Talk:Adventure (magazine)/Volume 39/Number 1/The Mad Commanders
Add topic| Information about this edition | |
|---|---|
| Edition: | from Adventure, 1923 Feb 10, pp. 3–34. |
| Source: | https://archive.org/details/madcommanders00robe |
| Contributor(s): | ragpicker |
| Notes: | Accompanying illustrations to be added later |
| Proofreaders: | ragcleaner |
Extract from the Camp-Fire section of the issue, pp. 181–182
FRANK C. ROBERTSON rises to tell us something about the old sheep and cattle wars that figure in his story in this issue:
The talk about “different” stories gave me the idea that maybe the Adventure bunch would like to read a story of a range war as such wars actually happened. Not that this story pretends to be a “history” at all. It is purely fiction, but the settling duplicates that of many real fights. The point is that in all these scraps the same mood was there, and given the same circumstances the results would have been the same. Many and many a good, man and many a bad one has “gone over the hump” in rows similar to this one.
I'VE tried hard to stress the one important fact that there was a certain amount of justification for both sides, and a whole lot of blame. If I have appeared to favor the sheepmen it is because it seemed necessary to stress their viewpoint for the sake of emphasis, and because in fiction they are always presumed to be in the wrong. They have to get a little more than an even break to win any sympathy from the reader. Sheepmen were usually the aggressors in range crowding simply because cattle were there first. Cattle men were usually the aggressors in violence. As a rule the cattlemen won the fights, and the sheepmen won the range. And both sides were ruled by prejudice.
I HOPE I've been able to show that there were good qualities in all of the men involved except “Dead-eye” Bender and “Pot-hook” These two may seem overdrawn, but I really don't think they are. They had their prototypes in real life—moral perverts for whom hate made a place. There was the notorious Tom Horn, who was hanged in Wyoming a few years ago. If my memory serves he was known to have killed four men, and when you consider how easy it is to kill lonely men on the range without it being known it is a certainty that those four were a small per cent. of his total number. Then there was “Diamondfield Jack” Davis who was convicted of murder, and later acquitted. It is not for me to say that he was guilty, but he had a lot of powerful friends in his hour of need. Undoubtedly this doesn't exhaust the list, and there were plenty of sheps ready to take a shot at a passing cowboy if opportunity offered.
I state explicitly in the story that only a few cattlemen would have anything to do with such people, but there were a number on every range who became so bitter over what they thought was an infringment of their rights that they were ready to seize any weapon that came to their hand.
IF THE blame could be traced to its ultimate source a lot of it would fall on the free range policy of the Government, and a lot can be charged to local politics. In States like Montana and Wyoming the cattlemen wielded the larger influence, and sheepmen could not get a square deal. In Utah, Idaho, and Nevada just the reverse was true. Range wars practically stopped with the establishment of the Federal Forest Reserves.—Frank C. Robertson.
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