The “Sweetwater Conspiracy” has had two planned publishing dates over the last five years, but both have been postponed for either marketing reasons or for storyline modifications and other iterative editing. I hope to finally publish this book by this time next year at the earliest or the year after at the latest. It is a story made for release in early July, as the critical events in this historical novel took place in that month in 1889. The following is a draft of the preface to the story. ~llaw (07/08/2018)

The Sweetwater Conspiracy: 

The Legend of Cattle Kate

(An American Tragedy)

(This is taken from the Preface to my historical novel about an actual incident that occurred in the Wyoming Territory just a year before the state was admitted to the United States of America.)

“In the summer of 1889, during the settling-up of the American west a sensational news story swept off Wyoming’s high plains, making international headlines and shaking the resolve of the westward pioneering spirit.  The story told of the macabre garroting murder by hanging of Ella Watson, a young, single, cowgirl homesteader (along with her friend, Jim Averell) by an ad-hoc vigilante group of influential Wyoming cattle barons.  According to the press, the precocious settler was strung up for stocking her new homestead with cattle by trading sex for cows.  Nothing could have been further from the truth, but the myth justified the means. They hanged Ella Watson and her boyfriend, but was someone else guilty? Or was it all a conspiracy?

This grisly incident, involving wealthy cattlemen and indigent homesteaders in Wyoming’s Sweetwater Valley, became a vital spark in the incendiary run-up to the infamous Johnson County War, leading to martial law as well as subsequent modifications to the various federal land grant acts that were profoundly influenced by that conflict.

The incident’s key role in the volatile triad of the federal government (trying desperately to equitably settle the west), the territorial government of Wyoming (in the middle of its transition to statehood), and the Wyoming Stock Growers Association (then, the most powerful jurisdictional and lobbying organization in America) must no longer be misunderstood nor ignored.  The criminal, judicial, political, and historical significance of this tragic event has been suppressed, subverted, ignored, and overlooked for well over one hundred years, and most of what little has been written about it has been inaccurate if not intentionally misleading. Numerous movies, such as Heaven’s Gate, The Redhead from Wyoming, and Shane have borrowed from this tragedy. But the dark underbelly of the story seems always to be avoided. Even today the Sweetwater murders are not discussed in Wyoming’s polite social and political circles, especially in the cattle ranching community.

What follows is the dark truth behind that sensational story of so long ago – a story that headlined the front pages of newspapers from Cheyenne to Chicago to New York and on across the Atlantic to London, Paris, and Berlin, but the press, influenced by the powerful leaders of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, got it all wrong.” ~llaw