The Outstater
Horse Thieves Matter
THE SON OF PIONEERS in the Flint Hills of Kansas, my sheriff grandfather was familiar with the story of “the Sedgwick County Anti-Horse-Thieving Association” — or the SCAHTA as it was never known because they were blessedly free of acronyms back then. Let us just say that it would not have fit into the defund-the-police messaging, nor would grandfather have known what you were even talking about.
In the winter of 1870 a group of 60 or so heavily armed men went place to place with a list of suspected horse thieves. They hung or shot dead eight of them. They did so on the authority of their association’s “manifesto.” Years later, The Wichita Eagle got a copy of it. Here is an excerpt:
“Since the first settlement of Butler, Cowley and Sedgwick counties the people have suffered from the depredations of horse thieves. Within 10 miles, at least 300 horses have been stolen within the past year. In hardly any instance was the horse recovered and no horse thief has been successfully prosecuted in any court of justice. The evidence is clear that a regular organized band of horse thieves exists in the counties. Parties losing horses have traced the animals to certain localities and suddenly lost all clue to them. There also have been a number of murders perpetrated in the region, but none has been suffered thereafter.”
So numerous were the horse thieves, the newspaper reported, that “no man dared institute a prosecution against any other man for horse stealing, however strong his suspicions might be.” The suspected men “swaggered” about the streets and threatened the lives of any who dared voice suspicions, it was said.
Nonetheless, the list was compiled and the association formed, “Amongst them may be found farmers, lawyers, doctors, merchants, sheriffs, constables, justices of the peace, and in fact men in every avocation of life.” That winter, during three raids in a two-week period, the vigilantes rounded up dozens, lynching or gunning down the eight.
A horse, please know, was not just a line item in a settler’s budget, it was survival. It is an understatement to say their theft was taken seriously. Indeed, the newspapers at the time had no trouble justifying the lynchings, noting that along with the thousands of Texas longhorns on the Chisholm Trail came “lawless characters with murder and horse-thievery high on their list of accomplishments.”
Let the law schools sort out the appropriateness of the Sedgwick County Anti-Horse-Thieving Association. I can only tell you that growing up under its example three generations later it was rare to run across anyone impolite let alone criminal. — tcl
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