Six prominent and politically powerful Wyoming cattlemen lynched and hanged Jim Averell and Ella Watson, the woman they called Cattle Kate. They had both been wrongly accused of cattle rustling. The lynching rocked the nation as the shocking story traveled quickly across the country. The men who killed Watson and Averell never went to trial. The grand jury was made of 16 people, seven of whom were cattlemen and could not find two key witnesses.
Averell was a postmaster, a notary public and a justice of the peace who had a Homestead. Watson filed her own homesteading entry with the government which meant that by the spring of 1888, she and Averell had claim to two 160-acre claims.
All this was during the time that open range ranching was beginning to come to an end and big ranches, owned by the land barons could no longer count on profiting off the free grass on government-owned land. More
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