Rogers and Hammerstein have their cowboys and farmers sing insults to each other in Oklahoma in a song with this refrain:

The farmer and the cowman should be friends,
Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends.
One man likes to push a plow,
The other likes to chase a cow,
But that’s no reason why they cain’t be friends.

But the cow-man and the plow-man very often were anything but friends. Farmers put up fences to protect their fields and mark their ownership; cattlemen cut fences and drove their herds across fields that separated them from their water sources. Tempers were raised, and so were rifles. Range wars between those with different visions of how to use the vast lands of the West were a regular feature in American history well into the 20th century … and I suppose they may not be entirely a thing of the past today, if we consider disputes over cattle grazing on public lands to be their heirs.

San Juan County lies in the southeast corner of Utah, touching the Four Corners where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona come together. The area had been of interest to Mormon settlers as early as 1855 when the short-lived Elk Mountain Mission was established there. Settlers from the Hole-in-the-Rock Expedition built homes there. Later in the century, Mormon colonies had been established at Bluff and Moab, Utah; Mancos, Colorado; and Fruitland, New Mexico.

In 1886, Francis Hammond, stake president for San Juan County (after his previous missions in Hawaii, I wonder how he felt about the desert?) dispatched exploring parties to locate sites for new colonies in the area. These men explored both forks of the Montezuma Canyon with its creeks, and located likely farmland at the present site of Monticello, Utah. It didn’t bother the Mormon farmers one bit that a cattle company run by Edmund and Harold Carlisle, with headquarters a few miles north of Monticello, ran their cattle through the general area to the water of Montezuma Creek. ((The presence of Utes in the area did not, apparently, cause them much concern; the Mormon colony was formed just prior to the organization of a reservation in the region, with the Mormon settlements grandfathered into an agreement that left them in possession of the land at Monticello. )) The Mormon farmers immediately staked out a townsite, dug some irrigation ditches, and planted wheat, oats, and potatoes. They returned in the following years and fenced in hundreds of acres of fields and began to build a rough town.

It wasn’t easy. The cattlemen did not easily surrender their domination of the region. The cattle ranchers could not establish a legal claim to the waters of Montezuma Creek, which the farmers did claim. There were disputes, raised voices, occasional warning shots, legal battles, and social conflict.

Early in 1895, President Hammond outlined the problems, as he saw them, for Church leaders in Salt Lake City.

Our people at Monticello are threatened with a worse trouble than the southern Ute Indian invasion from Colorado. It is from the rough and tuff element of the low down Cow-boy. … The Mormon settlers [are] more afraid of the cow-boys than they were of the Indians, which is true. During the holidays they came into a social party, and by their misconduct and cursing and damning the Mormons, swearing they would clean out the town when the proper time came, this so frightened the sisters they all took flight and ran home.

This has occurred a number of times before. One of our Sisters was shot down and instantly killed at a party at this same place some years ago – two men have been killed also at parties there. Our County Sherriff is unable to arrest them for they always come well backed up by their fellows, and heavily armed. They, this bad class, outnumber our brethren, and the Bishop informs me that he is in fear of his own life and that of the saints – this class I speak of are nearly, if not all, outlaws, and have made a rende[z]vous there and are connected with all the thieves and renegades of this inter-mountain country. Their vocation is stealing and robbing.

I’m not sure how to evaluate this report. I can easily believe the description of the cowboys’ behavior at the recent Christmas party, and that women would have left for the safety of home. I can also easily believe that President Hammond looked upon the cattlemen as outlaws – although whether they were “thieves and renegades” could be a matter of perspective rather than fact, and they were working cattlemen, not professional thieves. But a Mormon woman shot down by a cowboy at a party? I don’t know about that – I have been unable to verify the incident (which does not mean it did not happen); but that no name is given for the Mormon woman doesn’t feel quite right to me. When a Mormon was killed, whether by Indians in Utah or by ruffians in the mission field, the normal pattern is for us to have invoked the victim’s name over and over and over when reminding each of the perils of living in this world. The unnamed Mormon sister and the vagueness of the reported incident doesn’t feel quite right to me here.

Whatever is the truth about that reported murder, it forms part of the background to President Hammond’s proposed solution:

If about 6 or 8 of this class were either killed outright or so frightened they would leave the country we would have peace – If you have any counsel for us in this matter we would be very pleased to hear it and carry it out.

Boom. There it is. An appeal to violence, going as far as what amounts to mass murder, and one churchman is seeking “counsel” from another on his proposal. I do not have any response to President Hammond’s letter – Brigham Young’s outgoing correspondence is publicly available, but the outgoing correspondence of later Church leaders is much less accessible to researchers. Nor do I know how this situation was eventually resolved – I have not found evidence of any bloody or escalating conflict between cow-man and plow-man here, though. I dream of a stirring response from Wilford Woodruff to President Hammond, condemning even the proposal much less its execution. I do not know, though, what he did counsel.

I understand the frustration, at least theoretically. As President Hammond closes his letter, “We are really at a loss to know what to do.” We’re at a loss to know what to do about terrorism, both international and domestic. We’re at a loss to know what to do about systemic injustices in schools, employment, law enforcement, and other areas of life. We have leaders, and potential leaders, calling for further militarizing our police forces, bombing unidentified peoples abroad, violating the civil rights of citizens at home.

But that can’t be the answer. We are a war-like people, Spencer W. Kimball warned us. We are entering a phase in our study of the Book of Mormon where many, many Latter-day Saints will be parsing the scriptures to justify violence, rather than heeding the Book’s lessons that violence and the sins that accompany it destroyed a civilization.

We have to find a better way.