Matthew S. Luckett - Never Caught Twice

This is an intriguing and deeply significant contribution to the ongoing effort to demythologize the Wild West and adds an important new layer to the search for an identifiable legal culture in Nebraska and Great Plains history.

Mark Scherer, coauthor of Echo of Its Time: The History of the Federal District Court of Nebraska, 18671933

Despite what we think we know about horse theft, this is the first effort to pull it all together into a single study. It is good stuff!

Mark R. Ellis, author of Law and Order in Buffalo Bills Country: Legal Culture and Community on the Great Plains, 18671910

Never Caught Twice shows how creating and protecting private propertylivestock on the hoofrather than the advent of law and order defined Americas frontier settlement. Matthew Luckett is an excellent writer, deep thinker, and brave scholar.

Will Bagley, author of So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California

Matthew S. Luckett

University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln

2020 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska

Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover image: Charles Ferdinand Wimar (American, 18281862), Indians Stealing Horses, 1854, oil on canvas, Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha NE , Museum Membership Fund Purchase, 1951.80.

Parts of this book were originally published as part of my PhD dissertation, Honor among Thieves: Horse Stealing, State Building, and Culture in Lincoln County, Nebraska, 1850-1890, University of California, Los Angeles, 2014. Small sections were originally published as Cattle associations in Encyclopedia of Politics of the American West ( SAGE Publications, Inc., 2013).

All rights reserved.

Publication of this volume was assisted by the Virginia Faulkner Fund, established in memory of Virginia Faulkner, editor in chief of the University of Nebraska Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Luckett, Matthew S., author.

Title: Never caught twice: horse stealing in Western Nebraska, 18501890 / Matthew S. Luckett.

Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020007876

ISBN 9781496205148 (hardback)

ISBN 9781496223234 (epub)

ISBN 9781496223241 (mobi)

ISBN 9781496223258 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH : Horse stealingNebraskaHistory19th century. | Indians of North AmericaGreat PlainsHistory19th century. | Frontier and pioneer lifeNebraskaHistory19th century.

Classification: LCC HV 6661. N 2 L 83 2020 | DDC 364.16/28636109782909034dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007876

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

For JoAnna,

Who always says more nice things

It is never a good idea to begin writing a history book without a central question in mind. Historical narratives, and scholarly monographs in particular, should answer some kind of salient query, even if it has never before been asked. Not only will the book then presumably (one hopes) answer that question, but the process of responding to it will also guide the author and their manuscript through the darkest parts of their journey. A single, coherent question can lend clarity when all the people and places and events start to blur and feel muddled. It is its own raison dtre and casus belli. The question is the signal in the noise.

This book does not have one. When my dissertation advisor suggested that I pivot from my study of rural antihorse thief associations toward the history of horse stealing as a crime instead, I confess that no single overriding question came immediately to mind. In fact, I had a hard time keeping all the questions straight. There were just so many: Were horse thieves actually hanged? If so, why? Why do so many people today believe that horse thieves were hanged? Why were horses so important? But pinning down these questions was a challenge as well since, as I tumbled down the research rabbit hole, I began to realize that Americans intuitively understand horse stealing just as well today as they did one hundred years ago. But somehow we have collectively lost our historical understanding of the crime. And how does one construct a question around that?

By an intuitive understanding, I mean that many Americans seem to have gained a latent understanding of horse stealing through popular culture. Western movies, television shows, books, and even video games like the Red Dead Redemption series have created a broader sense of awareness with respect to horse stealing and its severity. In addition, Americans can readily make the mental connection between horse ownership and vehicle ownership. In a nation of people who own personal automobiles or trucks, it is easy to associate a beloved twenty-first-century car with an equally admired and essential nineteenth-century horse. But these connections are not merely cultural and technological. Over the years, at conferences and workshops and even in my classrooms, several people have come up to me after learning what I am working on to say that their great-great-grandpa or uncle or some other ancestor was hanged for horse stealing. While I have no reason to doubt the veracity of any of their individual stories, the sheer number of times this has happened has made me wonder whether everyone in the western United States actually does have a horse thief hanging from their family tree or if some weird quirk of our collective historical memory causes us to believe such a thing. Even this question, however, is difficult to answer. The history of horse stealing is, in many ways, the story of ghosts, shadows, and rumors.

In an effort to dodge having to answer a single question, I have done the next best thing: I wrote a narrative that tells the history of horse stealing in western Nebraska. It is the story of a category of crime, the history of a means of exchange, and a powerful reminder of the durability of historical memory. Horse raiding among the Plains Indians quickly evolved into a critical adjunct to the nomadic lifestyle adopted by those tribes that fully embraced equestrian hunting, fighting, traveling, and acquiring wealth. It provided easy access to mounts, social mobility, and food security just as surely as it robbed those tribes on the losing end of subsistence and self-defense. Once whites began to travel through, and then later reside on, the Great Plains, large-herd managers began accumulating power and wealth more quickly than their less-well-off neighbors. As tensions between Indians and whites mounted, the animals themselves became contested resources. Several plains conflicts started with the theft of a strayed horse or cow, and by the time the Great Sioux War broke out, both sides understood that healthy horse herds were their opponents Achilles heel on the plains. After the Plains Indians were sent to live in reservations, white horse-stealing gangs siphoned away reservation horses before turning their attention to their white neighbors. By 1890 fewer thieves were stealing horses as increasingly prosperous locals bought better, smaller, and more easily fenced items to steal. But those homesteaders and other small-herd managers continued to fear horse thieveswith good reason. Spoken myths became printed legends, and old fears about horse thieves continued to haunt Nebraskans even as passing Model Ts kicked up clouds of dust along Nebraskas desiccated, unpaved roadways.