Mullins, who cowboyed in Wyoming during this period, knew "some mighty fine
boys carrying little irons” that they used to put their own brand on mavericks. In
spite of the law, many cowboys believed that this was only fair play. Hadn't the early
ranchers done the same thing in Texas? Although Mullins claimed that he “never in-
dulged in this questionable game," he sympathized with the rustlers, pointing out
that the cattle barons "had cut off every avenue for advancement." In the words of an
old cowboy adage, "If you stole a few cattle you were a rustler. If you stole a few thou-
sand you were a cattleman." Such views were widely held. When the association's
"stock detectives"brought accused rustlers into court, juries of local citizens refused
to convict them.
In fact, the rustling charges were really just a cover for the association's attempt to
eliminate competition. "The rustler," wrote Asa Mercer in his classic history of the
conflict, "is the cattle baron's convenient scarecrow."Failing in the courts, the cattle-
men turned to violence. Their first strike came against James Averell and his lover,
Ella Watson, who were living on homestead claims that the association considered
part of the "open range.” The cattle barons first tried to force them out by spreading
rumors that Averell was the leader of a rustler band, and that Watson, known as “Cat-
tle Kate," was a notorious prostitute who had built her fine herd by accepting steers
for sexual services. Historians still dispute the truth of the charges. The pair refused
to be intimidated, however, and Averell published angry denunciations of "land
monopolists” in the newspaper. Finally, in 1889 a group of vigilante cattlemen in-
vaded their ranch and lynched the couple. Although the murderers were well known,
they walked free when the witnesses to the crime mysteriously"disappeared."37
The lynching of Averell and Cattle Kate stirred up animosity toward the cattle-
men. The small ranchers organized a competing organization, the Northern
Wyoming Farmers and Stockgrowers Association, and in 1892 they arranged to
drive-rather than ship-their cattle east, avoiding the big interests and their rail-
road connections. Nathan Champion, a trail boss with a tough reputation was to
lead the drive. The big interests responded by sending fifty gunmen into Johnson
County, where they killed three men and besieged Champion in a cabin along the
Powder River. He held them off for twelve hours before the invaders burned him out
and murdered him. Outraged Johnson County citizens organized into a vigilante
mob of their own and surrounded the invaders, determined to hang them all. But
the screams of the cattle magnates were heard as far away as Washington, D.C., and
President Benjamin Harrison sent in United States troops to restore order. It is de
batable whether federal intervention brought law and justice, for the cases against
those who killed Champion and his friends were quietly dropped when the witnesses
again disappeared. In the Johnson County War the most powerful political forces in
Wyoming stood in opposition not only to the rustler but to any cowboy individual-
istic enough to remain on his own.
OPEN BANOS 327
11
The Safety Valve
Most mid-nineteenth-century Americans were believers in the Jeffersonian promise
that ordinary citizens-armed only with courage, stamina, and self-reliance-
could move West, stake modest claims to the land, and make a success of it. The
promise depended on the availability of western land, boundless, fertile, and cheap,
and in post-Civil War America it was underwritten by the Homestead Act. Congress
passed this historic legislation in the spring of 1862, as Union and Confederate troops
fought and died for control of western Virginia and Tennessee, earlier Wests. But
homestead enthusiasts would not allow the dying to spoil their legislative achieve-
ment. “We doubt whether any endowment on so magnificent a scale has ever been
conferred on the moneyless sons of labor," read one rhapsodic editorial; the Home-
stead Act would shape American society "upon ages to come, when the battles on
the Potomac and Tennessee will be regarded as mere incidents in history."
Before the Homestead Act, the principles of American land policy were embod-
ied in a sequence of emendations and elaborations to the foundational Land Ordi-
nance of 1785, which opened the western public domain to settlers—but at a price,
for the sale of public lands was to constitute a principal source of federal revenue.
Over the next fifty years, in response to citizen complaints that the land law favored
capitalists and speculators over actual settlers, Congress gradually lowered the price
to $1.25 per acre and reduced the size of the minimum purchase from 640 to 40 acres.
But what settlers most wanted was the legalization of squatting the right to select
and improve lands anywhere on the public domain—even before they were sur-
veyed—with the guarantee that when the land was officially "opened" they would
be granted the opportunity to buy at the minimum price. In the American vernac-
ular this right became known as “preemption." Representative Balie Peyton of Ten-
nessee presented the plight of the squatter to Congress in 1835. "He had chosen that
330
spot as the home of his children. He had toiled in hope. He had given it value, and he
loved the spot. It was his all. When the public sales were proclaimed, if that poor man
attended it, he might bid to the last cent he had in the world, and mortgage the bed
he slept on to enable him to do it. He might have his wife and children around him
to see him bid; and when he had bid his very last cent, one of those speculators would
stand by his side and bid two dollars more. And thus he would see his little home, on
which he had toiled for years, where he hoped to rear his children and find a peace
ful grave, pass into the hands of a rich moneyed company." A New York editor, by
contrast, declared that preemption amounted to "granting bounties to squatters en-
gaged in cheating the government out of the best tracts of land." During the presi-
dential election of 1840, however, both the Whig and Democratic platforms en-
dorsed a preemption law, and in 1841, soon after the election of William Henry
Harrison ("Old Tippecanoe") to the presidency, Congress passed what was known
as the "Log Cabin Bill," granting preemption rights to all Americans. The land was
still not free, however, for sooner or later squatters, like everyone else, had to pay for
the acres they tilled.
