Riders of Judgment Read online

  © 1951 by Frederick Feikema Manfred

  Introduction © 2014 by the Board of Regents

  of the University of Nebraska

  All rights reserved

  Reprinted by arrangement with the

  Manfred Literary Committee.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Manfred, Frederick Feikema, 1912–1994.

  Riders of judgment / Frederick Manfred; introduction to the Bison Books edition by Thomas Pope.—Second edition.

  pages cm

  Originally published: New York: Random House, 1957.

  Summary: “A fictionalization of Wyoming’s Johnson County War, the legendary range war that pitted the small ranchers against the large and ended in the spring of 1892 with a dramatic shootout”—Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-8032-4881-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-8032-7744-1 (electronic: epub)

  ISBN 978-0-8032-7745-8 (electronic: mobi)

  1. Johnson County War, 1892—Fiction.

  I. Pope, Thomas, 1949- II. Title.

  PS3525.A52233R5 2014

  813’.54—dc23

  2013050114

  “The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.”

  Contents

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  INTRODUCTION

  Thomas Pope

  On April 9, 1892, twenty-six armed killers surrounded a small log cabin near what is now the town of Kaycee, Wyoming. They let two trappers who had happened by for the night go free, but then they killed a third trapper, Nick Ray, as he stood by the door. That left only Nate Champion inside, a local rancher who had fought against the rich cattlemen in the area who were trying to throw out the small-fry newcomers. Nate held on for several hours while hundreds of bullets from the hired gunmen outside splintered the cabin. During the siege Champion stayed low, shooting out of the windows at anyone who dared make a rush at him. Between shots he kept a poignant journal. “Boys, I feel pretty lonesome just now. I wish there was someone here with me so we could watch all sides at once,” he wrote. The last journal entry read: “Well, they have just got through shelling the house like hail. I heard them splitting wood. I guess they are going to fire the house tonight. I think I will make a break when night comes, if alive. Shooting again. It’s not night yet. The house is all fired. Goodbye, boys, if I never see you again.” With that, the house ablaze, Nate Champion signed his journal and put it in his pocket before he emerged, running from the back door with a six shooter in one hand and a rifle in the other. He was gunned down by four men and hit by twenty-eight bullets. The invaders later pinned a note on Champion’s bullet-riddled chest that read “Cattle Thieves Beware.”

  The death of Nate Champion—what a name!—is the most famous of a number of murders and lynchings that made the Johnson County War one of the bloodiest and seminal events in the settlement of the West. In the 1870s vast tracts of open range country were grabbed by rich men from the East and aristocrats from England, and soon their huge spreads dotted the Wyoming landscape. But in the 1880s, a second wave of poorer settlers, without political connections, began to put down roots in the state, and the established landowners fought back. They rustled the newcomers’ cattle, and many of these would be ranchers found themselves dangling from the end of a rope. Led by Nate Champion, they retaliated, often using means just as harsh and unforgiving as those of the rich ranchers. No one was entirely in the right, and no one was completely in the wrong. After several years of incessant rustling and killing, the rich landowners, in one of the most astounding moments in western American history, decided to settle things once and for all. They hired a small private army of gunmen from Texas, delivered them by a specially chartered train to Johnson County, and set them loose.

  After Champion’s murder the killers lay siege to another ranch, and more killings ensued. But the small ranchers, enraged by Champion’s murder, surrounded the killers, forced them to retreat inside, and wouldn’t let them escape. The story went national, and the governor of Wyoming telegraphed President Benjamin Harrison pleading for help. Harrison, a Republican backed by wealthy eastern interests, was inclined to side with the rich ranchers, but the notoriety of Champion’s death forced his hand, and he called out the Sixth Cavalry, who surrounded the gunmen and made them surrender. From there the courts took over, but by the time the case came to trial most of the killers were released or escaped back to Texas, never to be heard from again. While the law couldn’t settle the matter, market forces did. The big ranchers eventually lost; the big spreads became uneconomical and soon gave way to smaller ranches and farms.

