CLEWS The Historic True Crime Blog

The Johnson County War, or How True Crime Birthed the Western

Guest Post by Larry Lynch

(A note: Larry Lynch is an aficionado of high quality historic crime stories and recently began a blog, True Crime Lessons, to highlight the best in true crime online and between covers. In this guest post, he brings our attention way back to a seminal crime in the west and a classic historic crime title, The War on Powder River by Helena Huntington Smith, published in 1967 and still in print forty years later. It's become a classic in western American history.)

On July 20, 1899, a robust hog farmer and prostitute and her innkeeper friend were strung up on a stunted pine overlooking Spring Creek Gulch.

A detective working for the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association led the gang of lynchers.

Johnson County’s hard-up cowboys turned homesteaders, whom the cattlemen labeled cow “rustlers,” reacted with anger and fear and began arming themselves.

But the association initiated a plan to deal with that. It assembled a small army of 19 cattlemen, 21 Texas gunslingers, and another hired killer brought in from Nampa, Idaho.

Their intent was to eradicate somewhere between 19 and 70 Johnson County “rustlers” --- homesteaders the cattlemen decided didn’t deserve to occupy a piece of the open range. (Photo: Lynching victim Ella Watson. Via)

Things came to a head during the blizzardy spring of 1892 when the cattlemen’s “army” detrained at Casper and rode off toward the town of Buffalo, Wyoming where its leaders hoped to corner most of their victims.

The army of “regulators” began by surrounding the small ranch of Nate Champion, labeled “the bravest man in Johnson County” by one of the newspaper writers who chronicled the Johnson County war from its roots in the 1890s spring roundups to the lawlessness that followed.

Warned by the slaying of Champion, a spontaneous citizen militia made up of homesteaders from Buffalo and environs, maybe 200 strong, surrounded the gunslingers at a cattlemen’s ranch and threatened to obliterate them.

President Benjamin Harrison was forced to send in the Calvary to rescue the cattlemen’s crew, marching it off to Cheyenne where the whole gang was more or less incarcerated (mostly less) until they were cleared of all criminal charges.

This true crime story --- if the West could have true crime before it actually had much law --- is recounted in wonderful detail by Helena Huntington Smith in her 1966 book, The War on Powder River, still available from the University of Nebraska Press.

Smith tells this story with an engaging true to life flavor. To accomplish this she uses letters written by the cattlemen themselves, an abundance of not-quite-objective but many sided accounts by writers from the East and by Wyoming’s country editors at the time. All this is supplemented with information from a few books and “confessions” produced by participants.

For anyone who has been fascinated by Westerns in film and on TV, this book should become a must read. Larry McMurtry notwithstanding, it is probably as close as anyone is likely to come to “the true story” behind the myth that underlies the West.

I was tipped to Smith’s book by LSU film theorist Patrick McGee at the recent Colorado Springs conference on media and violence. In a 2006 book of his own, McGee traces how the events in Johnson County inspired the seminal Western novel The Virginian by Owen Wister and many Western films that followed. (McGee’s book is From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western.)

For a web-based quick history that may be intentionally short on some details, try out Wyoming Tales and Trails. Wikipedia also has a useful but incomplete rundown. It fails to mention Smith’s book but suggests that the disastrous 1980s movie Heaven’s Gate came close to following the true story, which is not correct. That flick is bad history as well as bad moviemaking. Somewhat ironically, the movie went so far over budget and did so poorly at the box office that Hollywood’s money men aren’t likely to have another go at the actual story any time soon.

In his conference presentation, McGee discussed his personal fascination with the way the stories of the old west based on The Johnson County War have moved over time from being sympathetic to the capitalist cattlemen to showing how the common homesteaders were victimized. I have yet to read his book, but it has moved to the top of my list along with The Virginian.

Anyone interested in the story with plans to visit Wyoming might check out Buffalo's city web site before heading out. It looks like some there are beginning to relish the story. They have just this spring erected a statue of Nate Champion.

