In the summer of 1895, a dispute over elk in Jackson Hole became national news. Boone tells what the papers printed, what the soldiers found when they arrived, and how long the law took to catch up with any of it.
You'd have read about it in the summer of eighteen ninety-five. Every paper in the country had it. The settlers of Jackson Hole had been butchered. Not one of them had. And the people the papers blamed never fired a shot. By one count, about sixty white settlers lived here then, and elk meant money, because men made a business of guiding rich hunters. When the herds thinned, the settlers blamed the Bannock, who came from Fort Hall to hunt, as they always had and as their treaty allowed. A former agent at Fort Hall said white men were killing hundreds of animals for heads and horns, and that Bannock hunting got in the way of business. Constable William Manning testified to the plan himself. "We knew some one was going to be killed, perhaps some on both sides, and we decided the sooner it was done the better, so that we could get the matter before the courts." On July thirteenth a Bannock party woke to more than two dozen armed men around their camp. Nine men, thirteen women, five children. "Surrendered gracefully," wrote Stephen Leek, one of the men who took them. They carried a pass from their agent. The deputies took it, and their ration checks with it. Then a messenger rode a hundred and twenty miles to the telegraph. "Nine Indians arrested, one killed, others escaped." One killed. Two words, all the wire ever gave him. He had a name and he had people, and the name is theirs to say, not mine. On the twenty-seventh of July a Cheyenne paper ran it. "Settlers Massacred. At Least Sixteen Families Butchered in Jackson's Hole." Two homes were robbed that summer, and the thieves proved to be six white men from Lander, come to fight Indians. Buffalo soldiers of the Ninth Cavalry marched over Teton Pass and found no dead settlers, no threat, and no wasteful slaughter of elk. Wyoming's own United States Attorney called it a prearranged plan, called that death murder, and said no official in that valley would hold a man of the posse for trial. None was held. A Bannock hunter named John Race Horse became the test case. In eighteen ninety-six the Supreme Court ruled against him, seven to one. That treaty right, the Court said, was essentially perishable. It took a hundred and twenty-three years, until two thousand nineteen, for the Court to take that back. The Bannock people are still at Fort Hall. I keep coming back to that pass. One sheet of paper said these folks had every right to be here. It rode off in a deputy's pocket, and the lie went out over the wire.
Photo: Strohmeyer & Wyman, 1898, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-stereo-1s49226 (cropped from the left half of the stereograph) · Public domain