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by A. S. Mercer (Author)
The true story of the Johnson County War written by the crusading local journalist who had once been on the side of the cattle barons.Asa Shinn Mercer is best known today as one of the Mercer brothers who brought pioneer brides from the east coast to the frontier town of Seattle in the 1860s. That story was fictionalized in the 1960s TV hit, "Here Come the Brides."Thirty years later, Mercer moved his family to Cheyenne, Wyoming to run the public relations newspaper for the Wyoming Stock Grower's Association. He soon found that the cattle barons were engaged in theft, extortion, and even murder to drive out small ranchers from Johnson County and claim exclusive rights to grazing and water.Turning his journalistic sights on the cattlemen, Mercer was threatened, beaten, his office taken over, and his newspaper suspended for a time. But he persevered, writing this account of the dangerous men he knew and had once worked for.The first edition of this book, "The Banditti of the Plains," was suppressed and today is extremely rare, fetching prices in the thousands of dollars. In 1923, John Mercer Boots republished the book and this edition expands on that one.Updated with an extensive new introduction and annotations about the principal actors in the drama, which did not appear in Mercer's or Boots' editions, this important work is now available for a 21st century audience.
