To meet one of
these new far-flung fences of the rich men who began to take up the West
was at that time only to cut it and ride on. The free men of the West
would not be fenced in. The range was theirs, so they blindly and
lovingly thought. Let those blame them who love this day more than that.

But the fence was the sign of the property-owning man; and the
property-owning man has always beaten the nomad and the restless man at
last, and set metes and bounds for him to observe. The nesters and
rustlers fought out the battle for the free range more fiercely than was
ever generally known.

One of the most widely known of these cow wars was the absurd Johnson
County War, of Wyoming, which got much newspaper advertising at the
time--the summer of 1892--and which was always referred to with a
certain contempt among old-timers as the "dude war." Only two men were
killed in this war, and the non-resident cattle men who undertook to be
ultra-Western and do a little vigilante work for themselves among the
rustlers found that they were not fit for the task. They were very glad
indeed to get themselves arrested and under cover, more especially in
the protection of the military. They found that they had not lost any
rustlers when they stirred up a whole valley full and were themselves
besieged, surrounded, and well-nigh ready for a general wiping out. They
killed a couple of "little fellows," or, rather, some of their hired
Texas cowboys did it for them, but that was all they accomplished,
except well-nigh to bankrupt Wyoming in the legal muddle, out of which,
of course, nothing came. There were in this party of cattle men a member
of the legislature, a member of the stock commission, some two dozen
wealthy cattle men, two Harvard graduates, and a young Englishman in
search of adventure. They made, on the whole, about the most
contemptible and inefficient band of vigilantes that ever went out to
regulate things, although their deeds were reported by wire to many
journals, and for a time perhaps they felt that they were cutting quite
a figure. They had very large property losses to incite them to their
action, for the rustlers were then pretty much running things in that
part of Wyoming, and the local courts would not convict them. This
fiasco scarcely hastened the advent of the day--which came soon enough
after the railroads and the farmers--under which the home dweller
outweighed the nomad.[G]

[Footnote G: See "The Story of t