Given the question: Read the following paragraph and extract the answer for the question: What group of people has to pay association fees to Ed Saunders? The storyline revolves around Lou Gehrig playing himself, who decides to give up baseball in New York for the life of a western cattle rancher. Once at the ranch, Gehrig encounters a protection racket preying on the ranchers by extortion and violence. He teams up with a crusading local attorney to fight the crooks and ultimately put them in jail. In the opening scene, Lou Gehrig is surrounded by a group of reporters at Grand Central Terminal in New York City, where he is about to take a train to his sister's ranch out west in Rawhide. Proclaiming that he is "through with baseball", he tells the sceptical newsmen that he wants the "peace and quiet" of the cowboy life.Gehrig plays an easygoing dude rancher, whose self-deprecating humor is displayed the first time he attempts to ride a horse. As he timidly approaches his steed, a ranch hand urges, "Jus' walk right up to him like ya' wasn't afraid", to which Gehrig deadpans, "I couldn't be that deceitful".An unscrupulous interloper, Ed Saunders, and his henchmen have seized control of the local "Ranchers Protective Association" by subterfuge and are using it as a front to extort outrageous "association fees" from the local ranchers, resorting to violence and bribery. After Gehrig refuses to pay, one of his ranch hands is shot by one of the crooks. Gehrig storms into the local saloon to confront Saunders and his gang. When a barroom brawl ensues, the attorney (played by co-star Smith Ballew) joins in the fight as Gehrig hurls billiard balls at the criminals. The movie eventually reaches a climax in the obligatory western film chase scene when Gehrig and the other ranchers form a posse to chase the fleeing Saunders gang and put them in jail.
The answer is:
local ranchers