LITMIR.BIZ

       INTRODUCTION

      In the towns along the tracks of the Union Pacific Railroad in southern Wyoming, and down in the cattle country in Colorado and Utah, the locals still tell stories about the Bassetts. And when they do, they are talking about the Bassett women, those unorthodox and controversial Bassett women, compared to whom the Bassett men are almost shadows.

      There were three of these women: the original pioneer, Elizabeth, and her two daughters, Josie and Ann. Elizabeth Bassett is remembered as “head of the Bassett gang.” Ann was first called “Queen of the Cattle Rustlers” by a Denver newspaper reporter, and she was known as “Queen Ann” forever after, partly because of her notoriety but also because her imperious ways and her regal bearing made the name a fitting one. The other daughter, Josie, gained her notoriety another way: in a time when divorce was almost unheard of among decent people, she acquired and discarded five husbands, at least one of whom she was suspected of killing. Still, Josie might now be forgotten except that, when almost forty years old, she piled her possessions into a wagon with a spare horse tied to its tailgate and left her childhood home in Brown’s Park to establish a homestead of her own. She found that homestead near Jensen, Utah, only forty miles away as the crow flies, but actually in almost another land because of the ruggedness and wildness of the intervening mountains. Josie lived there until her death almost fifty years later. As those years passed, she acquired the respectability of age (despite the stories still told about her) through the sheer strength of her personality, her generosity, her unaffected sense of humor, her companionability, and her stubborn insistence on living the way she wanted to. In her very old age she was as much a legend to the people of her countryside as was her sister Ann.

      The Bassetts were early pioneers in a section of northwestern Colorado belonging topographically to the Wyoming Basin, a high arid land of broad plains, undulating hills and occasional outcroppings of rock. This vast, irregular bowl is bordered by high mountain ranges with snowy peaks and thick pine forests; within its boundaries it is divided again and again by lower ranges of bare brown mountains only occasionally relieved by the stunted cedars which grow in country where water is scarce. There is infinite variety in this land of canyons, mesas, ridges, peaks and mountains; there is also infinite monotony in the coloration of its brown grasses, dusty green sagebrush and sober-toned rock. It is magnificently and grimly beautiful. In its bareness and brownness the skeleton of the earth seems revealed.

      The Wyoming Basin was the last frontier in “cattle country,” which extended as far south as Texas and as far east as Kansas and the Dakotas. In the late 1870s when the Bassetts arrived, the land west of the Rockies in Colorado was still reserved for the Ute Indians, and they lived there comparatively undisturbed by the white invaders. Their displacement was inevitable, of course, once the railroad linking the continent was built. The Utes fought their last battle in 1879.

      Even before 1879, and well into the twentieth century, the white invaders were fighting among themselves. They were divided into two groups: the large cattle barons, who dominated those endless square miles of grassland by the sheer size of their herds, and the small ranchers, who sought to establish and maintain smaller herds in the lands immediately surrounding their homesteads. All these cattlemen, large and small, broke the laws of more settled communities because laws had not been written to fit the circumstances under which both groups fought for survival. In and among these “honest” lawbreakers, another group inhabited that vast country—the outlaws, the “professional” lawbreakers, who committed their crimes almost with impunity because the law was represented only in a scattering of barely emerging towns.

      By happenstance, the Bassetts settled in the only valley in northwestern Colorado that could assure them a place in the folklore of the region. They filed their homestead claim in Brown’s Park, then known as Brown’s Hole, a small valley only thirty-five miles long and roughly six miles wide, surrounded by mountains so rugged that only from the east was there easy access. Not far from this eastern entrance was a little area called Powder Springs, a wellfrequented stopping place for outlaws on the run. But Powder Springs was overshadowed by Brown’s Park, which would become known as one of the way stations on a fabled outlaw trail that stretched from Hole-in-the-Wall

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