From the "Annals of Wyoming" There was not a hesitant, compromising bone in Asa Shinn Mercer. It was because of his utter fearlessness in printing what he thought to be right that he lost his thriving Cheyenne Weekly, the Northwestern Livestock Journal, and the home he had made in the capital city from which he and his family were virtually hounded. The story behind this expulsion is this: Mercer for some time had been concerned with the Johnson county range wars between the cattle barons and the grangers. The wars began in the eighteen-eighties. In October, 1892, Mercer printed in full a confession by George Dunning. The account gave in detail the means by which the Wyoming Stock Growers Association had hired gunmen, of whom Dunning was one, to kill off the settlers; it described in full the cattlemen's attack on and murder of a number of Johnson county ranchers. In publishing the con- fession, Mercer showed great bravery, since his newspaper was written for and supported by the very people whom he was now exposing — the rich and powerful cattle lords. Mercer must have foreseen that the cattlemen would react, but he could not have anticipated the full extent of what these reactions would bring about: his arrest on a charge of criminal libel, his imprisonment. |
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