The Cheyenne Ring: Cattle Country’s Power

The cowboy myth says it was all grit and open range: noble ranchers, hardworking cowhands, civilizing a wild frontier. The truth is messier.

In this episode, we trace who actually ran Wyoming in the late 1800s, and the answer isn't "cowboys." It's a railroad, a small circle of cattle barons, and two senators, nicknamed "the Cheyenne Ring", who answered to both at once. We follow the Wyoming Stock Growers Association's reach across state lines, all the way to Custer County, Nebraska, where the same fight over land and power played out fourteen years earlier: a shooting, a revenge killing, and a conviction that didn't stick.

 This is Part One of a two-part story. Part Two picks up later this month, where we find out how the location of Nebraska's capital city is connected to this same story. 

For photos, maps, and glimpses of the past, follow @rootedintheplains on Instagram.

Want to learn more?

Butcher, S.D. Pioneer History of Custer County, Nebraska. Broken Bow, 1901.

Hewitt, William L. “The ‘Cowboyification’ of Wyoming Agriculture.” Agricultural History 76, no. 2 (2002): 481–94.

Miller, Michael M. “Cowboys and Capitalists: The XIT Ranch in Texas and Montana, 1885–1912.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 65, no. 4 (2015): 3–28. 

Hansen, Peter A. “Still Controversial: The Pacific Railroad at 150.” Railroad History, no. 208 (2013): 8–35. 

"1884 Round-Ups of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association." Broadside, courtesy of Tom Berry, compliments of Armour's Livestock Bureau.

