In 1894, when A. S. Mercer published this angry eyewitness account of the cattlemen s invasion of Wyoming, the book was so thoroughly and ruthlessly suppressed that few copies of that edition remain today.

Although historians have since questioned some of Mercer s conclusions about the Johnson County range war, they have never controverted the facts of the cattlemen-homesteader struggle as he grimly reported them. With the intention of "executing" alleged rustlers and terrorizing the homesteaders, a band of fifty-two cattlemen and hired gunmen invaded Johnson Country, Wyoming, in April...