Revisiting the OK Corral and the Forgotten Trial of Wyatt Earp

On a recent post about the Earps in Deadwood, a Clews visitor, Chase, left this remark:

Big deadwood fan myself (big westerns fan too). Maybe it's just me, but I dont like the way wrote Morgan's character. On another note, which movie did you like better, Tombstone or Wyatt Earp? It's hard for me to choose...if i could, i would blend the casts...keep costner as wyatt, keep val kilmer as doc holliday, etc

And my answer is, both, and neither. Both actors are easy on the eyes but anyway I still wonder -- why don't they stick closely to the history? Isn't that fantastic enough for Hollywood?

Because the real history of the OK Corral and the tremendous fallout have never been fully plumbed on film.

It is early afternoon on a fateful day - October 26, 1881 - in the frontier town of Tombstone, Arizona. Four heavily armed men have decided to take the law into their own hands. Gamblers and possibly thieves, a notorious gunslinger among them, they are determined to take vengeance for a series of trivial insults and imagined threats. Ignoring the orders of the county sheriff, they march grimly to an alley between a rooming house and a photographer's studio. There they catch sight of their intended victims....

So begins The Forgotten Trial of Wyatt Earp, a law review article by Steven Lubet that appeared in the University of Colorado Law Review. It's a terrific -- and accurate -- primer on the thorny legal questions raised by the actions of the Earps. After writing this article, Lubet expanded it into a book; I will include an Amazon link to the book at the end of this post.

And in the same vein:

Wyatt Earp is a cultural icon, a man of law and order, a mythic figure of a West where social control and order were notably absent. The West also had its share of “bad” men and notorious villains. Could it be that the legendary Wyatt Earp might have have less the hero than we have made him out to be? Was he, as some now contend, a killing, gambling, philandering, corrupt politician with close associations to known murderers and gamblers?

That is the lead on a piece written by Colleen Coughlin entitled Law at the OK Corral: Reading Wyatt Earp Films, originally published in the Legal Studies Forum. The author analyzed four films of the famous shootout:

• My Darling Clementine (1946), starring Henry Fonda; the Earps are "frequently filmed with sunshine surrounding them"
• Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), including a fictional "twist in the legend."
• Warlock (1959), "brilliant in its challenge to mythology"
• Tombstone (1993) "perhaps the most historically accurate of the films discussed."

These articles left me wondering two things -- One, why does the history not exactly match the popular cinema -- isn't the truth, with its subtleties and shades of gray, more compelling than the white hat/black hat thing?

And two, when did law reviews start publishing such interesting articles?

The Jesse James Cinematic Curse

Sorry, this post has been deleted. You'll have to wait for the book!

Wyatt Earp on Deadwood

God, this show just gets better and better. Based on the sneak preview of this Sunday's episode, Wyatt and Morgan Earp will soon grace the camp.

Wyatt Earp, you might remember, was involved at the legendary gunfight at the OK Corral.

And what were they doing in Deadwood? Well, the real history is the guide.

From Black Hills Visitor Magazine:

Wyatt and Morgan left Dodge City for Deadwood on September 9, 1876, in a wagon drawn by the best four-horse hitch money could buy, heading for new opportunities in the booming Black Hills. ... The brothers arrived in Deadwood to find ... Deadwood gulch was jammed with prospectors, miners, promoters and fortune hunters. After looking over the situation, Morgan decided to return to Dodge City before winter closed in.

Wyatt was convinced that a sober man could prospect for gold dust at the gaming tables of Deadwood saloons. It also been reported (one account from Seth Bullock's son) that the Earps had been recruited as "muscle" by some party in Deadwood to help with mining claims, and didn't just show up looking for color....It is rumored that the reason Wyatt left was that he and Deadwood’s sheriff Seth Bullock did not see eye to eye on an issue.

Read the rest here.

For more -- The Wyatt Earp Museum

Wikipedia on the Gunfight at OK Corral

POSTSCRIPT:

Is all of the above just BUNK?

I have it on a reliable authority that there's more fiction than fact in the above account. From my correspondent:

Fact is, the only information about Wyatt in Deadwood, came from Stuart Lake's book.  Lake interviewed Wyatt twice before he died.  All he had in his notes that that Wyatt went to Deadwood sometime in late 1877 and left in the spring of 1878.  He drove a wood wagon...that's it...nothing more.  There was so little info that Lake left it out of his first book all together.   That brochure is nothing but hype and filler.

And the only thing I can add is that fact and fiction are blended beautifully on Deadwood and if nothing much is really known at this late date, then it's all a big white canvas on which the show's producer and writers may write large. 

