Much has been written about Shane as a classic western responding only peripherally to the Johnson County war of 1892 and (more often) as the embodiment of the ideal western hero. Because the film is a product of a period in which positions on ranching methods were ambivalent, however, its environmental message is limited by its cultural and historical context. Later western films addressing the Johnson County War and its consequences, however, were produced after issues surrounding the environmental impact of various ranching methods had been resolved. Westerns from Rare Breed (1966) to Tom Horn (1980), Heaven’s Gate (1980), and Monty Walsh (1970, 2003) begin to demonstrate another, perhaps more crucial, struggle underlying all of their battles—that between land use and environmental conservation and preservation; or ultimate destruction and, hence, failure. The battle between cattle ranchers and homestead farmers grows more complex once environmental and legal history are mined and reveal that cattle ranchers gained more land from the Homestead Act than did family farmers.
The rise of cattle barons in the western United States coincides with the passage of the Homestead Act of 1862, which, along with the Preemptive Act of 1841, provided means for cattlemen to obtain vast acreages of land for little or no money. According to John Upton Terrell, cattle barons used relatives, employees, and even prostitutes to gain the land they wanted to support their free-ranging cattle—160 acres from each person they employed (210). Passage of the Timber Culture Act of 1873 provided them with another way to gain land, this time with the promise to grow trees on at least 40 of the additional 160 acres they gained at no cost to them (210-212). The Desert Land Act of 1877 helped ranchers secure 640 acres more from each of their proxy, as long as they promised to irrigate at least part of it (212-213).
The legal system seemed to be behind ranchers, in spite of what look like attempts to secure land for poor homestead farmers, until the blizzards of 1886-1887 destroyed the ranch economy. The blizzards of 1886-1887 might also be a product of overgrazing. According to Harold E. Briggs, in the fall of 1886, the Little Missouri Stock Growers’ Association “decided that the ranges were badly overstocked in that roundup district and that in the future ranch hands there should refuse to work with new outfits running either cattle or horses” (533). The blizzards came soon after, with storms so powerful and temperatures so low that they killed from 80-92 percent of all cattle (Briggs 535). These blizzards, interspersed with drought conditions that destroyed grasses by drying them up or burning them away, nearly eradicated both ranchers and farmers. This is mentioned in The Sea of Grass when Brewton contemplates stocking shelters with water and hay.
The Rare Breed (1966) highlights the consequences of these blizzards in the 1880s’ West, in the context of the introduction of Hereford cattle as a crossbreed for Longhorns. The film is loosely based on the life of rancher William Burgess, who was responsible for bringing the Herefords into the American West from England. The film’s opening at an 1884 St. Louis Exposition (exhibited on a banner) establishes the context of the film. And Englishwoman Martha Evans’ (Maureen O’Hara) Herefordshire bull takes center stage. A bulldogging cowboy, Sam Burnett (James Stewart), leads the bull to its new owner in Texas with some intrigue behind his decision, where Evans attempts to convince Alexander Bowen (Brian Keith), the bull’s new owner, to crossbreed it with his longhorns. After the bull is set free on the open range, a worse than usual winter hits. Blizzards destroy most of Bowen’s cattle, both the longhorns and the Hereford bull, but crossbred calves survive and provide Burnett and Evans with the basis for a growing mixed-breed herd.
After blizzards and droughts in the mid-1880s that nearly annihilated both farmers and ranchers, especially in Wyoming, the conflict between ranchers and farmers came to a head—in the 1892 range war in Johnson County, Wyoming. On the surface, the “war” certainly looks like that between economic classes (with homesteaders on one end, and cattle barons on the other) or, as Richard Maxwell Brown argues, between those in favor of and those against incorporation. In an attempt to eradicate homestead farmers, cattle barons who had rebuilt their ranches and their association after the blizzards and droughts found a way to justify violent action against homesteaders because they branded them as criminals.
With the help of a “literary bureau” (Terrell 256), the Cattle Association flooded newspapers and magazines with false claims that cattle rustlers had run amok in Wyoming and must be stopped using frontier justice, since the local legal system was corrupt. Wyoming law was changed so a state militia would not interfere with the Cattle Association’s hired guns (which they called Regulators). Eventually these Regulators were defeated by a small army of homestead farmers, but Wyoming’s Governor Barber (Terrell 259) intervened, sending false reports to President Harrison and the United States Senate, although newspaper accounts made clear that the Cattle Association’s claims regarding rustlers were completely untrue, and homesteaders “had gathered to defend their lives against hired gunmen and cattlemen bent on destroying them” (Terrell 261) and had not incited war. Tom Horn (1980) highlights gunman Tom Horn (Steve McQueen), who not only works for John Coble (Richard Farnsworth), the land baron behind the Johnson County Wars, but also destroys so many homesteaders that the baron himself supports legal action against him. One of the most notorious film versions of the incident is Heaven’s Gate (1980).
On the surface, cattle ranching seems like a natural choice for the desert like grasslands of the nineteenth century. In fact, like the original in 1970, a remake of Monte Walsh (2003) responds to the frontier’s close after the 1892 range war and valorizes the cowboy mythology as much as did its 1970 original. The film opens in a turn-of-the-century present but then flashes back to Monte’s (Tom Selleck) last winter in a cattle camp. In a clear parallel to the blizzards prior to the Johnson County Range War, the winter wiped out most of the ranchers, and Eastern corporations threatens to destroy a free-range lifestyle that is again depicted as more in harmony with the natural world than is fenced ranching. The conflict between free-range ranchers and corporations is manifested by a cowboy’s killing himself after stringing too much barbed wire. The film even ends with Monte and his horse jumping over an automobile stuck in the mud—a clear dramatization of the superiority of his more natural lifestyle and closer and more environmentally conscious relationship with the natural world. Here it’s not the war that is highlighted but the cowboy lifestyle lost after homestead farmers and corporations won the West—at least within the Western film.
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