Original subtitles

As the United States prepares for its first centennial,

the war in the West between Native nations

and the United States is not yet over,

but its eventual outcome seems clear.

The tribes that once thrived in the Great Plains,

the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho,

are now mostly confined to reservations.

Bison are on the verge of extinction,

and the vast grassland

that once sustained them now offers opportunity

for a new wave of Western immigrants, cattle ranchers.

Their arrival will reshape the northern plains,

igniting a life and death struggle

for the control of the open range.

People live on myths,

and the myths that really stick in the American experience

are the myths of the West.

The mountains were taller, the deserts were harsher,

the snows were deeper.

American West conjures wonder,

possibility, opportunity.

The figure of the mountain man.

Notorious outlaws.

The cowboy.

The discovery of gold in California.

This train of wagons trailing across the prairie.

Everybody has a reason for wanting this land.

But most of that land was already occupied.

We have been residents for more than 10,000 years.

This is a clash of two different ways

of seeing life itself,

fighting for the future of your homeland on the one side,

and fighting for the destiny of the new republic

on the other side.

The history of the West is a creation story.

It's the creation of what we think of as modern America.

The West is a place where anything is possible.

It is the essence of the American dream.

The core of this is, what are we to be as a nation?

The reckoning is coming.

The West is this canvas

on which American dreams become larger than life.

In 1866, the end of the Civil War

brings a new wave of settlers West,

seeking fresh opportunity

and fresh profit on government lands

across America's Great Plains.

This is federal property known as the open range.

The grass is free at this point.

Settlers have come to recognize

that this enormous grassland,

which provided forage for tens of millions

of head of buffalo,

might be just as good for American cattle.

This realization dawns

as Americans in the North develop a new taste for beef

thanks to a booming post-war economy

and fast growing cities.

And it becomes very quickly central to the American diet

and the American identity.

When immigrants come to America,

one of the first things they write home is,

"You will not believe it,

but I'm having beef twice, three times a week."

The first place to meet this growing demand

is Texas.

While their owners fought in the Civil War,

the cattle proliferated here.

When they return,

they found some 5 million Longhorns grazing freely

on open lands.

This is chiefly Spanish Criollo Cattle

that's being interbred

with English Herefords, known as the Texas Longhorn.

Growing demand means serious money

and a steer worth $4 in Texas can sell

for up to 50 in New York,

but first they must reach the nation's meat packing center

in Chicago.

That means driving herds hundreds of miles across Texas

to the nearest rail hub in Abilene, Kansas,

grueling work that falls on the shoulders

of what will become an American icon.

The birth of the cowboy is really the cattle drive,

massive herds of cattle that needed to be protected

by cowboys that would make sure they kept moving.

You would round up in Texas,

and you would go up the famous Chisholm Trail,

but you had to be hardy.

You'd get left behind if you got sick.

And the reality is, being a cowboy was a terrible job.

It was really hard.

You were poorly paid.

About 20%, maybe even more

of American cowboys were African Americans.

It's also work that exposes cowboys to wild animals,

hostile Natives.

You're absolutely expendable,

which is why you find such a high proportion

of African Americans in this work.

It is far less glamorous

than Hollywood would memorialize it.

Today, there are a lot of people who wear cowboy hats

who don't go anywhere near cows,

don't go anywhere near horses, but people live on myths.

Built on the backs of cowboys,

the cattle business booms,

and with the completion

of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869,

transporting beef across the country gets easier

and even more profitable.

One of the most remarkable things was connecting the East

to the West with the Transcontinental Railroad,

and you can't exaggerate how significant that is.

Before the railroad, it costs as much to send a ton

of goods 30 miles over land as it does

to send it 3,000 miles across the ocean.

That changes everything.

Now, people moving West, they weren't moving laboriously

by the wagon.

Now they can get on the train.

That obviously opens up enormous field of opportunity

for ordinary families moving west,

but it also opens opportunities for big businesses.

Thanks to the railroad,

cattle ranching soon expands north

from Texas all the way to Wyoming,

where livestock can graze freely across the open range.

