THE PROFESSIONALS part one - Hired Guns

**DocT** · Site Admin Joined: 01 Nov 2007 Posts: 15

Arizona territory 1875, cattle companies (often backed by foreign investment) are expanding their herds of cattle and horses. As well as natural hazards such as the weather, the dry barren landscape and the ever present threat of Apache raiding parties, this expansion brings with it another hazard…..rustlers.
To combat this threat, those ranchers and cattle companies that could afford it hired protection men, professional gunmen known for their fearlessness, skill with guns, and willingness to use them.
The protection man, as one early rangeland chronicler put it, "carried his only authority in his holsters," but he was paid "to patrol the ranges, find as many rustlers as he could, and kill them where he found them." How he accomplished his mission was rarely questioned in the early days, and the protection man was responsible for many a lonely unmarked rustler's grave on the prairie.
At roundup time when cowboys from the various ranches hunted down the cattle, wild as deer, and drove them to a central location for sorting and branding, the protection man represented his employer and protected his interest. Later, when the ranchers formed associations, they shared range-riders' expenses and carried them on their books as "cattle detectives" or "association men." Small ranchers and settlers, who were frequently harassed as suspected cow thieves by the association men, often referred to them by other, less polite names; they called them "scalpers" or "hired killers."
Tom Wade, Ben Johnson & Morgan Caid were three such professionals, hired to wipe out a small band of rustlers operating out of an area known as the caverns, a series of rocky outcrops and cave's with only a single, easily defended trail leading in and out.

TO BE CONTINUED......

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