Transcript

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In the spring of 1892, 22 hired gunmen boarded a Union Pacific train in Cheyenne, Wyoming, headed north. They weren't soldiers, they weren't lawmen, but they'd been hired by an association of wealthy cattlemen to put down a political threat. Small ranchers and homesteaders who'd started crowding into the territory that the big operators considered theirs. This is a story about who actually ran Wyoming in the late 1800s. And it turns out that the answer isn't cowboys. It's a railroad, a small circle of cattle barons, and the politicians who answer to both at once. Welcome to Rooted in the Plains, a podcast about the people, places, and moments that shaped the Great Plains. I'm Nicole, and in each episode, I take you back to a time when sod houses lined the prairie, railroads carved through the tall grass, and community meant survival. For photos, maps, and glimpses of Plains' life, be sure to follow along on Instagram at Rooted in the Plains. You know the cowboy myth, even if you've never set foot in Wyoming? The Lone Rider, The Open Range? Shows like Yellowstone sell America on the same clean story novels have for over a century. From Owen Whistler's The Virginian back in 1902, all the way up to Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, noble ranchers and hard-working cow hands, defending their land and civilizing the wild frontier. I know someone who as a kid grew up wanting to be John Wayne, played Cowboys Until Dark, and maybe even got branded by his own brother. That myth has real staying power. The real economic story underneath that myth is a lot less romantic. By the 1880s, Wyoming's open range was dominated by a small circle of big cattle operators. Wealthy, well connected, and absolutely unwilling to share the grass with small farmers and homesteaders moving in. When Wyoming became a state in 1890, its legislature did something almost unbelievable. They elected the same man, Francis E. Warren, to be both governor and one of the state's first two U.S. senators, alongside Joseph M. Carey, another cattleman. Critics named the pair the Cheyenne Ring. The New York Times didn't mince words, reporting plainly that Warren and Carey represented two things at once, the Union Pacific Railroad and the Cattle Ring. The pairing wasn't an accident. The Union Pacific had been handed enormous land grants along its route through Wyoming, and the large-scale cattle operations were one of the only profitable uses for that land. The railroad and cattle barons weren't just neighbors, they were business partners. So when the Wyoming senators answered to the railroad and the cattle ring, they were really just answering to one of the combined interests wearing two hats. And that interest didn't stop at the Wyoming borders. Here's something that surprised me researching this. The Wyoming Stock Growers Association, the organization that was, for all practical purposes, the cattle ring itself, didn't confine its authority to Wyoming. There's a broadside from 1884 signed by the association president William C. Irvine, laying out 31 separate Roundup districts for that year alone. Each one assigned to its own foreman and its exact route, Creek by Creek. One of those districts doesn't even stay in Wyoming. It starts at Wounded Knee and runs along the White River towards Pine Ridge Agency in South Dakota. This wasn't a loose club of ranchers comparing notes. It was an organization running something close to its own private government across state lines. On paper, with Irvine's name at the top, that same authority openly extended into Nebraska's panhandle and the sand hills beyond it, in places that hadn't even organized county government yet. The association directed roundups and cattle inspections in the absence of a real civic structure. And where Nebraska counties did organize, cattlemen didn't just influence the government. They populated it directly. Custer County is the clearest example, and it's worth sitting with for a minute because what happened there over seven years shows exactly how this kind of power is actually used. When pioneer Cattlemen later admitted flatly that ranchers organized Custer County in 1877 so that they could get some benefit out of the taxes they might pay and be better able to protect themselves. Protection that conveniently came from the very men footing the tax bill and writing the rules in the first place. The first real test came that following year, in November of 1878. A deputy named Bob Olive, brother of one of the wealthiest cattlemen in Nebraska, tried to arrest a small operator, Amy Ketchum, on a cattle theft charge. Olive was shot dead in the exchange by a man named Luther Mitchell, who had been staying at the Ketchum house. Local sheriff took Mitchell and Ketchum into custody and then handed them over to Olive's brother and his friends. Neither man survived the night. The cattleman responsible, I. The following year, with settlers already outnumbering cattlemen 5 to 1 in Custer County, the county commissioner simply moved the polling places into the cattle district, making it nearly impossible for 30-odd northern and eastern farmers to physically reach ballot box. A protest letter to the governor at the time put the math plainly. More than 500 farmer voters in the county against fewer than 100 cattlemen and their cowboys, and the cattlemen still kept control of the government. That standoff finally broke in 1885 at a spread called the Brighton Ranch. By far the largest and most aggressive cattle operation left in the county, which had illegally fenced off more than 125,000 acres of public land. If you've been listening since the first barbed wired episode in season one, you might actually recognize this place. That photo I used of settlers cutting fence in 1885, taken by Solomon Butcher, that is this exact ranch taken then. Butcher was photographing Custer County's homesteaders right as this fight was happening. And this is his work that preserved most of what we know about it. That spring, a settler named Joseph Province staked a legal homestead claim inside the Brighton fence line. The ranch had him and his sons arrested for a cattle theft charge, the same tactic used against Mitchell and Ketchum years earlier. But the case fell apart before the trial. On April 10th, while Province was working his own field, two Brighton employees confronted him and he was killed. This time, the county didn't look away. When the sheriff rode out to arrest the two men, roughly 75 armed settlers from the town of Brokenbow rode with him. After the arrest, the same crowd stormed the Brighton ranch house itself and carried food and supplies back to the province widow. At trial, one of the two men was acquitted, and the other was convicted and served two years in prison. It wasn't a clean victory, but it was after seven years of cattlemen controlling the courts, the ballot box, and the law, the first time settlers in Custer County had actually won. The same standoff played out elsewhere in Nebraska's range country with less satisfying endings. In Frontier County, settlers fed up with cattle trampling their crops banded together. Building a log fort with gun ports cut into the walls specifically so they could shoot stampeding longhorns had finished construction only to have their entire fort burned to the ground by persons unknown before they even used it. Letters from the settlers of Hitchcock and Dundee counties around the same period described death threats, ruined crops, and as one farmer wrote to the governor, county commissioners, and clerk, who were stockmen themselves, working the open combination to drive small farmers out of the valley entirely. This kind of arrangement, land, cattle, money, and a railroad's reach, all feeding the same circle of men, wasn't unique to Wyoming and Nebraska either. Around the same period, a Chicago-based investment group called the Capitol Syndicate financed the massive XIT Ranch using a 3 million acre land grant they had received from building the Texas State Capitol. When they needed to move cattle north to the range in Wyoming and Montana, they shipped them by rail straight to a Union Pacific depot in Wendover, Wyoming. Different state, exact same pattern. Capital construction, land grants, cattle money, and a railroad, all braided together. So was the railroad really necessary for this or just useful? Here's a complicating wrinkle. Historians still debate whether the Transcontinental Railroad was necessary when it was built. At a 2012 symposium of railroad historians, Richard White made a pointed case that the cattle industry specifically didn't need the transcontinental line, that it would have survived and grown regardless, and that the real money in building these railroads wasn't made by hauling cattle or freight at all. It was made, in his words, through financial manipulation, land speculation, government bond schemes, and insider deals, dressed up as nation building. The Union Pacific wasn't simply a tool that cattlemen and capitalists happened to use well. For a lot of men involved, the railroad itself, the land grants, the bonds, the stocks, may have been the actual product. The cattle, the towns, even the politics were just downstream of that. When you look at that way, the hired gunmen riding north out of Cheyenne in 1892 feel less like a range war and more like an armed defense of financial arrangement that had been built years earlier on paper, far from any cattle at all, the same arrangement that cost Joseph Province his life for plowing his own field, and let IPU Olive walk free after Mitchell and Ketchum never made it through the night. And as it turns out, the same arrangement, land grants, railroads, and who gets to hold the power because of them, didn't stay in Wyoming or Nebraska cattle counties either. This exact same railroad shows up again in a different fight over where Nebraska's own government would sit. This is the story for next time. Then I'll bring you some stories from inside the building itself, the Nebraska State Capitol, on that date. The anniversary of the actual day it was decided. Thanks for listening to Rooted in the Plains. I hope you learned something new today. For photos, maps, and a little glimpse of Plains life, visit the Instagram page Rooted in the Plains. Thanks.