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In Johnson County, Wyoming, the Range War was seriously heating up. The big cattle ranchers in the area were mad that homesteaders were moving into the region and fencing off parcels of land.

Or, the small ranchers sent their cattle out to graze on the same public land that the big ranchers had used to get rich. For years, the big ranchers had been able to graze their cattle for free on open land that belonged to the federal government.

Now, much of the land was being divided up or used by small ranchers and the big ranchers were fed up.

In the summer of 1889, the cattle barons had accused two small ranchers of rustling. A group of six men kidnapped and hanged those small ranchers, Ella Watson and Jim Averl.

Ella and Jim were almost certainly innocent and no one was arrested or charged with their murders.

The cattle barons tried to bring five court cases against people they accused of being rustlers, but Jerry's acquitted the suspects all five times.

In 1891, the situation escalated. The cattle barons didn't think they could get help from the law or the courts, so they formed a group that was called an assassination squad.

It was led by a former sheriff of Johnson County, Frank Cannon. First, the squad hanged a horse trader who was accused of being a thief.

Then, in November 1891, a squad of five men burst into a tiny cabin that was owned by a small rancher named Nate Champion.

Nate and another man were inside, but the assassins had terrible aim. They fired at both men but hit neither.

Nate returned fire and wounded two of the assassins, one of whom later died.

The assassins fled and wanted no more of Nate Champion, at least for a little while.

During the investigation that followed, one of the assassins was forced to identify the other assassins in front of two witnesses.

On December 1st, 1891, exactly one month after the attack on Nate Champion, both witnesses were assassinated.

They were two more small ranchers, Orley Jones and John Tisdale, a lone gunman ambushed them and shot and killed them.

At the time, the supposed head of the assassination squad, former Johnson County Sheriff Frank Cannon, was the chief suspect.

But later, many came to believe that the murders might have been the work of Tom Horn.

The timeline can work, but it will always be tough to know for sure. Tom was already working for the Pinkertons, and it was at around that time that the cattle barons sent representatives to the Pinkerton office in Denver, Colorado to ask for help with their range war.

Whether or not Tom was involved in the murders of the two ranchers, he was in Wyoming for the peak of the war when a small army of mercenaries invaded Johnson County.

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