Читать книгу The Bassett Women - Grace McClure - Страница 11

BROWN’S HOLE

Sạm Bassett must have shaken his head in disbelief when he saw the belongings that Herb and Elizabeth were bringing to a wilderness. There were spooled bedsteads and the feather mattresses to go on them; there were walnut bureaus from Elizabeth’s girlhood home. These were practical enough; for that matter, so was the huge iron cookstove, even though nothing like it had yet been seen in Brown’s Hole, where people still cooked over fireplaces. There were, however, box upon boxes of books, and more boxes of china, silver and dainty glassware. Most wondrous of all, there was an organ! To these had to be added the barrels of flour and sacks of coffee and sugar and beans, the kettles, the skillets, the axes, the hammers, the rifles and shot, the barrel of nails. Any supplies they did not take with them in those two wagons would have to wait until they returned to town in late autumn to buy their winter’s supplies.

They made their move at the earliest signs of spring, as soon as the mountain passes were clear of snow. There was an urgent reason for this—in less than two months Elizabeth was due to deliver their third child. Elizabeth’s own enthusiasm for this new endeavor can be judged by the fact that she was willing to take the risks of the trip and the hardships of homesteading in her late months of pregnancy.

The wagons swayed and bumped southward over rocks and through sagebrush, following the faint tracks made by those who had gone before. For long stretches they were on comparatively level ground, but for equally long stretches the track took them over formidable hills. Then, like those before them in the trek west, Elizabeth and the children would get down from the wagons, to lighten the load for the straining oxen on the inclines and to save themselves from a turnover on the downgrades if the brakes should fail. One can imagine her walking with a child by each hand, picking the easiest path, mindful of the cumbersome burden she carried within her and matter-of-factly adjusting herself to it.

Josie remembered that first trip:

I don’t know how many days we were coming—I just barely can remember it. I was four years old. And one reason I remember it so well, they had a team of oxen, and wasn’t I afraid of those oxen! Oh! But I rode with them—I rode with Uncle Sam Bassett and his oxen all the way. But when I was on the ground I wasn’t with them, I was someplace else. And that’s how I come to remember our trip so well.

There must have been almost a holiday feeling to their journey. Elizabeth was not a woman to be transformed into a semi-invalid by pregnancy. Strong and resilient, she could take discomfort in stride. When they made camp for the night and the men had the fire burning well, she would have helped cook the dinner and put the children to bed with a song. If the two men lingered at the campfire, she would have entered into the conversation as eagerly and as gracefully as if she were sitting safe and secure in her old Arkansas parlor. And it may have been at one of these campfires that Elizabeth started her campaign, often mentioned by old-timers, to change the name of Brown’s Hole.

Back in 1869 and 1871, a one-armed Union Army veteran named Major John Wesley Powell had made two voyages of scientific exploration down the hitherto uncharted Green River. In Brown’s Hole itself, the Bassetts were to know the Green as a strong but serene ribbon of water pursuing a snakelike course through the valley that the river itself had created. However, to the north and south of Brown’s Hole the Green was a treacherous man-eater. It charged through high-walled red-rock canyons so narrow that for miles there would be no place for a boat to land, and poured over rocky beds of boulders that created giant whirlpools. Before Powell’s expeditions, the river had been considered nearly unnavigable; it was, in fact, never completely mastered until the construction of Flaming Gorge Dam in the early 1960s.

Major Powell’s journals of his voyages had been widely published, and if the Bassetts had not read them back in Arkansas they surely must have read them in the days when they were planning to make their home on the banks of the very river of which Powell wrote. Elizabeth would have read the names that the poetically inclined Powell had given to the landmarks he passed, and would have learned that he had called her future home Brown’s Park rather than Brown’s Hole.

“Oh Josie, dear,” one can almost hear her saying, “did you hear Uncle Sam say hole? I thought we were going to live in a park! To live in a park would be so much nicer, wouldn’t it?”

Elizabeth mounted an unremitting campaign, and she won it. At her insistence, neighbors began to use Major Powell’s name for their valley, and in doing so they forgot the major completely, giving Elizabeth sole credit for the more euphonious name.

