The Open Range
The prairie and desert lands of what is today Mexico and the western United States were well suited to "open range" grazing. For example, American bison had been a mainstay of the diet for the Native Americans in the Great Plains for centuries. Likewise, cattle and sheep were simply turned loose in the spring after their young were born and allowed to roam with little supervision and no fences. They were then rounded up in the fall, with the mature animals driven to market and the breeding stock brought close to the ranch headquarters for greater protection in the winter. The use of livestock branding allowed the cattle owned by different ranchers to be identified and sorted. Ranching dominated western economic activity beginning with the settlement of Texas in the 1840s.
Along with ranchers came the need for agricultural crops to feed both humans and livestock. Hence, many farmers came West along with ranchers. Many operations were diversified, with both ranching and farming activities taking place. With the Homestead Act of 1862, more settlers came West to set up farms. This created some conflict because increasing numbers of farmers needed to fence off fields to prevent cattle and sheep from eating their crops. Barbed wire, invented in 1874, gradually made inroads in fencing off privately owned land, especially for homesteads. On the Great Plains, there was some reduction of land open to grazing.
Cattle roundup
A cattle roundup in Colorado, ca. 1898.
Range Wars
A range war is a type of armed conflict, typically undeclared, which occurs within agrarian or stock-rearing societies. The subject of these conflicts is the control of "open range" land. Typically triggered by disputes over water rights or grazing rights for this land, these wars often involve farmers and ranchers. Formal military involvement, other than to separate warring parties, is rare. Range wars were known to occur in the American West. Famous range wars included the Lincoln County War, the Pleasant Valley War, the Mason County War, and the Johnson County Range War, and sometimes were fought between local residents and gunmen hired by absentee landowners.
Pleasant Valley War
The Pleasant Valley War, sometimes called the "Tonto Basin Feud," "Tonto Basin War," or "Tewksbury-Graham Feud," was a range war fought in Pleasant Valley, Arizona, in 1882 to 1892. The war involved two feuding families: the ranchers Grahams and Tewksburys. The Tewksburys, who were part Indian, started their operations as cattle ranchers before branching out to sheep, and racial slurs were bandied about from the early years of conflict.
Pleasant Valley is located in Gila County, Arizona, but many of the events related to this feud took place in neighboring Apache and Navajo counties. Other neighborhood Arizona parts, such as Holbrook and Globe, were the setting of its bloodiest battles. Although the feud originally was fought between the Tewksburys and the Grahams against the well-established cattleman James Stinson, it soon involved other cattlemen associations, sheepmen, hired guns, cowboys, and Arizona lawmen. The feud lasted for about a decade, with its most deadly incidents occurring between 1886 and 1887; the last-known killing took place in 1892.
The Pleasant Valley War had the highest number of fatalities of such civilian conflicts in U.S. history, with an estimated total of 35 to 50 deaths, and the near annihilation of the males of the two feuding families. The Pleasant Valley War was one of the deadliest and well-known range wars. It was also a reason Arizona's statehood was postponed for another decade. Years after its end, the feud remained a subject of many books and articles, and a number of gunmen made a name of themselves for their participation.
Johnson County War
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 small-time farmers and ranchers, as well as the state lawmen, received word of the gunmen's initial incursion in the territory, they formed a posse of 200 men to fight back the gunmen, which led to a grueling standoff. The war ended when the U.S. Cavalry, on the orders of President Benjamin Harrison, relieved the two forces.
One of the most well-known range wars of the American frontier, the Johnson County War has 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.
"The Invaders"
This image shows a group of Johnson County War invaders, 1892.
End of the Open Range
In the north, overgrazing stressed the open range, leading to insufficient winter forage for the cattle and starvation. This was particularly true during the harsh winter of 1886–1887, when hundreds of thousands of cattle died across the Northwest, leading to a collapse of the cattle industry. By the 1890s, barbed wire fencing was standard in the northern plains, railroads had expanded to cover most of the nation, and meat-packing plants were built closer to major ranching areas. This made long cattle drives from Texas to the railheads in Kansas unnecessary. Hence, the age of the open range was gone, and large cattle drives were over. Meanwhile, ranches multiplied all over the developing West.
The end of the open range was not brought about by a reduction in land due to crop farming, but by overgrazing. Cattle stocked on the open range created a tragedy of the commons as each rancher sought increased economic benefit by grazing too many animals on public lands that "nobody" owned. However, cattle were a nonnative species, and the grazing patterns of their ever-increasing numbers slowly reduced the quality of the rangeland; this was in spite of the simultaneous massive slaughter of American bison that occurred. In the winter of 1886–1887, as livestock that were already stressed by reduced grazing died by the thousands, many large cattle operations went bankrupt, while others suffered severe financial losses. Thus, after this time, ranchers also began to fence off their land and negotiated individual grazing leases with the American government so that they could keep better control of the pasture land available to their own animals.