|
The Johnson County War, also known as the War on Powder River and the Wyoming Range War, was a series of range conflicts that took place in Johnson, Wyoming between 1889 and 1893. The conflicts started when cattle companies ruthlessly persecuted supposed rustlers throughout the grazing lands of Wyoming. As tensions swelled between the large established ranchers and the smaller settlers in the state, violence finally culminated in Powder River Country, when the former hired armed gunmen to invade the county and wipe out the competition. When word came out of the gunmen's initial incursion in the territory, the small-time farmers and ranchers, as well as the state lawmen, formed a posse of 200 men to fight them back which led to a grueling stand-off. The war ended when the United States Cavalry, on the orders of President Benjamin Harrison, relieved the two forces, and the failure to convict the invaders of the murders they had committed. The events have since become a highly mythologized and symbolic story of the Wild West, and over the years variations of the storyline have come to include some of its most famous historical figures. Its themes and elements of class warfare have served as a classical basis for numerous popular novels, films, and television shows of the Western genre, as well as being one of the most well-known range wars of the American frontier. ==Background== Conflict over land was a common occurrence in the development of the American West, but was particularly prevalent during the late 19th century, when large portions of the West were being settled by Americans for the first time through the homesteading act. It is a period which historian Richard Maxwell Brown has called the "Western Civil War of Incorporation",〔 of which the Johnson County War was a part. In the early days of Wyoming most of the land was in public domain, which was open to stock raising as an open range and farmlands for homesteading. Large numbers of cattle were turned loose on the open range by large ranches. Each spring, round-ups were held to separate the cattle belonging to different ranches. Before a roundup, an orphan or stray calf was sometimes surreptitiously branded, which was the common way to identify the cow's owners. Lands and water rights were usually distributed to whomever settled the property first, and farmers and ranchers had to respect these boundaries (the doctrine was known as Prior Appropriation). However, as huge numbers of homesteaders moved into Wyoming, competition for land and water soon enveloped the state, and the cattle companies reacted by monopolizing large areas of the open range to prevent newcomers from using it. They also forbade their employees from owning cattle in fear of turning them into a competition, as well as threatening or lynching anyone whom they suspected as rustlers. The often uneasy relationship between the larger, wealthier ranches and smaller ranch settlers became steadily worse after the harsh winter of 1886-1887, when a series of blizzards and temperatures of 40-50 degrees below 0 °F (-45 °C) followed by an extremely hot and dry summer, ravaged the frontier.〔 Thousands of cattle were lost and the large companies began appropriating land and water supply in the area. Some of the harsher tactics included forcing settlers off their land, setting fire to their properties, and excluding them from participating in the annual roundup. They justified these excesses on what was public land by using the catch-all allegation of rustling. Hostilities worsened when the Wyoming legislature passed the "Maverick Act", which stated that all unbranded cattle in the open range automatically belonged to the cattlemen's association.〔Agnew, Jeremy, ''The Old West in Fact and Film: History Versus Hollywood'', McFarland; 1st edition (2012) p.40. ISBN 978-0786468881〕 The cattlemen also held a firm grip on Wyoming's stock interests by limiting the number of small ranchers that could participate. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Johnson County War」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|