The open range is grazing lands that aren't fenced,

and so they're not staked out

by any particular divide,

and that means the cattle can roam freely.

If you had the resources to acquire a herd,

and bring it to a place where it was free range,

you were sittin' pretty.

In 1877, Americans hoping

to prosper in the cattle boom are encouraged

by a new congressional law, the Desert Lands Act,

aimed to boost settlement in the high, dry plains.

The act lets anyone buy up to 320 acres of land

for just $1.25 an acre.

It was designed to fill the American West

with honest people who would sink down roots

and have their families, build a school, and some churches,

Goes back to Thomas Jefferson,

the smallholder is the heart of the American Republic.

Soon, hundreds of homesteaders flock

to Wyoming, hoping to make it as cattle ranchers.

The idea is that if you can get your cows out there

and fatten them up to feed on this open grassland,

that's gonna increase your profits.

You didn't have to pay for anything.

The animals take care of themselves.

They're wandering around, but you need a way

to know which cattle are yours,

and which cattle belong to your friend, or your enemy.

The solution is cattle branding.

You burn a symbol in the animal's side,

and people knew it was yours.

But branding is not a perfect solution

on the open range, where herds could interbreed,

making it hard to know who owns which unbranded calves.

These unmarked calves are called mavericks,

and according to common practice, if you find one,

and brand it, it's yours.

It's a long tradition where if you find stray cattle

that are not branded, what was called a maverick,

you can take that calf and give it your own brand.

It is basically a free calf.

By 1880, a calf is one of

the most valuable assets in America.

A herd of 10,000 cattle can net a yearly profit

worth $20 million today.

As fortunes amass, the cattle business changes.

The cattle industry in Wyoming begins

with small time operators,

but very quickly, larger ranches are funded

with corporate money, with stocks sold in New York,

and Boston, and Philadelphia,

and sold in Edinburgh, and Berlin,

because of this global industrial market.

These ranch owners get a reputation as aristocrats.

They're called the cattle barons.

But surprisingly,

the great cattle barons didn't own any land.

They might've owned a tiny, little bit,

but they were just extractors using the convenience

of the public domain to line their pockets.

They were living the good life with cigars,

and brandy, and amiable women, let's say,

in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Thanks to such easy profits,

Wyoming's capital, Cheyenne, builds its own Millionaire's Row

in the 1880s.

Its streets are lit up by some

of America's first electric lights.

In 1882, it becomes the wealthiest city per capita

in the world.

Wyoming's elite ranchers are determined

to maintain their wealth and power.

The most powerful ranchers in Wyoming create

the Wyoming Stock Growers Association,

and in the whole state, cattle ranching is the foundation

of power, and so the Wyoming Stock Growers Association

functionally becomes the government

of the territory of Wyoming.

Then in 1886,

Wyoming's cattle ranchers are dealt a terrible blow

in what comes to be known as the Great Die-Up.

Winter of 1886-1887 was one of the worst winters ever

to hit the Plains.

Cattle died by the thousands.

People would find vast herds frozen to death.

Investors in London, investors in Scotland,

investors in Boston, New York, all say,

"This is not a good business.

We don't wanna be involved here.

Liquidate your herds, send them to Chicago.

We're outta the business."

Ranches go under.

Cattle industry's in a free fall.

Any cattle barons left standing

are now ready to fight for every last dollar.

The great cattle barons get the legislature of Wyoming

to pass a law saying that every maverick belongs

to the Wyoming Stock Growers Association,

so that anytime there's an unidentified calf,

it can't be claimed by one of the homesteaders

or a small rancher.

The Maverick Act made the possession

of unbranded cattle illegal.

So the small ranchers are breaking the law

every time they pull one of their own calves back

from the herd.

The Wyoming Stock Growers Association

hire stock detectives who will patrol the range to make sure

that the mavericking policies are being enforced.

And the penalty for stealing cattle is death.

As tensions rise between Wyoming's cattle barons

and its small ranches over mavericks,

a new technology makes things even more challenging.

