(Nate Champion. Drawing copyright Richard Flore)

I am writing at bedtime. I am buoyed by 44 push-ups conducted by my son, which completed the trifecta of trials that will position himself to join the United States Navy.
 
It is pretty emotional, coming on a day that was filled with emotions.I picked up Admiral Mac early, to get to the retirement of a colleague over in Maryland, and then hurtled back to Virginia to attend the Spring Meeting of the association.
 
I had to be up early to do it, since those of you that read these things have been suffering through land and public policy issues forged through the process of taking of it from people who were reluctant to give it up.
 
That story gets gets better and worse. The Johnson County War of 1892 is sort of a tipping point in it.
 
I did not mean to wander into the war. The facts, though, are as plain as those of the Whiskey Rebellion against the brand new government in Washington, DC, back in the eighteenth century.
 
Nate Champion was a small rancher who was active in the efforts of small ranchers to organize a competing roundup to that conducted by the large land-owners. The theory was if they could do it earlier, they might achieve a certain advantage.
 
That advantage was viewed as theft by some, so you can see that the harvest of the Common was of some concern to others with larger interests. Plus, there were some legitimately out-of-the-box thinkers up in the Hole in the Wall, and Nate was much more convenient than they were.
 
I got a note that was sort of surreal about Nate; it was intimate and personal all these years after. A linear friend had restored the original old cabin on the Wold ranch a couple of years ago, and then there was a forest fire, and it burned down completely.  My pal thinks that Johnson County is STILL a hard place to get to know people, where they may be the ultimate right wing conservatives.
 
Anyway, the way the war started was this month, in 1892. Nate, his partner Ray and two others were at the KC ranch, not far from Hole in the Wall. Two guests- hunters or something- were lodging with them, part of the doctrine of hospitality that is part of life on the edge of civilization.
 
The cabin was surrounded in the night with the agents of the large cattle concerns, who really should have took up their concerns with the gang in the Hole in the Wall. The two guess were captured as they left the cabin early to collect water at the nearby Powder River.
 
Nate’s partner (funny that term comes with such baggage these days) Ray, was shot while standing inside the doorway of the cabin, just like Ruby Ridge,  and he died a few hours later. It was all documented in the poignant diary Nate kept, event-by-event, right through the siege.
 
“Boys,” he wrote, “I feel pretty lonesome just now. I wish there was someone here with me so we could watch all sides at once.”
 
By the time the long day was done, the final journal entry read: “Well, they have just got through shelling the house like hail. I heard them splitting wood. I guess they are going to fire the house tonight. I think I will make a break when night comes, if alive. Shooting again. It’s not night yet. The house is all fired. Goodbye, boys, if I never see you again.”
 
The house was on fire, not for the last time, and Nate signed his diary, slipped it in his pocket  and put ran from the back door with a pistol in one hand and a knife in the other.
 
He was executed immediately upon his emergence he was shot by four men and the invaders later pinned a note on Champion’s bullet-riddled chest that read “Cattle Thieves Beware.”
 
You can understand that would get your attention.
 
A couple riders-by found the macabre notification, as did local rancher Jack Flagg.
 
He rode to the county seat of Johnson County at Buffalo, where the sheriff raised a posse of 200 men. The posse rode out to seek battle.
 
I would tell you more about that, but I have to be in Chicago by eight-thirty, and I am not confident I will be able to get much further on ad-hoc land policy for a day or two.
 
Bear with me. If you find no Socotras tomorrow. I am the one in the Ryder truck, hurtling across America.
 
We will be back as soon as we can. But think of Nate Champion, and poor Ray dying on the plank floor, and be confident that they will be avenged. Or at least some folks are going to try to. The story is interesting, Talk to you Monday.
 

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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