In May 1903, Antone Kemnitz decided he’d had enough. The young cowboy caught a ride into town, sold his saddle and bought a one-way ticket east on the Rock Island Railroad. Although Kemnitz was leaving the Oak Ranch for good, he kept the Colt revolver given him by the Dewey Cattle Company. It would make a good souvenir of his adventures as a Dewey cowboy on the high Plains of northwest Kansas.

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In 1901 Kemnitz and some other cowhands from Manhattan, Kan., had hired on at the sprawling Oak Ranch on Beaver Creek in southwestern Rawlins County. Soon after their arrival, long-simmering differences had heated up between their cattleman boss and a family of tenacious sodbusters named Berry. It had become routine for the Berrys to fire rifle shots over the heads of Dewey cowboys while they were out herding cattle and fixing fences. That had been a routine young Kemnitz could not get used to no matter how hard he tried. Things had gotten so bad that Kemnitz just knew someone was going to be killed. That someone would not be him.

What happened next was probably even worse than Antone Kemnitz had imagined. Just a few weeks after Kemnitz lit out with his souvenir Colt, Daniel, Alpheaus and Burch Berry lay dead in Alpheaus Berry’s farmyard in neighboring Cheyenne County, and word spread that Roy Berry would likely die from a bullet wound to his face. It was the 20th century, but this big rancher–small farmer feud had turned as deadly as most any Western land squabble of the Wild West days.

Following the bloodbath, Chauncey Dewey and his cowboys holed up at the Oak Ranch, refusing to surrender until Sheriff Robert McCulloch of Cheyenne County could guarantee their safety from angry mobs of settlers said to be gathering at the Berry farm. Dewey claimed that the Berrys had fired first and he and his cowboys had returned fire in self-defense.

If Daniel Berry had known that in northwest Kansas he would butt heads with a cattle rancher, maybe he would have stayed in the East. But then again maybe not. Standing over 6 feet tall and weighing close to 200 pounds, Daniel Berry had never been one to run from a fight, and neither were his three boys, Alpheaus, Burch and Beech.

Daniel and his younger brother Edwin arrived with their families in Rawlins County, Kan., in 1885. During the years that followed, the Berrys weathered blizzards, droughts and crop failures. While many homesteaders gave up and left, the Berrys held on even after they encountered the opposition of the cowboys from the mighty Oak Ranch.

At about the same time Daniel and Edwin came to Kansas, another pair of brothers was investing in real estate in the northwest part of the state. Unlike the Berrys, A.B. and C.P. Dewey of Chicago had more money than they knew what to do with, and they put a fair amount of it into Kansas ranchland. In 1899 C.P. Dewey sent his 22-year-old son Chauncey to Rawlins County to learn ranching.

Owning a ranch out West was a fad among wealthy Easterners in the late 1800s, and a number of ‘dudes,’ future president Theodore Roosevelt among them, invested in ranchland. Frank Rockefeller, younger brother of multimillionaire John D. Rockefeller, owned a ranch adjacent to the Oak Ranch. But the ranching business was no fad to Chauncey Dewey. His dream of an empire covering endless miles of shortgrass prairie soon collided with Daniel Berry’s vision of a landscape dotted with small family farms. Chauncey accused the Berrys of cutting fences, rustling his cattle and vandalizing ranch buildings and wells. Daniel accused the Oak Ranch of allowing its cattle to devour his crops.

While Daniel took his complaints against the Oak Ranch to the governor and the secretary of the interior, his sons Burch and Beech and their cousin Roy, the son of Daniel’s brother Edwin, turned to firearms for protection. On June 24, 1903, the Mercury of Manhattan quoted J.B. Dyatt, who the newspaper called ‘one of the most influential men in and about Goodland.’ Dyatt said that the Berry boys were ‘dead shots….Burch…could take an egg, throw it far up into the air and shatter the shell before it hit the ground. He could do the same with a rifle.’

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