Advertised as lighter than air, stronger than whiskey,

and cheaper than dust, barbed wire.

The devil's rope, as the Indigenous People call it,

will allow people to secure their homestead.

It's dry in the American West,

and there's not a lot of wood, so it's hard to build a fence,

until the invention of barbed wire makes it pretty easy

to build a fence.

You can just unspool this barbed wire

to make sure your livestock stayed in,

and nobody came and stole from you.

It was the hot invention.

At the same time, it undermines the whole notion

of the open range system.

All of a sudden, there is no unfettered movement

of grazing cattle.

Everything was now cut and parceled

into these chunks of land guarded by sharp wire.

The fences threaten the cattle barons' livelihoods,

which depends on free access to the grass.

The cattle barons are determined to take action.

Two independent ranchers are the first ones in their sights,

Jim Averell and Ellen Watson.

Jim Averell and Ella Watson were beginning

to prosper a little, running a ranch for cattle.

Ella Watson was very angry that the cattle barons,

the Stock Growers Association, was starting

to make it impossible for her

and her husband to make a living.

But their homestead is right on the river,

a prime watering hole in the middle

of a cattle baron's range.

It was fenced, and so he couldn't use that land anymore,

land that had made him rich.

He needed to get them off that land.

And so the cattle barons decided

to eliminate Averell and Watson,

so they send out a hit squad.

The moral legitimacy is on the side of the homesteaders,

and none of the legitimacy is on the side

of the great cattle barons, who are misusing power

for their own greed.

Averell and Watson are accused

of stealing cattle, a practice called rustling.

And the stock detectives take them from their ranch,

and they lynched them.

Extrajudicial hanging, vigilantism.

The cattle barons believed

that this is the first important step in warning the people

of Johnson County to desist from rustling.

For the people who knew Watson and Averell,

this is an outrage, this is murder.

The powerful cattle barons have money,

and they controlled most of the newspapers.

So the headlines in most

of the Cheyenne papers present, "Rustlers are lynched,

and they deserved it, they were thieves".

And they say Ellen Watson is "Cattle Kate,"

a notorious prostitute who was being paid

with stolen cattle.

And that Averell was her pimp.

She is branded as an outlaw, when the truth

of the matter is, she was just a woman trying to get by.

The news terrifies small homesteaders

in Wyoming,

but some realize if they want to survive,

they must band together and fight back.

One of them is Nate Champion.

Nate Champion grows up in Texas.

He works in various places as a ranch hand

as the cowboy riding the ranges.

He knew how the business worked.

Champion moved to Johnson County

in the 1870s to set up his own ranch,

and has grown his herd to over 200 cattle,

but right now, the future looks bleak.

Homesteaders fear being murdered,

or falsely prosecuted for fencing off their own land.

People are dying and there's a real climate of fear.

Nate Champion's one of the few people

that does not get completely scared off by this.

Champion and some of his compatriots realized

they weren't gonna be able to stay in business

unless they could somehow break the power

of the cattle barons,

and so they establish their own association,

The Northern Wyoming Stock Growers Association.

It's gonna have its own set of rules, and its own roundup,

and crucially that roundup is gonna be one month

before the Wyoming Stock Growers Association roundup.

Champion and the homesteaders know

the risk, and going up against

the powerful Stock Growers is a make or break decision.

The big time ranchers know this is an existential threat.

If this roundup happens before them,

there's gonna be a lot of unbranded cattle

that they think should be theirs that are gonna go

to Nate Champion and his friends.

They have to stop it from happening.

So the cattle barons hire Frank Canton to lead the effort

to suppress the roundup.

Now Canton, he had a kind of checkered past,

murder, robbery, all sorts of crimes.

But he reinvented himself,

first as a sheriff in Johnson County,

and them as the henchman for the cattle barons.

He is in cahoots with big stock growers,

and ultimately becomes a stock detective.

In the spring of 1882,

Canton and his men find Nate Champion at his cabin.

Nate Champion is in bed.

