Violence in the West: The Johnson County Range War and Ludlow Massacre: A Brief History With Documents

Popular portrayals have long depicted the American frontier of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a "Wild West" marked by violence. This compelling volume by Marilynn Johnson explores the question of how violent the West truly was and what conditions made violence likely to occur. By examining the case studies of the Johnson County range war in Wyoming and the Ludlow Massacre during the southern Colorado coal strike, Johnson demonstrates that western violence in this period was a product of the transformation of the West from a rugged frontier to a capitalist market. The introduction provides an overview of the range and mining wars that plagued the region and the specific cases the book examines. The primary sources collected by Johnson — including newspaper reports, industrialists’ accounts, union documents, and personal memoirs — offer a vivid portrait of tensions surrounding land use, industrial development, labor, and race and ethnicity that fueled violence and ultimately contributed to western development. An epilogue looks at how these events have been remembered and how popular culture has helped keep the mystique of the Wild West alive. Document headnotes, two chronologies, questions for consideration, a selected bibliography, and an index enrich student exploration of this often-misunderstood part of American history.

Marilynn S. Johnson (Ph.D., New York University) is a professor of history and chair of the history department at Boston College. Dr. Johnson’s research interests center on urban, immigration, and western history. Her most recent book, Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City (Beacon Press, 2003) explored the history of police brutality from the mid-nineteenth to late 20th century. Her previous book, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II, (University of California Press, 1993) won the Sierra Prize from the Western Association of Women’s Historians. Currently, she is working on a history of new immigrants in Boston from 1965 to the present.