Written on this photo: “Settlers taking the law in their own hands cutting 15 miles of the Brighton Ranch fence in 1885.” Photographer Solomon D. Butcher staged the photo to illustrate a real incident.
The invention of barbed wire changed the Great Plains. Suddenly it was relatively inexpensive to fence land for cattle. Some operations like the Brighton Ranch illegally fenced public domain land and tried to keep homesteaders off. In 1884 settlers took down some of the Brighton’s illegal fencing and used the posts as rafters for their sod houses.
A ranch foreman had the settlers arrested while a second foreman, in Butcher’s words, “rigged up two large wagons, drawn by four mules each,” and visited each of the houses. The foreman used a large chain “hitched onto the projecting end of the ridge log, and in about three seconds the neat little home was a shapeless mass of sod, hay, brush and posts mixed up in almost inextricable confusion.” The ranchmen then retrieved their posts and left.
But one woman met the ranchers with a shotgun and drove them off. Meanwhile, a boy rode into Broken Bow and returned with a posse that chased the cowboys. In the end, a local judge ruled in favor of the settlers.
Conflicts between ranchers and settlers usually did not go so far, but sometimes turned deadly. In central and western Nebraska, many homesteads eventually became part of large ranches when farming proved impractical, while other farmers earned extra income by working part time for local cattlemen.
—David L. Bristow, Editor
Quotation is from S. D. Butcher, Pioneer History of Custer County (1901), 185-86. Photo: NSHS RG2608-2430
