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Sat 17 Sep 2005 9:53
by Kevin McGehee
[Fiction]
Completed
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Years ago I wrote a story called “The Lynching of Lefty Pross” and submitted it to a magazine that was in the business of publishing Western-themed fiction. It was rejected. But some later stories I tried to write, including Medicine Mountain, have been built around the idea that the 5 Hat cowboys described in this old-style newspaper article, stayed in the West Fork country.
Maybe I should have stopped trying to write those stories after I wrote this piece.
Murder and Lynching in W. Fork Country
Cattle Sale Largest Ever Seen Here
Some 200 head of cattle bearing the 5 Hat brand were sold and put in the rail cars bound to eastern markets recently in Little’s Spring, and there is talk that the owners of the brand are leaving the territory after one of their number was murdered by a cowhand from a neighboring ranch.
The cattlemen are said to have run afoul of more established ranchers along the West Clearwater River south of Fort Darrow by filing claims on watering holes in the desert country adjacent to land where Richard Magruder, Henry Brown and others have been running cattle for several years before the newcomers arrived. The filings left the other ranchers hemmed in between waterless desert on the east and lands reserved by the U.S. Army for Indians led by Chief Many Coups on the north and west. Cattle wandering south toward 5 Hat watering holes had been hazed back onto home range despite seasonal drought leading to low water in the West Fork.
According to the story, Magruder and Brown sought to win watering rights on their neighbors’ range through tactics both lawful and otherwise, leading to a tense confrontation in which threats were exchanged but no actions were taken. A few days later 5 Hat co-owner Elijah Scruggins was ambushed and shot dead by a Magruder employee named Pross, who was later seized and treated to horsehair justice despite the availability of federal soldiers to arrest and try the killer. While there is no word of charges against them in the lynching of Pross, the surviving 5 Hats seem to have chosen to sell off their herd and seek quieter environs, leading to a general consensus that they may have been involved. They are said to be former Confederates but your editor personally observed one of the men, as they went about their business in our town, to be barely 20 years old. Of the others, one bore the swarthy features of a mulatto but might have been Mexican for he was not heard to speak.
It is your editor’s opinion that murder from ambush deserves the harshest reprisal and that the murderer of Mr. Scruggins received what he was due in its conclusion if not in its manner. We live in a wild country where a traveling man’s scalp may be forfeit at any moment and his wife and children may be subjected to torture and worse. A white man who behaves like a savage should surely not be astonished that he finds himself treated like one. There may be those who would have this publication make known far and wide the names and full descriptions of the 5 Hat cattlemen, but even if your editor had that information he would be disinclined to call down further trouble on men who have been bullied, and one of their number murdered, and whose response has been limited to punishing the guilty and withdrawing quietly from the battlefield. Former Confederates or not, these are men whom anyone can easily see are capable of meeting their counterparts in an all-out range war if they chose, but as the Bible says “an eye for an eye,“ they seem content to leave it at that.
* * * The cattle sale caused some excitement at the rails, we’re told, since the cattle pens had fallen into some disrepair since the last time a herd was shipped from our town, and had at no time been capable of holding so many beasts at once. An informant advises that other ranchers both in the West Fork country and beyond have seen their herds grow at a phenomenal rate in recent seasons due to good rains and mild winters, despite that the creeks and river forks may be prone to run dry at this time of year. Even the Indians, novices that they are to the keeping of livestock other than horses, have done well with the cattle herds provided to them by the Army.
This is in contrast to the woe and complaint often heard from ranchers in our own vicinity, as the area suffers from a drought far in excess of past summers, and only those with access to the Antelope River itself seem confident of making it through the winter without greater than usual losses. Were it not for the long, dry expanse between here and the Clearwater basin, and the apparent jealousy of ranchers there over their range and water, one might almost expect some local herders to relocate northward.
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