For more Clews on Deadwood see --

This post, wherein I whine about the show's f*****g demise

or

This post, wherein I relay the tale of the "Huckster" character from the first season of Deadwood

First true western showdown

I really ought to slow down on borrowing tidbits from the folks at The Daily Perspective, but they do have a habit of noting anniversaries of events of great interest to me. On this date, in 1865....

In what some consider the first true western showdown, Wild Bill Hickok shot Dave Tutt dead today. The duel took place in the market square of Springfield, Missouri.

"What set Wild Bill apart was his ability to shoot fast and straight while being shot at. He killed Dave Tutt at 50 yards in the public square of Springfield, Mo., in 1865, apparently in a duel over his attentions to Tutt's sister," reported an article in the Howland Bandwagon on April 30, 1975.

Art from the Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune, November 17, 1955.

The Terror of Alaska

“As long as you only had enough money to buy a drink or two you weren’t welcome, but you were safe.”

-- An old-timer on the risk of patronizing Soapy Smith’s drinking hall

Just as Deadwood, South Dakota attracted racketeers who sucked gold from miners’ pockets, so too did the Klondike gold strike draw parasites by the score. As strange colored lights danced in the sky, deep snow might’ve muffled the sounds of sin in a mining camp called Skagway. Back when the mountains had no names, the impromptu town played host to the wildest establishment in all of gold rush Alaska: Jeff’s Place, a gambling hall owned by Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith II, but managed by the Devil himself.

Soapy was a graduate of the criminal underworld in Colorado, but it was Alaska that saw the worst and last of him. He got the nickname by selling soap and claiming that one bar in each batch had a bit of money in it, though nobody ever found any, which said enough about his moral code.

He was clever, the way he created a gang of thugs and card cheats. When someone shot the marshal – the only law and order young Skagway knew – Soapy took up a collection for the widow. A few such carefully thunk charitable gestures gave him the breathing room he needed to make Jeff’s Place a lure for the unwary, and murderers and murderees met there in regular congress; an untold number of men walked in with Arctic pannings in their wallets only to disappear forever.

But Soapy’s day of reckoning did come. The short version of the story: When the betters of the citizenry tired of murder, they organized for law and order. Soapy demanded entrance to the meeting. Frank Reid, a town noteworthy, refused to let him pass. Soapy drew a gun. Frank drew a gun. Some other men drew guns. The bullets flew. Soapy and Frank were buried near one another in the Skagway cemetery.

Art from the Winnipeg (Manitoba) Free Press, May 9, 1964.

The great-grandson of the legendary Soapy Smith has created an impressive website that pays tribute to his reign of crime; it's www.soapysmith.net. Which begs an issue, for me – if Soapy Smith is your great-grandfather, lordy, I'll bet a bar of soap that your great-grandma might be worth a website, too.

Sources: Soapy Smith website; “Skull is Bad Man’s Memorial; Erected in Memory of ‘Soapy Smith,’ Once Terror of Alaska,” Dunkirk (New York) Evening Observer, Dec. 20, 1928; “Life and Death of Skagway’s Soapy Smith,” Winnipeg (Manitoba) Free Press, May 9, 1964.

Postscript: I have it on good authority that Soapy was made a character on the Deadwood show during the first two seasons, referred to as The Huckster, said to sell soap with a prize inside. Alright, so the fictional frontier is a tad bit smaller world than the real thing, but what fun.

Deadwood (F-words ahead!)

Ah, Deadwood. If you can ignore the cussin’ an all, and Swearengen’s soliliquy-cum-servicin’, it’s a helluva fucking tale of the biggest fucking gold strike in US history. And a big chunk’s fucking true – most all these were real fucking people: George Hearst, Dan Doherty, E.B. Farnum, Sol Star, Charlie Utter, Johnny Burns, Con Stapleton, A.W. Merrick, “Nigger General,” Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, "Aunt Lou" Marchbanks, Seth and Martha Bullock, Al “Swedgin.”

And it’s the best excuse I’ve ever had for getting a little bit fucked up on a Sunday night, being my main fucking point.

And H-B-fucking-O is canceling it in yet ANOTHER example of that network's terrible case of programmis interruptis.

CoCk--SuCk--iNg Moth--Er--FuCK--erS!

