 |
|
The Greeting by Alfred
Jacob Miller. The painter witnesses the annual Rendezvous of Mountain
Men, trappers, and traders on the Green River while on an hunting trip with the
Scottish adventurer William Drummond Stewart in 1837 which became the subject
of Bernard DeVoto's classic account Beyond the Wide Missouri.
|
On July 10, 1890 Wyoming, the place where I grew up, was
admitted to the Union as the 44th
state. It is a big, square, empty
place—at least if you are looking for people.
It is the tenth largest state, but fiftieth in population, only an
estimate 544,000 or so folks most of them clustered in small cities along the
route of the Union Pacific Railroad/U.S. Highway 30/Interstate 80 in the
south, the oil city of Casper in the
middle and the boom/bust energy towns (coal, oil, uranium) in the Powder River area. The vast interior of the state is mostly
unpopulated wilderness to this day, range after range of rugged mountains.
The Federal government still owns 48% of all land, much of it still in open range in addition to an Indian Reservation (Shoshone and Arapaho),
an extensive system of National Parks,
Monuments, Forests, and designated Wilderness
Areas. There is also sprawling Francis E. Warren Air Force Base headquartered
in Cheyenne which controls Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) launch
silos scattered over hundreds of square miles.
Wyoming residents are noted for
being tough and independent with a tendency to simultaneously hate the Federal
government while being dependent in one way or another on its largess. They regularly return the most reactionary Republicans outside the deep South to Congress.
It’s the state that in recent decades his given the nation such
luminaries as former Interior Secretary
James Watts, Senators Allan Simpson and
Mike Enzi, and, of course, Vice President Dick Cheney.
Despite this, it’s hard not to love
a place of such stunning natural beauty.
The land that became Wyoming was
sparsely populated by native peoples for at least 10,000 years. In historic
time it was the home or hunting ground of Crow, Arapaho, Lakota, and
Shoshone. East of the Continental Divide it was a cradle of
the Plains Indian buffalo hunting
horse culture that developed in the late 1700’s as wild mustangs, the descendents of Spanish
stock in Texas were introduced
to the region.
The first white man known to visit was John
Coulter, who left the Lewis and
Clark expedition in 1807 to trap beaver.
He wandered into what became Yellowstone
Park. Back in St. Louis his accounts of boiling water shooting into the sky and
bubbling mud pots were dismissed as tall tales and the place was dubbed Coulter’s Hell.
What couldn’t be ignored was the incredible richness in beaver in the
hundreds of streams feeding out of dozens of mountain ranges. By the 1820’s it was the center of the fur
trade and Mountain Man culture
populated by such legendary figures as Jim
Bridger, Hugh Glass, Jeremiah
Johnson, and a teenager from New
Mexico named Kit Carson. Most of the Mountain Man Rendezvous, huge fur trading fairs and
social gatherings, between 1824 and 1840 when the beaver largely gave out, were
held along the Green River or
elsewhere in the region.
Trappers were also explorers. As
early as 1812 Robert Stuart of John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company
discovered South Pass, an easy rout
across the Divide, on a trip from Astoria
to St. Louis. This would be the route of the future Oregon Trail. Washington Irving used Stuart’s journal
of this trip as the basis of his novel Astoria.
In 1834 William Sublet built a
wooden palisade trading post east of South Pass named Ft. William. In 1841 with
the traditional fur trade in decline and the Rendezvous over, Astor’s American Fur Company bought the post,
erected an adobe fort and re-named it Ft.
Laramie in honor of one the French
Canadian partners in the firm. By
1849 the fur trade was over and the company sold the post to the U.S. Army.
In 1842 Jim Bridger established his own trading post, Ft. Bridger, on the Green
River near the former Rendezvous site.
Both posts played a key role as immigrant wagon trains began moving west. The western route was explored and mapped by
Army Captain Benjamin Bonneville in 1832-34.
Lt. John C. Frémont and his
guide Kit Carson conducted three expiations to the area between 1842 and
1846. His journals and “the first decent
map” of what would become the Oregon Trail were published in 1848, just in time
to become the Bible of a wave of immigrants.
In 1836 missionaries Henry H.
Spalding and Marcus Whitman and
their wives Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Hart Spalding became the first
immigrants to use the trail—or most of it—to get to Walla Walla in the Oregon
Territory. They had to abandon
their wagons in present day Idaho and
finish the trip by pack mule and canoe.
Small parties followed over the next few years. In 1840 Robert
Newell, Joseph L. Meek, and their families reached Fort Walla Walla with
three wagons, completing the Oregon Trail route.
