching and acts of intimidation continued. A Cheyenne Sun editorial of the time read, “There has been so many long-winded legal farces enacted in the territorial courts that it seemed to citizens as if the law was being used to protect and not to punish criminals.”

Small settlers were becoming more numerous in Wyoming and large-scale ranchers were becoming frustrated at the loss of their public grazing land. Big cattlemen began to accuse settlers of cattle rustling but when they were arrested and tried, juries were apt to acquit the settlers either for lack of evidence or out of sympathy for the accused and his family. The consensus at the time was that as settlement increased, cattle stealing increased in the area as well. Cattlemen felt they weren’t getting justice in the courts so they decided to take the law in their own hands.

In 1889, James Averall, a homesteader on public land used by rancher A.J. Bothwell, had constantly complained to Carbon County authorities and to a Casper newspaper about three men hogging land beside Sweet Water River. He was lynched by Bothwell and others. According to New York Times and Washington Post accounts during this time, the Johnson County “war” between cattlemen and “cattle rustlers” had reached the point where both State and Federal troops had to be brought in to restore order. Each side even used canons and heavy artillery against one another in the war of intimidation and control over the land. Despite the fact that cattlemen brought Texas Regulators in as hired guns, Federal troops managed eventually to restore order.

Other instances of violence and intimidation occurred with railroad men who were said to be prominent in Laramie vigilante groups. Neither the government nor the Union Pacific seemed to have frowned upon or prevented such activities. N.K. Boswell, a sheriff, stock detective and known leader of a Laramie vigilantes group, was jailed in 1872 in Denver for forming a vigilante group there. Boswell was shot to death trying to escape custody.

In 1868, a town tried to drive out a group of Laramie vigilantes. The local paper carried a notice for the vigilantes to leave town or hang and soon a riot ensued, causing the paper’s proprietor to flee town. With the help of citizens, the police drove the mob from town, but the mob of vigilantes returned to threaten to burn the town to the ground. The mayor called in the army and established martial law.

This was in sharp contrast to Nebraska, where “frontier justice” existed briefly in the absence of established law and order and yielded once government and settlement became more organized and developed. But in Wyoming, local government forces often were helpless before entrenched lawlessness and Federal troops were needed to end the violence.

The difference between the two western states resided in the type of people who settled each region and in the perceived effectiveness and impartiality of their government representatives. In Nebraska, settlers worked together to form protective associations, particularly to self-police remote areas until technology could make law enforcement more effective in such areas. In Wyoming, a motley group of mostly economically driven individuals from all over the world were brought together by the railroad and each felt the need to protect by force his or her investment from the others. The combination of British investment, ex-Confederate alienation and the rugged individualism of Texas cattle culture created a powerful extralegal force that a weak state government had to work hard to contend with. But in the end it was the citizens of both states who had to take control of their own destiny and make life on the frontier what it is today – a Western extension of democracy.  Y By Pippi Van Slooten, a UNL doctoral student studying political science. Her work includes research for the Nebraska State Historical Society on topics regarding the history of the Nebraska beef industry.