Champion reaches under his pillow and pulls up a revolver,

and starts shooting.

There's a gun fight.

Champion hits a couple of them.

They flee,

and they're not able to get Nate Champion.

Once the coast is clear,

Champion finds a literal smoking gun.

He does the minimal forensics to realize that it belongs

to Frank Canton, a key player for the cattle barons.

So now Nate Champion is in a position

to bring down Frank Canton.

This is a real problem for the Stock Growers Association.

If one of these stock detectives ends up in court,

they will be forced to testify against their employers.

Nate Champion could blow the lid off the whole thing.

In 1890, as tensions between homesteaders

and stock growers intensify, Wyoming enters the Union

as the 44th state, with Cheyenne as its capital.

Cattle barons are appointed

to important positions in the government,

hold meetings in the Capitol,

and have a hand in electing the state's governor,

and its two senators.

All three of them are Republicans.

President Benjamin Harrison is also a Republican,

so these are people who know each other,

so they're optimistic that they'll get some cooperation.

As the cattle barons consolidate

their power, the nation itself is in the midst

of a fight between workers

and the millionaires who employ them.

Thousands of miles away in Homestead, Pennsylvania,

Andrew Carnegie is in the midst

of crushing the Steel Workers Union.

He sees these unionized workers as people

that are undermining his ability to make his millions,

and so he does everything in his power to crush them,

including hiring a private army of 300 Pinkertons.

Mark Twain described the years between 1875

and 1900 as the Gilded Age,

a result of the Industrial Revolution

where people at the top enjoyed enormous wealth

and power at the expense of factory workers in the East,

and small farmers in the West.

These enormous natural resources of the country,

this vast amount, the whole lot of it,

is coming into the ownership of a smaller

and smaller group of people.

At this point, the wealthy have the power to be able

to incite violence at a mass level against the smaller guys,

and at times, they do.

As it is in the East,

so it goes in the West,

but the cattle barons go even further

and hire private armies to take out their worst enemies.

The cattle barons make a list

of 70 individuals up in Johnson County

that must be eliminated, by which I mean eliminated,

and the number one they want to get is Nate Champion.

The list included many homesteaders

in Nate Champion's Northern Wyoming

Stock Growers Association,

and anyone whose homestead is in the way.

This is not just a bunch of ranchers,

or hired hands, or cowboys.

The kill list is of prominent people

of Johnson County, sheriffs, and judges,

and city council members, and newspapermen,

so it's a civil war effectively.

The Stock Growers Association decides they're gonna need

to get some hired guns for this.

They recruit 25 Desperadoes, gunmen from Texas,

with the promise of $5 a day for expenses,

and $50 for every rustler that they kill.

Now, to us, they look like hit men.

To them, they were bringing justice to Johnson County,

a place that, in their minds, had descended into anarchy.

People in Johnson County are gonna call them invaders,

because they're coming to basically invade Johnson County,

to take over, and to kill people.

The hired guns travel from Texas

by a private train

to meet the cattle barons and Frank Canton.

They're then equipped with horses, with rifles.

They have a wagon that's got tons of ammunition, and food,

and even dynamite, and off they go,

headed for the heart of Johnson County.

On the way, they find out

that Nate Champion is staying on the KC Ranch,

which is right on the way to Buffalo,

and they thought, if they could ambush Champion,

they would get one of their key suspects off their list,

cutting the head off the snake.

As they near the KC Ranch,

the invaders cut the telegraph lines to prevent news

of their arrival from getting to Johnson County.

On April 9th, 1892,

the cattle baron's vigilante army quietly surrounds

the KC Ranch.

Nate Champion is staying at the KC Ranch

along with one of his friends and two other men.

Two of the guys go out to get water,

and they don't come back.

Nate Champion and his friend, Nick Ray, realize

that, "Where are they?

Something's going on here."

Ray decides he's gonna go look.

Suddenly, Champion, he knows what's going on,

and the question is, can he get out alive?

He's outgunned here by 50 to one,

but he actually hits three of them,

and he does manage to keep them at bay for several hours.