The Wyoming Lynching of Cattle Kate, 1889
The Wyoming Lynching of Cattle Kate, 1889

Author: George W. Hufsmith

Publisher:

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13:

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The Lynching of Cattle Kate (Ellen Watson) and Jim Averell by six prominent cattlemen filled the pages of Wyoming newspapers in 1889. The popular myth of the West was that Watson was a prostitute who galloped across the prairies and bartered sex for calves. For years residents of the Sweetwater Valley knew that these stories were not true. They knew that Ellen Watson's biggest crime was legally claiming a homestead on a piece of ground being used as a hay meadow by cattleman Albert Bothwell. Now, for the first time, an author has searched through the layers of fabrication and uncovered the true story.

Cattle Kate
Cattle Kate

Author: Jana Bommersbach

Publisher: Sourcebooks + ORM

Published: 2014-10-07

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 1615954783

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"A fascinating and disturbing look at a very dark chapter in the annals of the American West."—C.J. BOX, New York Times bestselling author Cattle Kate is the only woman ever lynched as a cattle rustler. History called it "range land justice" when she was strung up in Wyoming Territory on July 20, 1889, tarring her as a dirty thief and a filthy whore. But history was wrong. It was all a lie. Her real name was Ella Watson. She wasn't a rustler. She wasn't a whore. And she'd never been called Cattle Kate until she was dead and they needed an excuse. She was really a 29-year-old immigrant homesteader, lynched with her husband by her rich and powerful cattle-baron neighbors who wanted her land and its precious water rights. Some people knew the truth from the start. Their voices were drowned out by the all-powerful Wyoming Stock Growers Association. And those who dared speak out—including the eyewitnesses to the hangings—either disappeared or mysteriously died. There was no one left to testify against the vigilantes when the case eventually came to trial. Her six killers walked away scot-free. But the legend was stronger than the truth. For over a century, newspapers, magazines, books—movies, too—spread her ugly legacy. Now, on the 125th anniversary of her murder, the real Ella comes alive in Cattle Kate to tell her heartbreaking story. Jana Bommersbach's debut novel bares a legend central to the western experience.

Wyoming Range War
Wyoming Range War

Author: John W. Davis

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2012-09-05

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 0806183802

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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.

The Lynching of Cleo Wright
The Lynching of Cleo Wright

Author: Dominic J. CapeciJr.

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2014-10-17

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0813156467

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On January 20, 1942, black oil mill worker Cleo Wright assaulted a white woman in her home and nearly killed the first police officer who tried to arrest him. An angry mob then hauled Wright out of jail and dragged him through the streets of Sikeston, Missouri, before burning him alive. Wright's death was, unfortunately, not unique in American history, but what his death meant in the larger context of life in the United States in the twentieth-century is an important and compelling story. After the lynching, the U.S. Justice Department was forced to become involved in civil rights concerns for the first time, provoking a national reaction to violence on the home front at a time when the country was battling for democracy in Europe. Dominic Capeci unravels the tragic story of Wright's life on several stages, showing how these acts of violence were indicative not only of racial tension but the clash of the traditional and the modern brought about by the war. Capeci draws from a wide range of archival sources and personal interviews with the participants and spectators to draw vivid portraits of Wright, his victims, law-enforcement officials, and members of the lynch mob. He places Wright in the larger context of southern racial violence and shows the significance of his death in local, state, and national history during the most important crisis of the twentieth-century.

American Lynching
American Lynching

Author: Ashraf H. A. Rushdy

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2012-10-30

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0300184743

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A history of lynching in America over the course of three centuries, from colonial Virginia to twentieth-century Texas. After observing the varying reactions to the 1998 death of James Byrd Jr. in Texas, called a lynching by some, denied by others, Ashraf Rushdy determined that to comprehend this event he needed to understand the long history of lynching in the United States. In this meticulously researched and accessibly written interpretive history, Rushdy shows how lynching in America has endured, evolved, and changed in meaning over the course of three centuries, from its origins in early Virginia to the present day. “A work of uncommon breadth, written with equally uncommon concision. Excellent.” —N. D. B. Connolly, Johns Hopkins University “Provocative but careful, opinionated but persuasive . . . Beyond synthesizing current scholarship, he offers a cogent discussion of the evolving definition of lynching, the place of lynchers in civil society, and the slow-in-coming end of lynching. This book should be the point of entry for anyone interested in the tragic and sordid history of American lynching.” —W. Fitzhugh Brundage, author of Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 “A sophisticated and thought-provoking examination of the historical relationship between the American culture of lynching and the nation’s political traditions. This engaging and wide-ranging meditation on the connection between democracy, lynching, freedom, and slavery will be of interest to those in and outside of the academy.” —William Carrigan, Rowan University “In this sobering account, Rushdy makes clear that the cultural values that authorize racial violence are woven into the very essence of what it means to be American. This book helps us make sense of our past as well as our present.” —Jonathan Holloway, Yale University