Don’t tell me that it hurts your sensitive fucking ears. Or that it’s not the real fucking west. If you think the Victorian frontier wasn’t so bad you need to put down your Laura Ingalls and pick up some real fucking history.

What’s left of the best fucking western ever:

Sunday, July 23 – Episode 31: “Unauthorized Cinnamon”

Sunday, July 30 – Episode 32: “Leviathan Smiles”

Sunday, Aug. 6 - Episode 33: "Amateur Night"

Sunday, Aug. 13 - Episode 34: "A Constant Throb"

Sunday, Aug. 20 - Episode 35: "The Cat Bird Seat"

Sunday, Aug. 27 - Episode 36: "Tell Him Something Pretty"

Date unknown, 2007: two, 2-hour specials and it’s curtains.

Or at least that’s the word now. Ain’t been shit for updates on the show’s fate since mid-June. I’m gonna cancel my goddamn HBO ‘cause Big Love is cold horse piss next to Deadwood and we’ll all be pushing up daisies by the time Tony Soprano gets his roaring sweating fat ass whacked.

For more --

Variety: Pair of Specials for Finale

Episode Reviews from New Jersey Star-Ledger

Stark Visions of Frontier History from True West Magazine

Deadwood Redux from True West Magazine

Official Website of Deadwood, South Dakota

Deadwood Radio on Sirius

HBO's Deadwood Forum

Pissed off Deadwood Fan Sites:

http://www.hbonomo.com/

http://www.fireflyfans.net/thread.asp?b=11&t=21040

http://www.savedeadwood.tv/

And the best of fucking all --

If I'm feeling less than my full fucking self, you can blame the cocksuckers at HBO for recent actions so egregious, they'd give any reasonable man or woman cause to take up arms against them. For those who've been hunkering down in some hidey hole for the past month or so, let me present the most recent fucking developments. It seems that… despite the fact that said show could be currently described as the finest, most notable feather in those big-city HBO cocksuckers' hats, despite the general fucking lack of quality televised entertainments, "Big Love" aside, coming down the pike from HBO since "Six Feet Under" left the air and "The Sopranos" slowed to a crawl, those society people from New York City, who live with their heads up their asses anyway, decided not to renew "Deadwood" for a fourth fucking season. Gratuitous, hurtful, unnecessary! Lamentable, injurious, downright unthinkable! Shame the fuck on you! …

While I'm not normally a partisan in territorial rivalries, I'm no bought-out cocksucker either, one who'll lift her skirt to remain in the good graces of a reckless capitalist as forward-looking as a dog next to a plate of unattended gizzards. Thus I'd be remiss if I didn't strongly encourage the rest of you to cancel HBO as soon as the fine third season of "Deadwood" has concluded, so that those big-city fucks might feel their position weakening.

Heather Havrilesky for Salon.com

Speck and the Kid

The folks at The Daily Perspective note two important anniversaries in true crime today.

On this Date, 1881:

Billy the Kid is killed

Billy the Kid, a famous American outlaw, was shot and killed today. "The killing of Billy the Kid, by Sheriff Pat Garrett, instead of being a brave act, was more or less cowardly. The Kid was stopping at the house of a supposed friend, who betrayed him, and allowed Garrett to hide in the house. In the darkness of the night Garrett crawled upon him, and shot him dead," wrote The Globe on August 1, 1881. For more information about Billy the Kid and other legendary outlaws, visit The Outlaw Archive.

And on this date, in 1966:

Eight student nurses murdered

Sociopath Richard Speck killed eight student nurses today in Chicago. Corazon Amurao, a Filipino student nurse, was the only survivor. "The eight young victims, all students at South Chicago Community Hospital, were bound, strangled and knifed to death early Thursday in their duplex apartment. It was not until hours after the killer, a white man, left the apartment that Miss Amurao crawled from her hiding place. She stumbled across the sprawled bodies of the other girls and burst through a second-floor window to a ledge," wrote an article in The Sheboygan Press on July 15, 1966. Speck was taken into custody on July 17 after he attempted suicide and was hospitalized.

For links to newspaper articles covering these events, see DailyPerspective.com.

The Outlaw Archive

For American history buffs and historic true crime fans, especially that generous percentage furiously interested in outlaws, it’s Christmas in June.

