Cattle Kate: The Controversial Life and Legend of the Wyoming Territory's Most Famous Woman Outlaw

In the span of scarcely more than a half century, the West developed from a handful of scattered fur trapping enterprises, predominantly inhabited by males, to a region full of burgeoning rustic communities. Before the government’s official “closure” of the frontier as a lawless expanse, Western societies were essentially living apart from traditional American rule of law. What judicial structures were at work across the West were erratic, often willing to exercise extremes without evidential justification and manipulated by major corporate interests of the day, most notably cattle. 

As this suggests, despite the fact westward expansion is, more often than not, characterized as a conflict with nature and indigenous cultures, inherent danger existed as frontiersmen, family homesteaders, entrepreneurs, and cattle giants fought for a share in the new frontier life.

At times, those in search of wealth, whether from a gold rush, an iconic technology, or from the acquisition of land and livestock, went beyond the decimation of the indigenous peoples. That portion of the frontier offered to the more modestly endowed settlers by federal legislation emerged as an economic irritant to bigger companies and the elite. In some economic quarters, they exerted an extreme effort to sabotage the prevailing structure and remove lower classes from the government’s promise.

Where older America depended on the slave culture to sustain its rural existence, cattlemen serving Atlantic appetites for meat-forged empires of unthinkable dimensions in the West. With a weak system of law enforcement and unlimited availability of federal acreage open for public use, cattle barons granted themselves land rights and legal authority without limit.