  There were two eventual victors in the terrible Johnson County War. The first were the small ranchers, who transformed Wyoming into a liberal-leaning bastion for many years. The second was Nate Champion, who in his gallant, single-handed stand against a small army became a symbol of the lone cowboy. Meanwhile, the big ranchers, who at least in their own eyes were only trying to keep what they had struggled to build, became the symbol of suppression of the little man. In the end neither side had a lot to be proud of—but what does that matter? The legend was born, the myth was made.

  There is only one other event of equal historic and mythic weight that helped shape the western legend. On October 26, 1881, in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, Wyatt Earp, his two brothers Virgil and Morgan, and a tubercular dentist, gambler, and gunman named John Henry “Doc” Holiday, in a battle for control of the gambling interests in town, fought the Clanton and McLaury brothers in a dusty strip of manure-filled dirt called the O.K. Corral. Like Champion’s hold-out against a private army, the facts are more complicated— and less glamorous—than the legend that sprang from them. The gunfight at the O.K. Corral gave birth to the legend of the valiant marshal bringing order to the towns in the newly settled frontier, while the Johnson County War created the equally resonant myth of the rich landowners trying and failing to stop the poor immigrant classes from creating a new life west of the Mississippi.

  This myth of the West first emerged into public view in 1902, when Owen Wister wrote The Virginian, a retelling of the Johnson County War from the rich ranchers’ point of view. Soon, other novels followed; books like The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark and Jack Shaefer’s Shane also retold the Johnson County War, and Charles Portis’s True Grit states that Rooster Cogburn was one of the hired killers who fled back to Texas. The silent films knew a good thing when they saw it, and it is impossible to imagine American moviemaking in the early years of the twentieth century without the Western—especially the lightning-fast gunfighter. Early stars like Hoot Gibson, William S. Hart, and Tom Mix turned Wister’s ode to the rich upside-down and instead celebrated the heroic gunman suggested by Nate Champion’s famous last stand, bringing justice to poor farmers and ranchers. Nor did that legend die when the Talkies transformed Hollywood—the Western thrived throughout the 1930s and well into the 1960s, and it is still a potent force today, although it now often depicts a new frontier called Outer Space in a new genre called Science Fiction. Nate Champion did far more than protect his small ranch from rich landowners and thereby give birth to the Western mythology—he also helped create the American film industry.

  Frederick Manfred knew all of this in 1957, when his Riders of Judgment was published. Before Fred—as his son-in-law I can only call him Fred—virtually no serious research had been done by novelists or film makers about the real events behind the Johnson County War. The myth was so overwhelming, the persona of the Wild West hero so persuasive, and the money to be grabbed from a simplistic rendition so e
nticing that no writers or film makers felt the need to dig down into the weeds of history to find out what really happened in 1892 on those lonely Wyoming slopes.

  The archives of the University of Minnesota contain Fred Manfred’s life’s work, beginning with his birth on January 6, 1912, in the small farm town of Doon, Iowa, and continuing up to his death in Luverne, Minnesota, on September 7, 1994. His manuscripts, notes, research, letters, and all of the other artifacts of a life devoted to literature are contained in this stupendous collection, surely one of the most complete in American literature, a great treasury waiting to be discovered. Here is contained Fred’s every step in the creation of Riders of Judgement.

  Fred began by doing an astounding amount of research—his notes indicate he began in the late spring of 1955, not long after Lord Grizzly, his monumental novel of the fur trapper Hugh Glass, had come out to great success. He first read 114 books, from histories of the Johnson County War to virtually every novel he could lay his hands on about ranching, gunfights, and any other element of the tale he was about to tell. He then—and probably concurrently with the reading of those books—handwrote 173 pages of notes, ideas, notions, character sketches, vocabulary lists, names both historical and invented, and all of the many themes he hoped to investigate and blend into his tale. He then handwrote a 101-page scene outline, where every character, event, and theme is laid down, plus the bones of his story, from beat to beat, scene to scene, all assembled in what he later described as four movements, as if he were preparing to write a symphony. Finally, in late October of 1955, Fred embarked on an extensive research trip up to the Wyoming area where the Johnson County War took place. Aided by the Wyoming State Historical Society, Fred read through newspapers and other historical records; he then drove up to Nate’s old ranch site and to the land where the cabin stood and on which Nate was killed. There are photos, taken by his wife, Maryanna, of Fred standing in front of Nate and Ray’s graves and of him lying on the ground on the exact spot where Nate was shot, staring up into the same sky Champion saw as he died. It must have been a magnificent trip.

