Murder and Mob Law in the Big Horn Basin Part 3: A newly elected sheriff in a county escalating toward war

Part two of our saga ended with the long-simmering tensions in Big Horn County hovering on the brink of explosion. Two accused murderers sat in the Basin jail. Evidence strongly suggested both men had been killed in cold blood, and many in the county openly believed they should hang. Yet court case after court case stalled. Appeals and insanity pleas, ideas still unfamiliar on the frontier, dragged justice to a crawl and fueled the growing conviction that the courts would never act.

Meanwhile, by the end of 1902, the war between sheepherders and cattle ranchers in Big Horn County had turned openly vicious. Both sides were prepared to spill blood to control the open range. Cattlemen insisted sheep destroyed grass and trespassed on land they believed was rightfully theirs, while sheepmen pushed flocks into even more territory. With no fences, disputed water holes and deepening resentment added to the mix, minor trespasses escalated into ambushes, night raids, burned camps and sporadic gunfights. What had once been a bitter, economic dispute had hardened into a conflict where men were willing to kill.

Tension-filled sheriff’s election

In this volatile situation, an election was held. Few expected excitement on the ballot, except for the race for sheriff. That office had suddenly become the most dangerous and politically charged position in the county. Cattlemen wanted a man willing to ride the range and stand against interference. Homesteaders and townspeople hoped for a sheriff who would resist mob rule and protect the authority of the law. Everyone, regardless of allegiance, wanted a sheriff who might survive long enough to serve.

Defending a county larger than the state of Maryland was itself a near-impossible task. Communication was slow, transportation even slower, and fugitives could vanish for weeks into the steep, timbered hideouts of the Bighorn Mountains or slip away into tiny outposts scattered along the wild edge of Yellowstone National Park.

When the votes were counted, Johnston J. Fenton, a Democrat, was elected sheriff, the only Democrat on the entire ticket to win that year. Voters seemed driven by a mix of conviction and desperation, hoping a new sheriff could calm the county’s growing unrest. With the election, Fenton now carried the full weight of public expectation, inheriting a county at a precarious moment.

Two notorious prisoners 

Jim Gorman, accused of killing his brother Tom during a bitter family feud that included the alleged stealing of Tom’s wife, and J. P. Walters, charged with murdering Mrs. Agnes Hoover near Thermopolis after she refused his marriage proposal, both sat in jail, alive for the moment, but enduring the unbearable heat of summer and the bitter cold of winter in the small county facility.

The threats surrounding their confinement were neither rumor nor exaggeration. Newspapers had stories of vigilante plans. Anonymous warnings circulated. Word drifted north from Thermopolis and east from Cody that armed men were gathering in small groups, waiting to see whether the new sheriff would move decisively or falter.

Fenton’s authority was challenged almost immediately. In mid-July, he traveled south to Thermopolis to arrest several prominent cattlemen suspected in the killing of sheep owner Ben Minnick. Contemporary newspaper accounts describe the arrests as successful, but the victory was short-lived.

After securing the prisoners, Fenton and his deputy, A. L. Stone were effectively imprisoned themselves when a mob of armed men surrounded the hotel where the sheriff and his entourage had taken refuge. Friends of the cattlemen openly declared that Fenton would never leave the building alive with his prisoners.

From inside the hotel, the new sheriff wired the governor, urgently requesting immediate militia assistance. He also telephoned Cody, Basin and other nearby towns, calling for help. Reports noted that bands of heavily armed men were riding toward Thermopolis from multiple directions. One newspaper bluntly summarized the crisis: “Lawlessness reigned supreme” in the Big Horn Basin.

Fenton stated that he believed he could hold out only until reinforcements arrived. It was a calculated risk in a county where the authority of the law had already begun to erode. Even the towns of Cowley and Lovell, where most residents were farmers rather than aligned with either sheep or cattle ranchers, formed militias of their own to protect the sheriff.

From bad to worse

With the sheriff trapped in Thermopolis, the nightmare everyone feared unfolded at Basin.

Early on a Sunday morning, roughly 30 armed men entered Basin under cover of darkness, after quietly forcing the ferryman to take them across the Big Horn River. They surrounded the jail. Sheriff’s Deputy Christopher L. Price and Basin Town Marshal George Mead attempted to reason with the mob, but their efforts were futile. When the attack came, Deputy Price resisted, and was answered with a bullet through the heart. He died instantly, the first officer to fall in the line of duty in Big Horn County.

The band of men smashed the jail doors with telephone poles but could not get into the cells. Walters was shot in his cell, crouched and pleading, hit multiple times by each assailant. Gorman was next. He hid beneath his bunk as bullets ripped through his body. When the mob finally dispersed, he was still alive, but by dawn he’d died, his body riddled by what the mob believed was righteous justice.

Fenton’s lonely post

By Sunday morning, hundreds of state militiamen from the south, along with citizens from across the county, arrived in Thermopolis to safely escort a new group of prisoners to the now-empty jail and the shaken city of Basin.

Sheriff Fenton now stood at the center of a county that had openly rejected the rule of law. One deputy lay dead and awaiting burial. One set of prisoners was dead, but another now filled their place. Even with a force of the governor’s militia present, the cattlemen’s throng remained scattered across the hills, convinced they had done what the law would not.

Newspapers across the region reported that Fenton appealed for a permanent militia presence and warned that he could not guarantee the safety of his prisoners without it. Local cattlemen made it clear that further violence would follow if their leaders or the perpetrators of the jail assault were taken into custody. 

Big Horn County had entered a new and dangerous phase, and Sheriff Fenton, only months into office, was left to enforce the law in a place that had just proven it might not be enforceable at all. Would a grand jury, a judge, and the county prosecutor be willing to ignore threats and bribes and seat a jury capable of delivering an unbiased trial?

Relevant historic facts

Despite the dismissal of charges against her, Maggie Gorman remained deeply unpopular in the community and left Wyoming once she was no longer needed to testify. She later used her middle name, Stella, and the surname Wagner. She died in 1960 at the age of 83.

Her daughter, Rose Gorman, was only six months old when her father was killed. She left Wyoming with her mother and spent much of her life in Washington state. Rose later married twice, had three children, and died near Amarillo, Texas, in 1986 at the age of 87.

Deputy Christopher Pierce, who was shot and killed during the lynching, is buried in the  Thermopolis Cemetery next to his mother. He was 26-years-old.

In the years that followed, Buffalo Bill Cody lobbied the Wyoming Legislature to create  Park County, separate from the violence plaguing the eastern side of the county, an effort that succeeded in 1909. Around the same time, LDS farmers unsuccessfully petitioned the state to create a separate “Mormon County” stretching from Otto through Cowley and Lovell.