The Johnson County War is an important and iconic event in the history of the American West. It was basically an attack on homesteaders by rich, powerful cattlemen who didn't want to give up the open range, a conflict that played out again and again in different areas of the West. What we need to understand is that the cattlemen were nearly always in the wrong. The passage of the Homestead Act of 1862 gave settlers the right to purchase land from the government at a low price and establish farms and small ranches. The cattleman used intimidation and outright violence to try to drive the small landowners off the range, and even though their actions were illegal, they generally got away with it because of their wealth and political influence.
In Johnson County the cattleman branded the homesteaders as rustlers, They weren't. Of course there were rustlers active in the area as in any cattle raising region, but the large ranchers used that fact to make war on any small landowner competing for land and water rights. Then they hired a small army of of outlaws, gun thugs and other disreputable characters from Texas to invade the county. One of their first actions was the murder of nine miners who had nothing to do with land or cattle whatsoever.
Then they went after a cowboy named Nate Champion. Nate's "crime" was forming an organization of small ranchers to compete with the Wyoming Stock Grower's Association. The WSGA had sent assassins to kill him 5 months earlier but when gunman invaded his cabin in the middle of the night Nate pulled a pistol from under his pillow, shot two of them and escaped. Now this small army of Texas killers had him cornered at the KC ranch that's mentioned in the song. Mr Champion single-handedly held them off for several hours, killing four and wounding three more before they managed to set fire to the cabin. He came out shooting but fell in a hail of bullets.
By now word had spread of the happenings at the KC and the Sherriff of Johnson County, who was sympathetic to the homesteaders, had raised a posse of 200 men. The cattleman army now found themselves under siege and outnumbered at the TA ranch. The governor, whose sympathies lay with the cattlemen, appealed to President Harrison to send in the US Army. When the soldiers broke the siege the cattlemen's force was arrested and held prisoner at a military base. However, even though papers found on the leader of the gunmen contained a hit list of 70 homesteaders and implicated over 20 prominent stockmen for having hired and directed the cattlemen's force, no charges were ever brought.
A great amount of Western novels, films and TV shows deal with these range wars. Some. like a 1902 novel by Owen Wister called "The Virginian" were sympathetic to the cattlemen and even glorified lynchings and other extrajudicial violence. The movie "Shane" on the other hand, was sympathetic to farmers and painted the large ranchers and their minions quite villainously.
The first person to write about Johnson County was an interesting character named Asa Shinn Mercer.
Mr Mercer is one of those now forgotten figures who pops up at different times in history for diverse reasons. In the early days of Seattle which was suffering for a severe lack of women, Asa went back east and recruited proper young women of good families to make the long journey west, take jobs as teachers, store clerks, etc. Nearly all ended up marrying local men and populating the region. To this day being descendant from these Mercer Girls is considered quite prestigious in the Seattle area. These events formed the basis for a popular 70s TV series called "Here Come the Brides." Asa Mercer would eventually be the founder and first president of the University of Washington but Between the Mercer Girls and the U of W he was a practicing journalist. When the Johnson County War broke out he was editor of the official publication of WSGA. But even though he was being employed by the stockmen, he recognized immediately the heinous nature of their actions against the homesteaders, and being a courageous journalist with integrity, he began to editorialize against them while still in their employ. In 1894 he wrote a detailed history of the war titled "Banditti of the Plains", the Banditti of course being the rich and powerful ranchers. This book was heavily suppressed at the time. The entire first printing was ordered destroyed by a court after a lawsuit was brought by the WSGA. An entire second printing mysteriously disappeared from the boxcar of a Union Pacific train. His printing press was burned, he was arrested and jailed and the book plates destroyed. His writings were seized in the mail as obscenity and his business was ruined, but his views were ultimately proven true. The book was the main source material of a notorious 1980 film called "Heaven's Gate". I say notorious because director Cimino went so over budget and the film performed so poorly at the box office, that it propelled United Artist Studio into bankruptcy. I personally enjoyed the movie and it has begun to develop a bit of a cult following, particularly the director's cut. There's one scene most Mudcatters will enjoy where a young man plays a fiddle tune while skating around an early roller rink.
Go to Youtube and type in Heaven's Gate: Roller Skate Dance.