School stuff

You know, when we think of problems with corporations... I think modernity and would have never...until now, thought about the 19th century and the West as a place where corporate corruption and manipulation was rampant, problematic, and the reason for a lot of violence.

I suppose this is what all this learning does lol...

Last week, I had to read a book called Wyoming Range War which in essence discussed the fight for grass grazing rights between small claim independent farmers and big cattle corporations.  By the time I was finished with the book, the corruption was so high that the then acting governor of Wyoming attempted to convince president Harrison to order martial law on Johnson County, Wyoming to stop an "insurrection" when in reality a plan that he was privy to (actually helped plan) where men who worked for Big Cattle went to Texas, hired some guns, came back with lots of ammunition, weapons, and even two reporters and a surgeon... tried to sneak into Johnson County to execute 70 people on a hit list (they claimed the people they were after were cattle thieves and corrupt politicians...they succeeded in killing 2 people before everything fell apart for the vigilantes) which included the local newspaper editor (who had written editorials against Big Cattle) and all the county commissioners...  
The martial law did not happen, the men were caught before they could enter the town of Buffalo, Wyoming and kill the people on their hit list and only two people were killed...
BUT this involved two senators, the governor, and various other state and local officials who brazenly took money from big cattle corporations to demonize a town full of small independent farmers who refused to leave their legally purchased land....  That was ONE event in 1892.

Also though, once the railroads began to stretch across the west and building towns to accommodate all the people coming West became important, the Railroad corporations set up dummy companies to create towns near their railroads and would intentionally not let lines go through smaller and independently incorporated towns, causing many of these smaller towns to fail...  William Cody attempted to set up more than one town during his life, because of some of the things he experienced as a child... and he came up against the corporations learning if you didn't have the money like they did, you had no shot at establishing towns like his father had only a few decades earlier... 

crazy stuff.