  At last on March 19, 1956, after nearly a year of immense and wholly unique research, at his home in Bloomington, Minnesota, Fred began to handwrite the first draft of what he thought would be called either Crimson Grass, Home of Man, Dark Remembrance, Scarlet Grass, Wild Land, or, his early favorite, Crimson County. Fred worried that the name Nate Champion was too good to be true and also limited him to a mere retelling of historical events rather than affording him the literary latitude he needed, and so his hero became Cain Hammett. On a legal-sized sheet, Fred’s sprawling handwriting begins with the words, “Cain came riding down out of the clouds.” Working at a steady pace, he finished the first draft on July 20, 1956. He then immediately jumped into the second draft, this time typed. Every sentence was worked and reworked, and the amended manuscript begins with the slightly altered, “Cain came riding down through a cloud”—cleaner, simpler, and yet more profound. The 373-page manuscript was finished on December 8, 1956.

  Partly due to the success of Lord Grizzly, Riders of Judgment, as it was now called, was immediately accepted for publication. Both Allen Collins, Fred’s agent, and David McDowell, his editor at Random House, were delighted with it, and Fred spent the next several months making changes mostly dealing with small technical points of dialogue and language, changes that continued up to just days before the novel went to press. It was released in hardcover in May 1957.

  The reviews were equally pleased. The Charlotte News said Riders was “a superior Western…. The attendant details, the obvious love of the subject matter, the careful craftsmanship of the biographical and natural descriptions all help to lift Riders high.” The Chicago Sunday Tribune described it as a “powerful, richly realized novel… a striking addition to the shelf of top flight fiction about the west.” The Charleston News & Courier reviewer said, “I commend this novel without reservation…. I admire it for its quality, and also because it. bestows a new literary decency upon the Far Western heritage of every American.” The Buffalo Bulleton said, “The book… closes with a sense of great humility, leaving a broader understanding of mankind and a feeling of reluctance to judge the actions of any man, whether honorable or dishonorable, for each, of necessity, meets his destiny… each fallen victim to the turbulence within himself, thus paying the price for living the life he chose and making the decisions he made.” The New York Times called it “a thriller all the way.” The Saturday Review said it “digs deeper and is stylistically superior to most of its genre.” The Chicago Sun Times said, “Manfred writes with the painstaking authenticity and Chaucerian gusto that marked his first books under the name of Feike Feikema. This tenth novel is just about the author’s best.” The Providence Sunday Journal said, “Here is your chance to ride the open range… and wonder… how God could make a country so big and people it with men so very human.” The Omaha World Herald said, “First rate Westerns are rare…. Riders of Judgment is one of the good ones—a novel fit to stand beside the memorable Shane” The Minneapolis Sunday Tribune said, “As in Lord Grizzly, the sense of place and time is vivid, the talk is natural and yet in period, the physical scene is closely observed. Manfred’s eye and ear are both acute, and what is seen and heard in this far-flung landscape of plains and mountains lends veracity and liveliness to his narrative.”

  Initial excitement was high. The Manfred papers describe Fred’s anticipation of a movie sale, which would have catapulted him to both financial security and literary success. He acquired H. H. Swanson, a Hollywood agent, who worked to get film deals on both Lord Grizzly and Riders of Judgment—and in both cases came frustratingly close. Copies of Riders were sent along with enthusiastic reviews to George Stevens, the director of Shane, and to John Wayne, both of whom seriously considered the project before finally rejecting it. The absence of a movie deal reduced national attention and excitement, and initial sales, which had been encouraging, began to slip. Fred noticed but then moved on to what would become his next novel, Conquering Horse.

