On March 23, 1883, cowboys in the Texas Panhandle were rounding up and preparing “a herd of beef just about ready to start to market.” At midday, their foreman approached the ranch’s general manager and demanded he pay the cowboys as they worked rather than as a lump sum at the end of the year.

“If the request was not granted,” the manager recalled,“they would quit at once.” Perhaps feeling he lacked the authority to meet their demands, the manager rebuffed the cowboys — only to watch as the hired hands “turned their horses, gave a cowboy yell, waved their Stetsons in the air and made a bee-line for the headquarters.”

That evening the strikers discharged their revolvers and, according to the manager, let loose a flurry of threats. Intimidation continued the next morning when the cowboys returned to retrieve their personal property and stuck around for “a bit of a pow-wow.”