Harry Sinclair Drago writes with authority and a sense of drama about the bloodiest range conflicts in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Montana late in the nineteenth century. He details the background and events surrounding the Lincoln County War of New Mexico (1878-81), a violent struggle for economic supremacy between cattle barons and merchants; the ironically named Pleasant Valley War of Arizona (1886-92), a conflict between cattlemen and sheepmen complicated by personal vendettas and old family rivalries; and the Johnson County War of Wyoming (1892), a folly that turned bloody when big cattlemen rode against suspected and known thieves with orders to shoot. These pages are filled with some showy characters: cowmen Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving; the Grahams and Tewksburys, western counterparts of the Hatfields and McCoys; William Bonney, alias Billy the Kid, who cut a swath in the Lincoln County War; and Ella Watson, said to have been the notorious Cattle Kate Maxwell, after she was lynched for cattle rustling.

Wyoming attorney John W. Davis retells the story of the West’s most notorious range war. Having delved more deeply than previous writers into land and census records, newspapers, and trial transcripts, Davis has produced an all-new interpretation. He looks at the conflict from the perspective of Johnson County residents—those whose home territory was invaded and many of whom the invaders targeted for murder—and finds that, contrary to the received explanation, these people were not thieves and rustlers but legitimate citizens. The broad outlines of the conflict are familiar: some of Wyoming’s biggest cattlemen, under the guise of eliminating livestock rustling on the open range, hire two-dozen Texas cowboys and, with range detectives and prominent members of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, “invade” north-central Wyoming to clean out rustlers and other undesirables. While the invaders kill two suspected rustlers, citizens mobilize and eventually turn the tables, surrounding the intruders at a ranch where they intend to capture them by force. An appeal for help convinces President Benjamin Harrison to call out the army from nearby Fort McKinley, and after an all-night ride the soldiers arrive just in time to stave off the invaders’ annihilation. Though taken prisoner, they later avoid prosecution. The cattle barons’ powers of persuasion in justifying their deeds have colored accounts of the war for more than a century. Wyoming Range War tells a compelling story that redraws the lines between heroes and villains.

Details the Lincoln County War, Pleasant Valley Feud, Johnson County War, Conflict on the Clear Fork of Texas and Fence-Cutting War in the Texas Panhandle, etc.

In this lively account of Arizona's Rim Country War of the 1880s--what others have called "The Pleasant Valley War"--Historian Daniel Justin Herman explores a web of conflict involving Mormons, Texas cowboys, New Mexican sheepherders, Jewish merchants, and mixed-blood ranchers. At the heart of Arizona's range war, argues Herman, was a conflict between cowboys' code of honor and Mormons' code of conscience.

The Natchez Trace is remarkable in American history for the legends and tales surrounding it. During the first half of the nineteenth century, travelers--traders, settlers, andøthe occasional war party or fugitive from justice--followed its course from the Appalachians to the lower Mississippi, from Knoxville to Natchez. In this vibrant and energetic account, the author has mined both history and legend for startling tales of the near-mythical thieves, cutthroats, and confidence men once reported to have stalked their unsuspecting victims along this frontier trail--the terrible Harpe brothers, who came to a satisfactorily bad end; Samuel Mason, a thief done in by other thieves; and John Murrell, whose reputed schemes threw the South into a paroxysm of fear. Robert M. Coates retells the stories of these and other "land pirates" in chilling and ominous detail, preserving for us the tales once whispered on the edges of the dark southern woods nearly two centuries ago.

When cowboys were workers and battled their bosses In the pantheon of American icons, the cowboy embodies the traits of “rugged individualism,” independent, solitary, and stoical. In reality, cowboys were grossly exploited and underpaid seasonal workers, who responded to the abuses of their employers in a series of militant strikes. Their resistance arose from the rise and demise of a “beef bonanza” that attracted international capital. Business interests approached the market with the expectation that it would have the same freedom to brutally impose its will as it had exercised on native peoples and the recently emancipated African Americans. These assumptions contributed to a series of bitter and violent “range wars,” which broke out from Texas to Montana and framed the appearance of labor conflicts in the region. These social tensions stirred a series of political insurgencies that became virtually endemic to the American West of the Gilded Age. Mark A. Lause explores the relationship between these neglected labor conflicts, the “range wars,” and the third-party movements. The Great Cowboy Strike subverts American mythology to reveal the class abuses and inequalities that have blinded a nation to its true history and nature