Respect for the law came slowly to the old West, and in the last decade of the last century a long stretch of cavalier piracy was finally conquered by the steadfastness and courage of pioneer homesteaders who, in a hundred separate terrains, and with a thousand different stratagems, finally won out against various kinds of vandalism and secured the protection of the law for the great onrushing tide of their fellow colonizers. Nowhere was the struggle more joined than in Arizona, Nebraska and Wyoming where, as late as the 1870’s, hired militias were sent on terrorizing campaigns to keep the ranges free and clear for the great private herds already feeding there. In this struggle, there was a collision of two ethos’- on the one hand, a veteran resentment and resistance to change which enlisted the service of mercenaries’ and, on the other hand, the loyalty and stubborn courage of individual sheep farmers, defending their own lands, rooted there by a sacrificial labor of blood. Here depicted is one man’s triumph over such a collusion of savage forces. But what is meant to be shown is not only the heroic quality of this single struggle, but of that larger struggle by which freedoms were gained, a lawless anarchy wiped out, and the growing democratic stature of the Republic consolidated. With the passage of years however, a periodic tug-of-war has erupted between the vast majority of our country’s citizens who depend upon the safeguards guaranteed them by the Constitution to protect them from arbitrary-i.e. illegal—power or privilege (as represented by an increasingly unappeasable & overweening corporate, financial, and military elite)—-threatening, these days, to upset, -if not render irrelevant, –for all practical purposes, - the very freedoms and opportunities promised all of us by the Founding Fathers, in defense of which they famously pledged, - in Jefferson’s timeless words - their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor
