A close acquaintance at the time was the sheriff of Gunnison County, ‘Doc’ Shores, who developed a remarkably accurate understanding of Horn. He noted that Horn was an interesting conversationalist but ‘not the type of man one liked to argue with.’ In a grueling pursuit of train robbers from a site near Canon City, across to the west slope of Colorado, back through New Mexico and Texas and ending in Oklahoma, Shores perceived that Horn became selfish and ruthless and that he placed little value on human life. When Shores and Horn caught up with the robbers, one of them threatened Horn. Horn’s reply was that he’d had enough of cheap threats and had already decided to leave the robber where he’d found him — dead. A rancher’s wife interceded and saved the man’s life.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Wild West magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

After his stint with the Pinkertons, Horn was hired by the Swan Land and Cattle Company in Wyoming in 1892. While he was employed purportedly at first as a horse breaker, he was, in fact, a’stock detective,’ ideal work for a lone wolf like him at a time when the cattle barons were fighting — sometimes with hired guns — for their very existence.

Wyoming had developed rapidly after the Union Pacific laid its tracks across the southern part of the territory in 1867 and 1868. Cattle companies, who brought their herds there in the late 1870s, were plagued by a series of events: passage of confusing laws pertaining to cattle range rights, overgrazing and drought, followed by blizzards. The end of the heyday of the overextended barons was soon at hand. Cowboys, thrown out of work, knew few things- cattle and horses, and the harsh fact that they were broke and hungry. A rustling epidemic and the influx of homesteaders who settled in the prime lowlands combined to force the big outfits to the brink of financial disaster, and indeed, many of them went under.

A climate of lawlessness and tolerance by lenient judges and juries sympathetic to rustlers brought even more pressure to bear on the cattle barons. Representatives of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association wrote: ‘It is very difficult to get an indictment from a grand jury [even] with pretty definite evidence as to the guilt of the party charged with stealing cattle. Unfortunately, it is almost completely useless to bring matters to the court even after an indictment has been obtained and the evidence pretty well gathered. There seems to be a morbid sympathy with cattle thieves both on the bench and in the jury room.

‘If we had the means to enter into any investigation of the matter, we would be obliged to act through private detectives. We already have tried this system, and have been thrown out of court and laughed at for our pains. Circumstances have forced cattlemen to look to themselves for protection outside of any association.’

By 1890, Wyoming was entering a 20-year period that brought about the greatest degree of change in its history. Cheyenne was one of the first cities in the world to have incandescent lighting; by 1890 there was already a form of central heating, and the first automobile arrived in 1902.

And into this context stepped Tom Horn, who came to Wyoming at age 30. He has been aptly described as a man out of the Old West who was trying to live in the new. Fresh from his experience with the Pinkertons in Colorado, Horn seems to have felt that Wyoming offered a more favorable environment for a man of action. And perhaps he was right — but not for long.

What was this man like, this ‘horse breaker’ who had signed on to hunt down rustlers for the Swan Land and Cattle Company? Horn was big, over 200 pounds and 6 feet tall in a day when the average man weighed perhaps 160 and stood 5 feet 6 inches. Horn was tough and self-reliant to the extent that on a 10-day patrol that he undertook for his employer at the time of Willie Nickell’s murder, he carried only the clothes on his back. A little bacon and dried bread were his only provisions, and he stopped at ranches only three times.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to