The first small organized immigrant wagon train parties set out in 1841 and
’42. The next year the trickle became a
torrent when a company of 700-1000 immigrants set out under the leadership of
former Army Captain John Gatt. Marcus Whitman, who accompanied the Great Migration of 1843, dissuaded the
company from abandoning their wagons and led them as far the Dalles where they were blocked by Mt. Hood.
A few years later a rude road would be constructed to complete the
wagon route to the Willamette
Valley. In subsequent years more and
more immigrant trains took the route wearing deep ruts in the prairies that can
be found to this day and stopping at Forts Laramie and Bridger for rest and
supplies.
In 1848 Brigham Young led
thousands of Mormons broken up into
several parties over the Oregon Trail to Ft. Bridger, where the old mountain
man advised them of a route into what became Utah. The Mormon Trail accommodated thousands
more over the next few years.
The discovery of gold in California in
1849, unleashed a new torrent of feverish wealth seekers who followed the route
of the Oregon Trail as far as Ft. Hall in
present day Idaho before branching
southwest along the Humbolt River.
An estimated 400,000 pioneers used the western trail system before the Civil War. Despite all of the traffic, almost none settled
in Wyoming. Immigration along the trails
was helped by a period of relative peace with the Plains tribes established by
the Ft. Laramie Treaty 1851.
But increased traffic alarmed the tribes, particularly after the Bozeman Trail was blazed branching off
from the Oregon Trail to reach the newly discovered gold fields at Virginia City, Montana in 1863. The route went through the Powder River country reserved to the
tribes by treaty. Warriors began
attacking parties on the Bozeman trail, and even fairly large companies on the
main Oregon Trail.
In 1865 Major General Grenville
Dodge, already personally interested in a potential transcontinental
railroad route roughly following the Oregon/Mormon trail, ordered a punitive
expedition to the Powder River country leading to the Battle of the Tongue River in which the main body of Arapaho were
defeated and their horses killed or confiscated. The next year the conflict blew up into
general war with all the Plains tribes named after the Lakota chief Red Cloud, but actually led by the
Southern Cheyenne and their Lakota and Arapaho allies.
The Army established a string of forts deep in the Powder River country—Ft. Reno, Ft. Phil Kearney, and Ft. C.F. Smith all under the inexperienced command of Col. Henry B. Carrington. The tribes attacked the new forts and
regularly harassed their supply lines and small parties that set out to collect
fire wood or hunt. Vastly outnumbered Carrington could not protect immigrant
parties on the Bozeman trail who continued to be attacked. In December attacks on wood parties from Ft.
Kearney resulted in the death of several men, including the only experience
cavalry officer in a post made up mostly of infantry. Another party was besieged on December 21and
a mixed party of 81 cavalry and infantry and two civilian scouts under Capt. William J. Fetterman was
lured into a trap by Crazy Horse,
then a young Lakota warrior and were massacred.
Besieged in the fort and expecting an attack, Carrington dispatched
civilian scout Portuguese Phillips to
ride to Ft. Laramie for relief. After a
storied ride through territory teaming with hostiles and through a raging
blizzard, an exhausted Phillips arrived at Ft. Laramie on Christmas Eve to announce the news to the astonished attendees of a formal military ball. After a delay due to weather, troops were
dispatched from Ft. Laramie on January 2, 1867.
Despite being relieved, the Powder River Forts and any immigrants foolhardy
enough to hazard the Bozeman were in danger.
In the summer of 1867 large parties of several hundred Lakota and
Cheyenne under Red Cloud planned attacks on Forts Smith and Kearney. On August 1 a party of 18 troopers and six
civilians were attacked while cutting hay by more than 600 warriors. Making a rude fort of river willow, they held
off repeated charges thanks to new breach loading Springfield Rifles by the troopers and the expert marksmanship of
civilian Al Colvin wielding a new 16
shot lever action Henry. The next day a
similar party cutting wood was attacked out side of Ft. Kearny. 31 infantry under Capt. James Powell managed
to form a fort from their wagons and using their new Springfields held off more
than 1000 Lakota under Crazy Horse and a
smaller number of Cheyenne under Little Wolf. The battle lasted five hours until the
party was relieved by a column from the Ft.
Powell reported killing 60 and wounding 120 attackers while suffering 5
dead and two wounded.
Despite the back-to-back victories at the Hayfield and Wagon Box fights,
the Powder River forts were too exposed to defend. Besides, the approaching transcontinental
railroad made it essential that a general peace be established on the
Plains. The government sent peace
commissioners to Ft. Laramie, but Red Cloud and other leaders refused to meet
them until the Powder River forts were abandoned, which they were finally in
August. Still Red Cloud refused to come
in until November. He then negotiated
the most generous treaty in the long history of
Indian warfare in this country.