On the fourth or fifth day the wagons entered the eastern end of Brown’s Park (as it shall be called from now on) through Irish Canyon. Then they turned west to reach Uncle Sam’s cabin, located eighteen or so miles up the valley. As they traveled they surely must have stopped at any cabins along the way, despite Elizabeth’s advanced pregnancy. In Arkansas she might have followed the custom that required pregnant women to retire from public view, but in isolated Brown’s Park that custom would have seemed rather silly. The shared experiences of the handful of people living there were to create an intimacy in which old customs, old backgrounds, and disparities of education and personality became insignificant. Their lives were to be so intertwined that the Bassetts’ neighbors are essential to the Bassett story.

The first homestead on their way belonged to José (“Joe”) and Pablo Herrera, two brothers who had fled New Mexico as political refugees.* After a period of time in which they had lived by their wits and their success in the gambling halls in Wyoming, they had come to Brown’s Park and established themselves with the help of fellow Mexicans who worked for not much more than their board and room. They carried on a brisk trade with the Utes for their exquisitely tanned buckskin, did a great deal of drinking and gambling, and offered an open house to anyone who happened to drift into the Park. A photograph still in existence shows José Herrera to be a burly, handsome Castilian, well-dressed to the point of foppishness, with an air of strength and breeding. It is difficult to reconcile the sophisticated man of this picture with the one who, J.S. Hoy said, would start sharpening a long knife while talking to someone who disagreed with him.

One of the Herreras’ drinking companions and full-time lodgers was A. B. Conway, a practicing lawyer in Iowa before personal problems sent him west. Conway eventually abandoned an aimless and alcohol-dominated existence in Brown’s Park and went on to become “Judge Conway,” Chief Justice of the Wyoming Supreme Court. When he died, the eulogies of his admiring fellow citizens rang across his grave. This brilliant man’s fondness for the Herrera brothers would indicate that, villains though they might be in the eyes of some of their strait-laced Anglo-Saxon neighbors, they were still men of polish. Indeed, in the years before the Herreras returned to New Mexico to engage once more in political agitation on behalf of their fellow Mexicans, the well-bred and well-educated Bassetts counted them as friends.

The wagons then passed the Hoy Meadows on their trip up the valley, although it is possible that Sam would not have bothered to stop here. There were five Hoys—four brothers and an uncle—holding choice meadow lands along the Green River. They claimed to be the first to set up a ranching operation in the Park (the Hoys would not have considered the Mexican Herreras “ranchers”) and had originally hoped to hold the Park as their private domain, attempting to shut out any competition from incoming homesteaders. This had proved to be impossible, but they still stayed more or less to themselves and were not intimate with their neighbors.

There were others in the Park whose names will appear from time to time in the Bassett story. There was the Spicer family, and there were the two Australians, Griff and Jack Edwards, and Jimmie Reed, who was living in a dugout at the lower end of the Park with his Indian wife and their children. There were Scotsman John Jarvie and his wife Nellie, who ran a trading post up at the far west end of the Park. Jarvie was later to build a storage house of stone, reputedly cut by an ex-convict destined to be hanged from the Bassetts’ corral gate.

Another neighbor in those early days was James Goodman, a member of Major Powell’s expedition down the Green who had come back to settle on this peaceful section of the wild and treacherous river he had helped explore. The Bassetts also soon met “Buffalo Jack” Rife, who was eventually joined by his brothers Ed and Bill. At this time Jack was a bachelor cowboy working up on Diamond Mountain for Jim Warren. He later gained the nickname “Buffalo Jack” by establishing a private sanctuary for the few remaining buffalo, paying the Indians in salt and other supplies to leave them unharmed. His boss, Jim Warren, was an ex-priest (presumably Catholic) and an ex-rustler who had turned rancher when he met and married a good and moral woman.

Soon to come to the Park was another man whose name will appear over and over in the Bassett story: Charley Crouse from Trap Hill, North Carolina. At the time the Bassetts arrived, Charley had a ranch on nearby Diamond Mountain but he moved down into the Park within a year or so. Charley Crouse was an uncouth, rough-talking, hard-drinking semiliterate who had run away from home at the age of nine. His ruling passion was good horseflesh, and he raised fine horses that he took as far away as Nebraska to race for large stakes. When his horses won, Charley was in the money; when they lost, he was not above appropriating a few loose cattle to mend his faded fortunes. Matt Warner, an outlaw who was in and out of Brown’s Park, referred to Charley in his memoirs as “that lovable old rustler.”

