‘THIS WHOLESALE SYSTEM OF ROBBERY’
In scenes familiar to Western filmgoers painted raiders on horseback swoop down from the hills in a cloud of dust to steal scores of horses and cattle from pioneers minding their own business. While American Indians did engage in such stock raiding, Hollywood has exaggerated its prevalence, making it part of the American frontier myth. On the central Plains in the 1860s such raiders were more likely white men, their victims often Indians.
Examples abound from the earlier Indian removal era, when all manner of miscreants shadowed the departing bands. Take for example what happened to a party of more than 600 Wyandots who sought to relocate from Ohio to Kansas in July 1843. Soon after setting out in their 100-wagon train to meet waiting steamboats in Cincinnati, they were accosted by petty thieves, charlatans and whiskey peddlers and compelled to circle up at night for protection. Regardless, at least one thief struck in the dark and made off with a Wyandot horse—the kind of event depicted in hundreds of films and novels but with pioneers in the wagons and hostile Indians doing the raiding. That same year some 1,000 emigrants ventured west on the Oregon Trail with no reported attacks by Indians.
Rustling of Indian stock east of the Mississippi River, however, paled in comparison to the rampant livestock theft recorded on the Plains in the 1860s. As cross-border raiding between Kansas and Missouri border ruffians ramped up during the Civil War, stock theft reached epidemic proportions. Citizens were especially outraged when whites stole from whites. In April 1863 , on the northern border in White Cloud, complained that two Kansas horse thieves recently caught and jailed in neighboring Nebraska had been released on a writ of habeas corpus. Why bother to arrest a thief, the paper asked, when vigilance committees stood ready with “a rope and the nearest tree”? “ can’t reach him then,” the editor dryly concluded. The