The passage of the Log Cabin Bill set Americans to arguing whether the time had
not come for
dropping the revenue principle altogether and providing free land for
settler families. The most vocal proponent for such a "homestead" law was labor
leader George Henry Evans, editor of the New York Working Man's Advocate. Urging
the laboring man to "Vote Yourself a Farm," Evans proposed a federal program to
grant 160 acres of the public domain in the West to any citizen who was willing to
improve it. Free land, he believed, like the "safety valve" on a steam boiler, would
"carry off the superabundant labor (of eastern cities) to the salubrious and fertile
West." Like many other nineteenth-century reformers, Evans was disturbed by the
increasing concentration of land in the hands of wealthy Americans—what his con-
temporaries referred to as “land monopoly." Evans urged that strict legal limits be
placed on the quantity of public land an individual could acquire. Even more radi-
cal proposals to eliminate land monopoly were circulating, Firebrand labor leader
Thomas Skidmore argued that the government should confiscate large landed es-
tates and redistribute them to ordinary workingfolk. Horrified capitalists de
nounced both Skidmore and Evans as "agrarians" a term conservatives had pre-
viously used to deride the Shays rebels in late eighteenth-century Massachusetts.?
Evans's proposals were rescued from the political fringe by another New Yorker,
Horace Greeley, editor of the nationally distributed New York Weekly Tribune, the
most influential newspaper in nineteenth-century America. Greeley spoke to a wide
constituency that included merchants and manufacturers. "Every smoke that rises
in the Great West," he reminded them, "marks a new customer to the counting rooms
and warehouses of New York." Western expansion was good for eastern business.
Greeley, too, was an avid believer in the notion of a western safety valve, emphasiz-
HATITT VALVE 331
Horace Greeley, 1872. Beinecke.
332 SAFETY VALVE
ing the benefits that free land would have for employers: strikes, he argued,"will be
glaringly absurd when every citizen is offered the alternative to work for others or
for himself, as to him shall seem most advantageous."
Editorials in the Weekly Tribune kept the homestead issue at the top of the polit-
ical agenda during the 1850s, and in the minds of millions of Americans Greeley's
name became indelibly linked to the promise of free western lands for settlers. “I
turned my face westward with the spirit of Horace Greeley," wrote African-Ameri-
can homesteader Oscar Micheaux more than a half-century after the passage of the
Homestead Act, "his words go west, young man,'ringing in my ears." Fact was, Gree-
ley did not coin this famous phrase, so identified with him, but quoted it from an In-
diana newspaper. Tell that to the thousands of pioneers like Micheaux who located
the source of their westering inspiration in the New Yorkeditor who made the home-
stead law his crusade.
In the mid-1850s the new Republican Party embraced the homestead program as
part of its effort to build an alliance between northeastern and western politicians.
In exchange for eastern votes for homestead legislation, westerners would support
higher tariffs to protect "infant industries" like textiles and iron. Under Republican
auspices the homestead program took on an antislavery cast. "A country cut up into
small farms, occupied by many independent proprietors who live by their own toil."
George Washington Julian of Indiana told his fellow congressmen, would presenta
"formidable barrier against the introduction of slavery." Southern legislators, fear-
ing that the agitation for free land inevitably would lead to "Free Soil"—the politi-
cal movement to bar slavery from the territories—became implacable opponents of
the homestead bill. One Alabama senator warned that the plan was "tinctured with
abolitionism." In 1859 the Republican coalition succeeded in pushing the legislation
through Congress, only to have it vetoed by Democratic President James Buchanan,
deeply in debt to southern supporters. The issue immediately became fodder for the
presidential campaign of 1860. “Does anyone suppose that Abraham Lincoln would
ever veto such a bill?"Greeley editorialized.
The secession of the southern states and the mass departure of southern con
gressmen from Washington after the Republican electoral triumph of 1860 removed
the final obstacle to the passage of the "Act to Secure Homesteads to Actual Settlers
on the Public Domain." It took effect on January 1, 1863, the same day as the Eman-
cipation Proclamation. Persons over the age of twenty-one-both men and women,
citizens and immigrants who had declared their intention to become citizens—were
eligible to file for up to 160 acres of surveyed land on the public domain. Home-
steaders had to cultivate the land improve it by constructing a house or barn, and
reside on the claim for five years, after which they would receive full title, paying only
a $10 fee. Alternately, after only six months of residence they could exercise a "com-
mutation clause" allowing them to purchase the claim at the minimum cash price
SAFETT VALVE 333
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