Charley was erratic and more than slightly dishonest, but he was a good businessman. He raised three good children, although the credit for this was given to his wife Mary, daughter of a Mormon convert from England. Mary was well thought of by everyone in the valley, for she was a fine woman who involved herself in all the acts of neighborliness that are so important in a frontier community. Genteel Mary Crouse may have suffered from living with a man whom Joe Haslem describes as “meaner than a bitch wolf in a rainstorm,” a man who called his own sons “the red-headed bastard” and “the black-eyed son of a bitch.” However, he provided a good living for her, and her own good reputation gained both of them an entree into Brown’s Park polite society. Although Charley participated in that polite society, he much preferred a bottle of whiskey and a game of cards with the men who lived in his bunkhouse.

These people considered themselves neighbors, even though their homes were spread out over an area of almost three hundred square miles. Elizabeth’s most important neighbors in those early days were the Yampatika Utes who camped on the banks of Willow Creek only a stone’s throw from Sam’s cabin. In times to come, Elizabeth was sustained by the Ute squaws and educated by them in wilderness ways, and Josie and young Sam played with the Ute children. The bonds of neighborliness were strong between the Bassetts and the Indians as long as the Utes were free to return to Brown’s Park.

When Elizabeth first saw Uncle Sam’s cabin she must have fallen silent until she remembered her manners. (Josie remembered it as “a funny little old log cabin with two rooms, no floors, no windows.”) Uncle Sam may also have been dismayed as he looked at his bachelor’s quarters and then at the two wagons full of belongings, the two extra adults, and the two lively little imps who undoubtedly started climbing on his bed, getting into his tobacco jar, and fingering his guns and hunting knives within five minutes of their arrival.

The plan had always been, of course, to erect a cabin for the new arrivals. Although surely it must have been begun, the cabin was not finished a month later, on May 12, 1878, when Elizabeth delivered the first white child to be born in Brown’s Park. The infant, Ann, was an active, intense little mite who pulled strongly at Elizabeth’s breast and screamed with rage when her hunger was not satisfied. Perhaps because of her spartan life, Elizabeth’s breasts did not fill and she had no milk for the baby. Potential disaster was averted, according to Ann’s memoirs, when Buffalo Jack Rife stopped by:

A troop of Ute Indians were camped about two hundred yards from the cabin, among these was an Indian mother, See-a-baka, who had a new-born papoose. Buffalo Jack Rife, good old “Buff”, spoke their language like a Ute, so after consultation with Dr. Parsons [this elderly doctor died the next year, to everyone’s sadness, since there never again was to be a medical man in residence] he held a pow-wow with Chief Marcisco and Medicine Man Mush-qua-gant, “Star.” After making considerable medicine and sign talk, it was decided to permit the squaw to become my wet nurse and me to become a foster twin to her papoose, a boy named Kab-a-weep, meaning Sunrise.

Indians do not coddle newborn infants by covering the head. I’ve been told it was storming when they carried me to the Indian wickiup, and I can imagine how I must have blinked and grimaced as the snow settled on my little face.

It was the custom of the Indians to move from the river bottoms where they wintered, to cooler summer camp grounds on the mountain tops. For that reason my Uncle Sam built the “double cabins” for mother at the head of Willow Creek, so she could be near my foster mother. To this cabin See-a-baka came at regular intervals to feed me. I nursed her for six months, until cow’s milk could be provided. It was Judge Conway who rounded up a milk cow and presented her to me, so I got into the cow business at a decidedly early age.

Uncle Sam had built the cabin up on Willow Creek by the time the milk cow arrived, but the location of the cabin satisfied neither Herb nor Elizabeth. This was the least of their problems, however; more depressing was the scanty and monotonous diet. Sam had helped select the food supplies they had brought to the Park—beans, flour, coffee, sugar, pork sideback. Sam lived on these staples and may have been satisfied, since they could always be supplemented by game he shot. To Herb and Elizabeth the menu was unappetizing, and for the little children it was a disaster. Judge Conway’s milk cow must have been a godsend to them all.

