In conclusion, your petitioners represent unto your excellency that there exists in the district named an armed combination to prevent the administration of law and justice; that neither life nor property is in any respect safe, and does not and cannot receive protection at the hands of the civil authorities. The country named is in a feverish state of excitement and under a complete reign of terror, and both persons and property are wholly at the mercy of the outlaws and thieves who infest that section. We, therefore, pray your excellency will place the district named under martial law, for the reason that it is the one remedy for the existing evils, and it is the only way of protecting the lives and property of the people there. Respectfully submitted, (Signed) Trustees of PRATT & FERRIS CATTLE CO., By J. A. Pratt, Manager. CLAY & FOREST, HENRY A. BLAIR, WM. A. PAXTON, WINDSOR, KEMP & CO., E. S. ROUSE BOUGHTON, JOHN N. TISDALE, FRED G. HESSE, A. R. POWERS, HENRY G. HAY, MANHATTAN CATTLE COMPANY, By H. G. Hay, President. OGALLALA LAND & CATTLE COMPANY, By W. C. Irvine, Manager. CLARK & HUNTON, A. B. CLARKE & CO., CONRAD & CLARK, MURPHY CATTLE COMPANY, E. W. WHITCOMB, THE WESTERN UNION BEEF COMPANY, By Geo. W. Baxter, Manager. JAS. G. PRATT, BAY STATE LIVE STOCK COMPANY, By H. H. Robinson, Superintendent. To the reader of these pages who has kept the run of events as they have been detailed, the above can only be viewed in the light of a tissue of false statements from beginning to end, and as a last dying effort to accomplish by strategy what the signers of this petition, or their agents, had failed to do in an open fight on the grassy plains of Northern Wyoming. Up to the time of the filing of this libelous petition no act of violence had been perpetrated in Johnson county, or any other northern county, save by the cattlemen themselves, or their hired assassins. The threats, intimidation and murder were all on the side of the cattlemen. True, George Wellman had been killed, but the well-settled conviction then, and now, rested and rests in the minds of the public that this unfortunate young man was the victim, not of the settlers of Johnson county, but of the cattlemen themselves. That the murder of George Wellman was planned in Cheyenne and the brutal outrage executed on orders from the Capital City seems of easy demonstration to all fair-minded men.