"Power's Larger Meaning":
The Johnson County War as PoliticalViolence in an Environmental Context

By Daniel Belgrad

The Johnson County War serves to model a post-revisionist approach to western history, one that emphasizes the dynamics of human/nature interactions but does not moralize. The violence that took place in the Powder River Valley of Wyoming is analyzed as symptomatic of a crisis in the ecological mode.

In April of 1892, forty-eight vigilantes bankrolled by the Wyoming Stock Growers' Association (WSGA) rode into Johnson County, Wyoming. A mixed group of Texas gunmen and Wyoming cattle company representatives, they carried a list of seventy "rustlers" who were their intended targets.1 They surprised and killed Nate Champion, one of the seventy, at the KC ranch south of Buffalo. Before they could get much farther, however, they were besieged by a posse of more than two hundred residents determined to resist the domineering "cattle barons." The Johnson County War has found its way into western history in two archetypal forms: as a story of cattle owners punishing lawless rustlers, and as a story of homesteaders defying the rich and powerful.2	1
Since 1970, new methods and subject matter from such interdisciplinary fields as American studies, environmental studies, women's studies, and ethnic studies have revolutionized the historiography of the West.3 These new approaches have led western history into whole new areas of inquiry.4 Yet, the old standards of the western history repertoire—its gunfights and cattle drives—may prove to be some of the most fruitful sites of investigation into themes of contemporary relevance.	2
The question of who won the Johnson County War is still unresolved. This is because the answer is not a matter of historical fact but of historical interpretation, and the criteria used to determine victory have varied from one historian to the next. The story of the Johnson County War has had multiple endings, depending on the "master plot" into which each historian has chosen to fit it.5	3
In traditional western historiography, the governing paradigm was of a teleological progress manifested by frontier settlement. This was a story of "'savagery' subdued, wilderness conquered, [and] civilization planted."6 In this context, to award victory to one side in the Johnson County War was to stake that side's claim to represent the forces of progress. Those historians who defined progress as "law and order" imposed on a "wild" West told a story of stockmen policing rustlers. The version that pitted homesteaders against robber barons, by contrast, equated progress with the spread of democracy. Asa Shinn Mercer wrote in 1894, exemplifying the latter formula: "Corporation rule dominated so long, and then the disgrace of the state's invasion came as a climax . . . . From now on there will be a new Wyoming, purified by the people's rule, and made the home of a happy and prosperous population."7	. . .