Chapter 1

Things in Tucson valley were starting to get a mite cautious with the hired guns all flocking in for the Cattle Association advertised rewards for rooting out the pesky settlers that had farming on their foolish brains. The deluded dreamers also had a fair amount of barbed wire to fence in perfectly fine grazing land needed for their vast herds of Association stock beef destined for the Eastern markets.

They had already gone through three sheriffs in the county the past year and it was looking like nobody was anxious to fill the boots of the last officer of the law just recently moved up to boot hill like the previous pair of lawmen. All three of them were fair to middling gun-hands but they didn't have that sense of instinctive viciousness needed to survive in a hostile environment.

The ranchers were greatly outnumbered by the settlers but they had violence on their side and they were willing to go to any extreme to get rid of the hordes of migrant farmers looking for a place to put down roots. A good example of that slice of invading humanity was the Logan family. The Logan's were recent arrivals to the American West but they knew their "rights" and that the law was on their side. The ranchers had been using the government land for decades without proper permission and now the newly arrived settlers were claiming their forty acres as provided under the law.

Grandpa Logan was the oldest member of the family at the ripe old age of fifty five. He had been in some of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War and survived to tell the story. He had landed in New York City and found that his services were needed to protect the Union against the Southern slaveholders with their disloyal secession from the United States of America. He had lost part of his left ear, took a bayonet slice into the meaty part of his shoulder and was minus two toes from frostbite on a cold night in January. He was one of the lucky ones who managed to come through the other end pretty much intact and able to marry the widow of a Union Captain that didn't make it through the first week of the war. Her name was Josie and he loved to whisper it in her ear when he was riding her from behind in their big wooden bed snugly tucked into the Conestoga wagon with the white canvas top. She had two children from her marriage and they were both boys with exceptional high spirits and very little brains. They were Matt and Mark. Grandpa Logan was known as Henry but he didn't like the name and preferred to be called "Pa".

Both Matt and Mark had married Irish girls with names that nobody really remembered and they were just Mary and Molly to the rest of the family and each of them had four young ones like it was some sort of an assembly line. Their little wagon train of three wagons made it west to the Indian Territory in less than nine months which was better than average by most standards considering the time of year that they had started.

Grandpa Logan had kept his military issue rifle and sidearm and now he had them close to hand no matter how safe everyone thought they were in the wild and violent land. There were fourteen of them altogether not counting the Wilsons who had tagged along with them because Sergeant Gerry Wilson was as close to Grandpa Logan as a man could get to another man without being given a jaundiced eye. The Wilson boys, Bobby and Billy were a handful for their mother Charity but their father let them get away with anything because he was tired of making young men follow all the rules and regulations set by people that didn't know their ass from their elbow. Sergeant Wilson was missing one leg from the knee down but it didn't seem to slow him down much in tending to the small farm and he had the help of two strapping boys to take up the slack.

Between the thieving Indians desperate for meat now that the Buffalo had disappeared from the plains and the small ranch and farm operations that helped themselves to the stray steer here and there, the Association was beginning to feel the pinch of lack of ready cash from sale of stock to the meat markets back East.

Grandpa Logan was well-versed in the laws of Economics and he predicted the bankruptcy of the Cattleman's Association before the New Year.

He was one hundred percent accurate.

The hired guns were angry because their source of income was no longer a factor. Many of them just pulled up stakes and headed out to the gold fields of California and the sights of the vast Ocean to the West.

The railroads were buying up land so fast that the farms were being squeezed before they even had a chance to get started properly. Everything started to change when the small ranchers banded together and decided to import sheep to take the place of the cattle that were hard to herd and tend with expensive cowhands. Instead they hired the much cheaper Mexicans and the trained dogs that did all the work without pay. If the Association was still there in the valley, there certainly would have been blood on the range and blood in the streets of the small towns that dotted the area along the major routes to the mountains in the distance. The absence of the large Cattleman's group created a vacuum that even the settlers couldn't fill.

At first, the introduction of the little white creatures was treated like some sort of circus newly arrived in town but some of the older hands that had seen this before in other areas knew that it was a powder keg ready to explode at any moment.

Some of the Association hired guns signed on with the new sheepherding interests because the investors knew they would be needed when the open range would be part of a struggle for dominance and control in the search for profit.