Lynching Beyond Dixie
Lynching Beyond Dixie

Author: Michael J. Pfeifer

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2013-02-27

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 0252037464

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In recent decades, scholars have explored much of the history of mob violence in the American South, especially in the years after Reconstruction. However, the lynching violence that occurred in American regions outside the South, where hundreds of persons, including Hispanics, whites, African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans died at the hands of lynch mobs, has received less attention. This collection of essays by prominent and rising scholars fills this gap by illuminating the factors that distinguished lynching in the West, the Midwest, and the Mid-Atlantic. The volume adds to a more comprehensive history of American lynching and will be of interest to all readers interested in the history of violence across the varied regions of the United States. Contributors are Jack S. Blocker Jr., Brent M. S. Campney, William D. Carrigan, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Dennis B. Downey, Larry R. Gerlach, Kimberley Mangun, Helen McLure, Michael J. Pfeifer, Christopher Waldrep, Clive Webb, and Dena Lynn Winslow.

Southern Horrors
Southern Horrors

Author: Crystal N. Feimster

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-11-23

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9780674035621

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Between 1880 and 1930, close to 200 women were murdered by lynch mobs in the American South. Many more were tarred and feathered, burned, whipped, or raped. In this brutal world of white supremacist politics and patriarchy, a world violently divided by race, gender, and class, black and white women defended themselves and challenged the male power brokers. Crystal Feimster breaks new ground in her story of the racial politics of the postbellum South by focusing on the volatile issue of sexual violence. Pairing the lives of two Southern women—Ida B. Wells, who fearlessly branded lynching a white tool of political terror against southern blacks, and Rebecca Latimer Felton, who urged white men to prove their manhood by lynching black men accused of raping white women—Feimster makes visible the ways in which black and white women sought protection and political power in the New South. While Wells was black and Felton was white, both were journalists, temperance women, suffragists, and anti-rape activists. By placing their concerns at the center of southern politics, Feimster illuminates a critical and novel aspect of southern racial and sexual dynamics. Despite being on opposite sides of the lynching question, both Wells and Felton sought protection from sexual violence and political empowerment for women. Southern Horrors provides a startling view into the Jim Crow South where the precarious and subordinate position of women linked black and white anti-rape activists together in fragile political alliances. It is a story that reveals how the complex drama of political power, race, and sex played out in the lives of Southern women.

The Banditti of the Plains
The Banditti of the Plains

Author: A. S. Mercer

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2013-06-14

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 080618714X

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In 1894, when A. S. Mercer published this angry eyewitness account of the cattlemen’s invasion of Wyoming, the book was so thoroughly and ruthlessly suppressed that few copies of that edition remain today. Although historians have since questioned some of Mercer’s conclusions about the Johnson County range war, they have never controverted the facts of the cattlemen-homesteader struggle as he grimly reported them. With the intention of "executing" alleged rustlers and terrorizing the homesteaders, a band of fifty-two cattlemen and hired gunmen invaded Johnson Country, Wyoming, in April 1892. After besieging and killing "the bravest man in Johnson County," the raiders in turn found themselves besieged by the homesteaders and finally in the protective custody of the Untied States cavalry. Further legal and illegal maneuvering permitted the invaders to go unpunished, but the cattlemen never again attempted to retain their hold over the range with organized mob violence. In this new edition of The Banditti of the Plains the original text has been followed with the utmost fidelity, even including the illustrations. An informed and interesting foreword by William H. Kittrell has been added to the book.

Hoosiers and the American Story
Hoosiers and the American Story

Author: Madison, James H.

Publisher: Indiana Historical Society

Published: 2014-10

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 0871953633

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A supplemental textbook for middle and high school students, Hoosiers and the American Story provides intimate views of individuals and places in Indiana set within themes from American history. During the frontier days when Americans battled with and exiled native peoples from the East, Indiana was on the leading edge of America’s westward expansion. As waves of immigrants swept across the Appalachians and eastern waterways, Indiana became established as both a crossroads and as a vital part of Middle America. Indiana’s stories illuminate the history of American agriculture, wars, industrialization, ethnic conflicts, technological improvements, political battles, transportation networks, economic shifts, social welfare initiatives, and more. In so doing, they elucidate large national issues so that students can relate personally to the ideas and events that comprise American history. At the same time, the stories shed light on what it means to be a Hoosier, today and in the past.