NewspaperARCHIVE has opened its vaults to offer us a free archive of historic newspapers, a collection of old articles about the most famous criminal legends who ever appeared on the American scene.

To some, they were firecrackers, men and women with the guts to give corporate America some much-deserved gunshots in the ass. To others, they were vicious widow-makers who followed no code.

Say their names to anyone on the continent and the names are known; most everyone can picture their faces. Jesse and Frank James. Billy the Kid. Wyatt Earp. Wild Bill Hickok. Bonnie and Clyde. Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid. "Ma" Barker and her gang of gay sons. Pretty Boy Floyd. Baby Face Nelson. John Dillinger. Doc Holliday. Machine Gun Kelly.

The best way to know them is to see them as the people of their time saw them. Many of these famous outlaws had one thing in common: they were so good at their craft – crime – that their careers lasted for years. And a lot of newspapers devoted barrels of ink to their exploits.

The archive is found at http://www.outlawarchive.com/.

Last Man Standing

In 1872, a half-dozen would-be gold millionaires organized in Salt Lake, Utah to prospect in southern Colorado. They made most of their mistakes before they set foot out the door.

They didn't hire a professional guide. They didn't pack enough provisions. They overestimated their skills for survival in the Rocky Mountains and underestimated the weather. And they included in their operation a man named "Alferd" Packer.

Israel Swan, Samuel Bell, George Noon, Jasper Humphrey, and George Frank set out with Packer in the spring through the San Juan range. Almost at once, the party hit deep snow and lost the trail. Fright and cold set in. Blinding storms came on. Their food gave out. For days they lived on rosebuds. They grew desperate, crazed.

Eventually the party emerged from the mountains -- five men short.

Packer explained that the rest had turned back for Utah. But two weeks later, a prospector known as Captain Graham had a party on the Gunison River and there, they came upon the bodies of five men lying in a secluded shelter under a massive old pine tree -- their last refuge in a storm. Four of the bodies had flesh cut from the legs. All had skull wounds, and the scene suggested they'd been killed in their sleep. Their wallets were emptied of funds. J.L. Packer was seized.

The story hit the news telegraphs in the fall of 1874. The headlines -- many of them appearing in the upper left corner, the most prominent spot on a newspaper's front page -- screamed:

A WHITE CANNIBAL.

Horrible Deed

in the Wilds of the

Rocky Mountains.

The leading U.S. tabloid, the New York Herald, ran this telegram from a correspondent:

OMAHA, Neb., Sept. 6, 1874. The particulars of the horrible murder briefly telegraphed on the 1st inst, have been received, and for diabolical ferocity this deed, I think, exceeds anything known in the annals of modern crime.

The newspaper was gentle on Packer, speculating for readers in heart-touching scenes:

He may have meditated asking some to kill the others and eat them ; but fearing he could not bring them to his purpose, kept his counsel and killed all the others. In such a case one would naturally fear being made a victim himself. Even if Packer had taken the responsibility and shot down one of his party, that the others might have food to eat, it is likely the others, fearing their turn would come next, would have killed Packer. We read of lots being drawn in such emergencies to determine who should die, but I never believed these tales, and here is a case in proof that the old law of self-preservation stands first, for one's dying that others may drink his blood or eat his flesh and live.

And the Herald's man wasn't even half finished with tender sympathy for Alferd Packer. The chronicle went on to imagine how Packer felt as he set up a camp near his victims:

It is dreadful to think of this man camping nearby and going every day for two weeks to cut a horrid meal from the bodies of his dead comrades. What were his thoughts through the silent watches of those long, bleak winter nights, with his dead companions, slaughtered by his own hand, lying cold and stiff near him, none but the All Seeing One and himself can ever know.

The State of Colorado was not quite as lenient as the Herald. Packer was put on trial for murder. After two trials, he was convicted of manslaughter. But the charge was eventually overturned and Packer was freed to become a wandering derelict. Packer was officially pardoned in 1981.

A final postscript came in 1989, 115 years later, when a law professor from George Washington University led a team to the mountain town of Lake City, Colorado, to unearth the remains of the five victims. All the long bones of all bodies showed evidence of a brutal killing and systematic defleshing. The grisly details were enough to make some wonder whether Packer weren't rather more lightly regarded than his deeds accounted for.