Elizabeth’s experience on an established farm in civilized Arkansas could not have prepared her for that first summer, with two small children, a newborn baby, and a sickly middle-aged husband whose muscles had yet to be hardened after years of sedentary life. Sam surely must have helped, but he was neither rancher nor farmer, and preferred prospecting in the mountains. It was late in the growing season by the time Herb cleared enough ground for a vegetable garden of sorts. Because their future was to be in raising cattle, they bought a few head and began the task of learning what to do with them. The cattle were too precious to be used for food, and if Elizabeth did not already know how to use a rifle she must have learned that summer so that she could shoot wild game. The Indians showed her how to make jerky from the deer she shot and told her which fruits and roots were edible among the wild things growing on the mountains.

Somehow they survived the winter, although old-timers have reminisced that the Bassetts were sometimes hungry. The Park women helped as they could; if someone were coming the Bassetts’ way, they would send along a few eggs or a loaf or two of bread, whatever they could spare. Such things were offered with tact, as gifts from one neighbor to another. With that same tact Elizabeth brought gifts in later years to other struggling newcomers.

The second summer was better. Herb’s health had improved and Elizabeth was acclimated. They had a proper garden, and the problem of food became less pressing. Then in late September of 1879, just as they believed the worst was over, news reached the Park of the Meeker Massacre at the White River Agency station only seventy-five miles away.

This uprising of the Utes resulted in the cancellation of the trust fund set up by treaty and the loss of hunting privileges in their traditional territory in western Colorado. The massacre was used as proof by both the white settlers and the government back in Washington that the Indians could not be trusted to keep the peace. Yet in truth the tragedy was the direct result of what could be described as acts of war by a white man, the Indian agent Nathan Meeker, who had almost life-and-death control over the reservation.

Nathan Meeker was an author and journalist who, under the sponsorship of Horace Greeley (owner of the New York Tribune and coiner of the phrase, “Go west, young man, go west!”), had founded Union Colony on the plains of northeastern Colorado, now the prosperous city of Greeley. His colony was to be run on idealistic principles based to a certain extent on the ideas of the French socialist Fourier, who advocated communal endeavor and equal sharing of communal income. A visionary and a romantic, Meeker turned out to be a very poor businessman.

At the end of five years, Union Colony was on the verge of collapse from drought and devastating grasshopper plagues, as well as from Meeker’s inexperience and mismanagement. Moreover, his excessive moralism was splitting the Colony apart. According to Marshall Sprague, author of Massacre, a definitive book on Meeker, he not only opposed tobacco, liquor, gambling, billiards, dancing and the theatre, but also believed that fishing was cruel to trout and picking wildflowers was childish. His self-righteousness was abrasive as he imperiously insisted upon imposing his extreme ideas.

Meeker personally was ruined financially, and was being sued by Horace Greeley’s estate for repayment of loans. (Greeley had died not long after the Colony was founded.) To rescue himself, he applied for the job of Indian agent and was appointed in May 1878. Meeker believed that the only solution to the “Indian problem” was to “civilize” them. He was determined to turn the Utes into farmers as quickly as possible.

The Ute Nation had been getting along quite well with the white men. The principal chieftain, Ouray, realizing the folly of resisting iron cannon, had generally kept the tribal hotheads under control. The Utes continued to wander freely in their old hunting grounds, supplementing the dwindling game supply with the rations distributed by the Agency. Their principal occupation was still hunting, and their hunting was profitable to them, for there was a great demand for their beautifully tanned buckskin, which, according to Dr. Meeker’s own statement, sold for $1000 a ton at the railhead. Yet in the report that Meeker sent to Washington (in August 1879, just prior to his murder), he showed no desire to build on the Utes’ traditional talents. Instead, he complains of their refusal to plow, to plant, to send their children to school, to forsake their customary hunting expeditions, even as he comments that farm equipment is inadequate and out-of-date, that the schoolroom is rude and ill-equipped, and that the seed furnished by the government had been full of cockleweeds. He suggested a solution to his strongest complaint, that the Utes went hunting:

If government would take away all the horses in the vicinity, except such as could be useful, the Indians would not go abroad; and if cattle were given instead they would, or could, or should engage in a profitable industry, and one to which they take readily and naturally. To permit any class of human being to do as they please, and, at the same time to be supplied with food, inevitably leads to demoralization. After I get hold of these Indians I can tell a great deal better what can be made of them. I should like to have plenty of land in cultivation, with tools all ready; take away their horses; then give the word that if they would not work they should have no rations. As to how much they would work and produce in such a case, and as to how fast they would adopt a civilized life, is merely to speculate, but my impression is they would not starve.

