Author: Smith, Helena Huntington,
Title: The War on Powder River: the story of an insurrection.
Description: NY, McGraw Hill, (1966). 2nd printing. G in G DJ. Witty, compassionate, highly authentic book. Power River bubbled down from the Big Horns and where 3 forks met. Bitter transformation of the majestic peaceful expanse of land into a battleground. Johnson County was ideal for raising beef. In the summer of 1879 the cattle gold rush was on, the era of the cattle baron had egun. By 1884 the range was overstocked, prices fell. Then came the winter of death 1886-1887 with its fifty four-day snow storm. Unemployment followed forcing cowboys to become homesteaders And since horses and cows were all they knew. they did not farm but raised a few head of cattle on choice bits of land along the creeks. None of this was regaraded with favor by the big owners. A fact of the range is the motherless calf, the maverick which can be claimed and branded by whoever catches it first. These orphans served as an excuse for the Maverick laws that big stockmen wanted, ostensibly to prevent rustline but actually to ruin the homesteading cowboys. Murders, lynchings, broken fences followed The War on Powder River had begun. Miss Smith narrates her story as an inexocrable grandiose epic. At last ineveitably the Federal troops came and peace was restored But an innocence had disappeared. A lost time for which one can have no regrets. Also a brutally poetic era for whose passing we are somehow the poorer. owner stamps fep, tape markes on dj.

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