Hell on the Range: A Story of Honor, Conscience, and the American West

In this lively account of Arizona's Rim Country War of the 1880s, historian Daniel Justin Herman explores a web of conflict involving Mormons, Texas cow-boys, New Mexican sheepherders, Jewish merchants, and mixed-blood ranchers. From political intrigues, ambushes, and lynchings, argues Herman, issued a peculiarly Western story of "good men fighting villains." By recounting the story of the war from its social origins to its enshrinement in myth, Herman casts new light on Western violence, Western identity, and American cultural history.

At the heart of Arizona's range war, argues Herman, was the conflict between a cowboy code of honor---an outgrowth of Southern culture---and a Mormon code of conscience born of Puritanism, the Enlightenment, and religious revival. Herman investigates the sources of these attitudes, then tracks their development in subsequent years. He considers both the attempt by Arizona's first elected governor to create a state informed by conscience and the attempt by best-selling novelist Zane Grey to make Arizona's range war into a lesson in honor. In the telling of this little-known chapter in Western history, Herman investigates the American predisposition to both violence and peace.

Daniel Justin Herman is associate professor, Central Washington University. He is author of the award-winning Hunting and the American Imagination.