One of Meeker’s early acts had been to plow forty acres and plant it in potatoes although there had been “opposition from the Indians to the occupancy of this valley, since its use to them had been for winter grazing of their horses.” Moreover, contemporary accounts say that he ordered their race track plowed up—the track for the displays of horsemanship that were so important to their culture—because they ran races on the Sabbath. Then the well-meaning tyrant ordered that only heads of families could collect the rations on which they depended so heavily, meaning that if the men went hunting, their wives at home would go hungry.

During the summer of 1879 there was increasing petty vandalism against the white settlers throughout the Ute territory. In August the older and wiser heads of the tribe went to Denver to discuss their grievances with the knowledgeable and sympathetic Governor Pitkin. The governor understood the gravity of their complaints and the possible consequences, but he was helpless in the face of the chains of command in the federal bureaucracy. By September the Utes were disillusioned by the lack of response to their peaceful complaints and wild with anger at the man who had so sanctimoniously trampled on their traditions.

The final straw was the news that soldiers were being sent to the reservation to keep order. On hearing this, a radical group of Utes attacked and killed all nine white men stationed at the White River Agency. When outside help arrived, Meeker was found about two hundred yards from his house with a log chain around his neck, one side of his head smashed, and part of a barrel-stave driven through his body. His wife and daughter were nowhere to be found. They had been carried off by the Ute attackers.

The horror of Meeker’s death and the resulting fear for their own skins left the whites throughout the area in a state of panic. While the soldiers were out chasing down the captors of the Meeker women, settlers from outlying areas were leaving their homes in droves. Those near the Rocky Mountains headed for Steamboat Springs, a new cattle town at the foot of the Rockies, or its older neighbor, the mining community up at Hahn’s Peak. South of Brown’s Park in Ashley Valley (later to become Vernal, Utah) the Mormons built a fort for their protection.

Although Brown’s Park was in the center of Ute country, its own permanent community of Utes seemed little affected by the happenings at White River. Still, the Brown’s Park people felt themselves naked against the threat of an uprising among their heretofore peaceful neighbors. All ranchers of this period lived with the threat, however obscure, of being the victims of some maverick Indian; the present situation was much more dangerous since a whole powerful tribe might unite to drive the white men out of their territory. Most of Brown’s Park’s population fled, although Indian-wise Uncle Sam Bassett trusted the good will of his Ute friends and stayed where he was. A good number stopped at the ranch of Charley Crouse’s brother-in-law, Billy Tittsworth, who lived halfway between the Park and Green River City. They stayed the winter with Billy, living on his supplies and keeping a sharp lookout for the red men with their scalping knives.

According to Josie, her mother was not afraid of the Indians but her father was. When Herb decided that he would take his family to the safety of Green River City, Elizabeth could not argue with the prudence of leaving. Abandoning their cattle and leaving most of their possessions in Sam’s keeping, they pushed hastily in a lightly loaded wagon down the valley and through the pass at Irish Canyon toward the security of town.

Homesteading had not been Herb’s first choice, and it is very possible that he was happy to leave Brown’s Park and had no real intention of ever returning. But Elizabeth had grown to love the valley, with the red bluffs of its foothills giving way to the green expanses of meadows along the river, and the high mountain ranges that seemed to shelter the valley whichever way she looked. She could have almost enjoyed the hardships of their first months, which demanded so much creativity and which challenged her capacities. It may have been the first time in Elizabeth’s life she had been given a chance to live up to her full potential, and it is difficult to believe that she was not heartbroken at their defeat.

NOTE

*The phrase “political refugees” is Ann Bassett’s. There was serious unrest in the New Mexico Territory for many decades after the Mexican war in 1846 as its Mexican inhabitants struggled against adverse political and economic conditions.