On the night of April 2, the sheepherder Joe Allemand and four of his associates were encamped along Spring Creek, near the town of Ten Sleep, when a group of seven masked cattlemen attacked them.

The conflicts usually began as disputes over grazing rights, but the cattlemen also complained that the sheepmen destroyed the open range and made it unsuitable for cattle.

For example, cattlemen claimed that sheepmen let their flocks overgraze, or that the sharp hooves of the sheep were cutting up the grass to a point where it wouldn't grow back.

Generally, the cattlemen were the stronger of the two factions and they controlled the range by establishing a type of border called "deadlines" and hiring gunmen to prevent sheepherders from crossing them.

However, not long after the agreement was in effect, the herder Joe Allemand and his partner, Joseph Emge, became some of the first to break it when they began moving their flocks across the deadline to a place near Worland for the winter season.

In this case, Emge was well aware of the consequences of passing through cattle country with a herd of sheep, so, during the first drive, he had a local deputy sheriff accompany him.

For the first thirty miles or so the journey was uneventful, but, on April 2, the party met up with a pair of friends, who lived nearby, and stopped to have dinner with them.

The raiders, who were later identified as George Saban, Herbert Brink, Albert Keyes, Charles Farris, Ed Eaton, Tommy Dixon, and Milton Alexander, rode out from the ranch sometime that night and found the sheepherders' camp soon after.

George Saban, the leader of the group, was the owner of the Bay State Cattle Company, one of the largest in Wyoming, and already known to the public for having led the lynch mob that raided the Big Horn County jail in 1903, where two prisoners and a deputy sheriff were killed.

According to Morris: "[Lamb and Greet] were awakened by staccato cracks of automatic rifles and the glimmering starlight made indistinctly visible moving shadows stepping swiftly about in the haze, punctured with spitting flame flashes when the weapons spoke.

In front of the wagon ruins Allemand lay face upward with bullet holes in his neck and side, to show where deadly soft-nosed missiles took his life.

Although some accounts vary, it is generally believed that the group of raiders snuck up to the Allemand-Emge camp, split in two, and then began shooting at the flocks or advancing on the wagons.

In Morris' words; "the sheepmen played upon the cupidity of men and balanced golden gains in rewards against silence and fear of punishment."

In the days that followed, Brink and Dixon bragged about committing the murders until one of their friends, William "Billy" Goodrich, informed Sheriff Felix Alston in Basin.

In the history of Big Horn County only three grand juries have ever been assembled because of the reluctance or refusal of witnesses summoned to give testimony that would be inadmissible in courts of law.

He perjured himself loyally before the grand jury, then drove to a ranch some five miles distant from the Goodrich home, put his horse up in the barn and shot himself to death.

Morris quoted the following from the state's records: "I heard Brink shout: 'Show a light and come out,'... A man appeared at the front of the wagon.

Because the state's government was finally making convictions, cowboys became reluctant to shoot people over grazing rights, knowing that now they could be held accountable for it.

One of the prosecutors in the case, Will Metz, summarized the meaning of the verdicts by saying that "it is significant of the beginning of a new era, of a period where lawlessness in any form will be no more tolerated [in Wyoming] than in the more densely settled communities of the east."