The Ft. Laramie Treaty of 1868 which
created the Great Sioux Reservation,
including the Black Hills and
recognized that the Powder River country had never been ceded by the Cheyenne
and could be used as a reserve for them and Lakota who did not want to live on
the reservation and as a hunting preserve for all Cheyenne and Lakota. The Bozeman trail was effectively
closed. Red Cloud became the only native
leader ever to win an Indian war.
Yet he knew that the white men would eventually break the treaty, which
they did after gold was discovered in the Black Hills setting off a new war
with the Lakota and Cheyenne that would be fought largely in the
Montana/Wyoming border region. But for a
time at least there was peace.
While war was raging on the northern planes, the Union Pacific Railroad was approaching rapidly from Omaha through the flat, easy country in
Nebraska along the Platte River. On July 4, 1867 railroad construction
boss General Granville Dodge (remember him?) platted a town site on in a hollow
of the high plateau where the road would cross Crow Creek just before ascending the steep grade of Sherman Hill, the high point of the
route. It was approximately half-way
between Omaha and the Valley of the
Great Salt Lake and was thus a likely division
point for the road. Tracks arrived
at the site on November 13. At first just a rough-and-tumble end-of-tracks Hell-on-Wheels camp, it became the town
of Cheyenne, named for the tribe
making war just a few hundred miles north.
Within a few months over 4,000 people migrated to the new settlement,
dubbed The Magic City of the Plaines
in the press for it’s phenomenal growth. Even as the railroad moved east taking with it
the large construction crews gamblers, prostitutes, fortune hunters of all
sorts flocked to the city as did stockmen hoping to take advantage of the new
rail head to open up a whole new range for their herds.
A temporary Army camp became Fort
D.A. Russell, which soon supplanted Ft. Laramie as the main Army post on
the Planes. Its supply depot, Camp Carlin employed teamsters and
freight handlers feeding 15 posts scattered to the north. Within a couple of years stockyards were
built, giant ranches established to provide beef for the nation and the famous Cheyenne Club catered to instant
millionaires and housed the new and powerful Wyoming Stock Growers Association.
While other towns sprang up as the U.P moved west—Laramie, Medicine Bow, Rawlins, Rock Springs, Green River, and Evanston—Cheyenne remained the
principle city. Wyoming Territory was carved out of Dakota Territory and organized on July 25, 1868 with Cheyenne as
its capital. The name was picked by Representative J. M. Ashley of Ohio based on a Delaware Indian word that he mistakenly believed meant “end of the
plains.” It actually means some like the
“flat by the river,” hardly descriptive of the new Territory. The name was
already applied to the Wyoming Valley
in Pennsylvania.
A few towns like South Pass
began to spring up in the interior, away from the railroads.
With men busy building things, the few white women in the Territory began
to step forward and at first unofficially took on the duties of local
administration. In recognition women
were awarded the franchise in the
state in 1869—the first in the country.
In 1870 women served on a Laramie jury while a female bailiff, Mary Atkinson served the
court. The same year at South Pass City Esther Hobart Morris became
Justice of the Peace, the first
woman officially elected to public office in the contry. The Territory stuck by it’s commitment even
when women’s suffrage was discouraging support for statehood in Congress. The state would maintain the women’s vote and
go on to be the first state to elect a woman Governor, Nellie Taylo Ross,
in 1924.
Between 1869 and ’71 three government expeditions finally explored and
mapped Coulter’s Hell. The final survey,
by Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden
convinced Congress to act to preserve the area from encroachment by miners to
the north and stockmen from the south and west.
Yellowstone, occupying the
northwest corner of the states and strips of adjacent Montana and Idaho, became
the first National Park in the
world. Within a few years it would
become an attraction for a tourism industry that would eventually grow to be
one of the state’s major sources of income.
The state also became the home of the first national forest, Shoshone National Forest in 1891;
first National Monument, Devil’s Tower in
1906; and Grand Teton National Park
1924.
Still, the Territory of the late 1800’s was a wild and wooly place. Well organized bands of outlaws and rustlers
operated out of the Hole-in-the-Wall a
secluded mountain hideout in remote Johnson
County from the late 1860’s all the way into the 1920’s. The best known were Butch Cassidy and Harry
Longabaugh, A/K/A the Sundance
Kid.
There were also racial tensions in the Territory, particularly at the coal
mines operated by the Union Pacific for its engines. The company began replacing white miners
with Chinese laborers at a lower
rate of pay in the 1880s. White miners
organized in the Knights of Labor
bitterly contested the policy. In 1883
rioting broke out at Rock Springs resulting
in the death of at least 23 Chinese and the burning of the 60 houses in the
Chinese district. Federal troops had to
be called in to protect the Asians, although public sentiment across the west
was with the white miners. Violence
against Chinese spread over the west in the aftermath.