  Riders soon joined Fred’s Buckskin Man Tales, but its reputation, while high, has been unfairly outshone by Lord Grizzly. And the Western genre, once a backbone of popular American fiction, has become a backwater, taking Riders with it. Any hope for a resurrection of Riders seemed doubly doomed when in 1980 Heaven’s Gate, a disastrous movie that falsely retells the Johnson County War and bears no resemblance to Fred’s novel, became one of the most notorious failures in Hollywood history. Happily, in 2002, eight years after Fred’s death, encouraged by Larry McMurtry, his old companyero and now a screenwriter, Hallmark Channel made Johnson County Wars, a fine adaptation of Riders of Judgment—it’s only a shame that after years of hoping, Fred never lived to see his work come alive on a screen.

  Riders of Judgment is one of the best researched and most accurate depictions of the West, and particularly of the Cattle West, ever written. The dialogue is astonishing in its meticulous authenticity. The historical record is painstakingly researched, and whatever changes Fred made only help the reader feel the events all the more profoundly. The description of places is reliable, from the smallest flower to the mountain range on which Cain first appears riding down into the world of men. Here, for example, is a typical description of the land: “They crossed a great open space. The ocher soil was matted over with blooming short grasses, with white and purple and gold flowers. Patches of miniature ferns rode above the grass like diaphanous green veils. Perfumes of the most delicate kind, yet each distinct, and weighted with the fresh scent of cloud dew, touched the inside of the nostril no matter what way a man turned his head. It was all a park, almost too good for grazing.”

  Here is Fred’s take on western lingo: “Well, you kin talk agin mares all you want. But I had me one onct that I dearly loved. Rabbit was her name. She was my night horse. I was helpin’ a man named Hobie Parker bring up a bunch of longhorns from Denver. We had good luck until we hit the North Platte and then all
hell commenced to let loose. One stompede after another. One night I’d just laid down, it was rainin’ hard, and I had my little mare Rabbit staked near me, when there was a terrible crack of thunder, and before I could raise from my suggans, the longhorns was up and going, headed straight for me and Rabbit. I forked her in the dark in my underwears and let her run. I had her pick her way through them wild critters. By jiggity it was dark that night! Why, it was so dark that night you couldn’t find your nose with both hands. I been out many a night when it was so black the bats stayed to home, but this night was blacker.” And so on, in passage after passage, until the spirit of the land, the speakers, and the times becomes its own poem.

  But that is only the beginning of Fred’s achievement in Riders of Judgment. The novel takes its time and refuses to give into the temptation of mere action to solve a plot or character concern. Each moment reveals and develops his primary objective: to depict human emotion in all of its range and depth. Gunfights, love affairs, treachery, even death itself—all become an almost incidental ripple to the deeper concern of mankind in motion. On that larger stage Fred places the ambition of three men all in love with the same woman, something few authors would even attempt and that Fred succeeds in credibly and movingly describing. The depictions of action are shown as yet another stanza in the human song, often tragic and just as often prone to the vagaries of accident and impulse. The hanging of Ella and Avery is a brilliant one-act tragedy on the madness of human caprice, while the astonishing portrait of Cain Hammett’s hold-out in the cabin is a masterpiece of moving description.

  Nor is Fred’s plotting relegated to a simple retelling of historic events, or a merely well-crafted orchestration of action and character. Fred begins his novel after many of the events of the Johnson County War have already taken place and ends it before other events will draw it to a conclusion. Instead, Fred concentrates on Cain Hammett and limits and refines his plot to Cain’s journey toward death. Like Homer’s Iliad, which deals with only a few weeks in a ten-year war, Fred distills a huge event down to its primal elements. The character of Cain Hammett is a major achievement, at once heroic and human, fragile and magnificent; it is astonishing that a novel that celebrates human triumph ends with Cain’s death and yet convinces us of his victory. Fred avoids the simplicities that would have limited his portrayal of Cain as a mere superman in chaps and instead gives him the human frailties that make him transcend the traditional Western demigod. Cain is real and human and flawed and finally wonderful.