The Homestead Act of 1862 began
to attract large numbers of immigrants to the fertile, but narrow valleys
draining the high country. Homesteaders
fenced their property interfering with free movement of stock over the Open Range over which powerful cattle
barons moved their herds. In places they
also cut off access to water. In
addition cattlemen believed that some of the settlers were rustling their
beef—something mostly done by the non-sod busters of the Hole-in-the-Wall.
By far the most violent episodes in Territorial and a state history was the
infamous Johnson County War,
declared by the powerful cabal of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association after
the brutal winter of 1888 decimated their herds. They accused small ranchers and homesteaders
of rustling their thin crop of spring calves.
Bands of cowboys began burning out sodbusters and harassing small
ranchers, banning them from the traditional joint spring round-ups. A number of small ranchers were shot,
lynched, or disappeared at the hands of Stock Association “Detectives”
including Johnson County Sheriff Frank M. Canton who was suspected of organizing most of the terror.
In a sensational 1889 case two homesteaders, Ella Watson and Jim Averell were lynched
and several witnesses, including a 14 year old boy were murdered after the
crime was reported to authorities. The
Stock Growers Association circulated a lurid and entirely false story to the
national press that Watson was a non-existent Cattle Kate, supposed queen of a ruthless gang of rustlers.
As
lynchings and murders continued, remaining small operators formed their own
association, the Northern Wyoming
Farmers and Stock Grower's Association, and announced plans for their own
1892 spring round-up. In response the
cattle barons imported 23 Texas gunslingers, hired four more detectives, and
formed an unofficial posse under Canton that also included some of the most
important men in the state as well as a sympathetic eastern newspaper
reporter. The Texans were paid a handsome
$5 a day plus a $50 a head bounty on any person on a 70 person hit list carried
by Frank Canton. Riding to Johnson County from Casper the Regulators, as they styled themselves,
cut telegraph wires to prevent word of their activities from getting out.
The first
target was one of the organizers of the Northern Wyoming group, Nate Champion. He was besieged in his log cabin after
his three companions were captured and shot.
He held off his attackers for most of a day killing 4 attackers and
injuring several more until his cabin was set on fire. He came out shooting and was riddled with 28
bullets. The Regulators left him where
he lay with a note pined on his chest “Cattle Thieves Beware.” Neighbors heard the lengthy gun battle,
depriving the Regulators of surprise.
They got
word to a new, sympathetic Sheriff in the county seat at Buffalo, who rounded up a posse of 200 men and cornered the
Regulators in a log barn at the TA Ranch
by Crazy Woman Creek. A prolonged gun battle erupted and three
more Texans were killed. Someone managed
to escape and get word to a sympathetic Acting Governor who wired President Benjamin Harrison for
military help to save the Regulators.
Troops from Sixth Cavalry at Ft. McKinley near Buffalo arrived in
time to save the men.
The army
took the Regulators into custody and brought them to Ft. Russell in Cheyenne,
where Canton’s hit list and other damming evidence, including the instructions
of the powerful leaders of the Stock Grower’s Association who hired the thugs
and their identities was revealed. The
Johnson County Attorney began to collect evidence against them all, including Senator Francis E. Warren, the biggest
fish of all.
In
Cheyenne, however the surviving Texans and detectives were released on bail and
“disappeared.” The big wigs escaped
prosecution because the County simply could not afford to prosecute the
case. Public outrage in the state
resulted in the Republicans, identified with the Stock Growers Association,
being ousted from both houses of the legislature and the election of a
Democratic Governor.
It didn’t
last long. Republicans and the Stock
Growers were soon riding high again.
Warren was elected to a new term in the Senate in 1894 and served until
1924 becoming one of the most powerful men in that body. When Ft. Russell was converted from a cavalry
post to an Air Force Base after World War II it was renamed in Warren’s
honor.
The events
of the Johnson County war marked the early statehood of Wyoming, which remained
deeply divided between the two sides for decades with occasional outbreaks of
violence. It became the archetypical
western story retold over and over from many points of view. Owen
Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian glorified the big
ranchers and their “loyal cowboys.” The
1952 film classic Shane told part of the tale from the other side.
The new state
closed out the 19th Century by
enthusiastically embracing the Spanish
American War. It sent more men per
capita to the conflict than any other state, including many cowboys, some of
them veterans of the Johnson County War, who joined the Rough Riders.
Today, folks
in Wyoming still pick sides in the Johnson County War dispute. The Wyoming Stock Growers Association remains
a powerful force in the state, although it now must share its clout with the
big energy companies.
Wyoming is
known as both The Cowboy State and
the Equality State celebrating
different aspects of its past.
No comments:
Post a Comment