Читать книгу The Bassett Women - Grace McClure - Страница 13

RANCHERS AND RUSTLERS

The Bassetts returned to their old cabin only to pick up their belongings; then they went back down the valley to their new homesite. On the way, the children broke out in measles. Elizabeth bedded them down under the massive cottonwoods bordering the spring and started to help strip the logs that Sam and Herb were hewing for a cabin. When she was not chopping firewood, cooking meals, washing clothes, feeding the chickens, milking the cow or helping Josie care for the smaller children, she was grubbing out brush for the vegetable garden. After the cabin was far enough along that the family could move in out of the open, there was the chicken house to be built, then the corral for the stock and the sheds for supplies.

After the essential buildings were completed, one can imagine Elizabeth suggesting that an extra supply of logs be cut before winter set in, “for the bunkhouse we will need in the spring.”

Bunkhouse! They had no cowboys. For that matter, they had only a handful of cattle. This would not have deterred Elizabeth. She had a clear and constant vision of what must be accomplished and, with gaiety and good humor, she pushed her husband toward the goals she had set for them. (Only occasionally would her violent temper transform the Southern gentlewoman into the brassy-voiced slavedriver.)

If she pushed Herb, she also pushed herself with her need for success. Josie said of her, “My father didn’t know how to brand a cow—neither did she, but she tried . . . . “ Until her anticipated cowboys arrived, Elizabeth managed the cattle herself. When she was not working at the cabin or in the garden, she was in the saddle—a sidesaddle, of course, as befit a lady—taking salt blocks to her precious cattle, keeping a watch for mavericks, moving her herd to better pasturage, perhaps shooting some game for the dinner table, while Herb and little Josie took care of things at home.

She had her first experience with the casual way in which property rights were treated in cattle country when they first returned from Rock Springs and found that the cattle they had left with Uncle Sam were missing. According to Josie:

My father bought twenty head of heifers just before the Meeker Massacre and he branded his heifers with “U P.” . . . on the ribs. Great big “U” with the “P” connected. But while we were away in Wyoming a man came into the country . . . his name was Metcalf . . . and he branded with “7 U P.” He had a “7” in front of our “U P” all over those cows. My father didn’t know what to do, he was stranded . . . but my mother did. She said, “I know some of those cows, and I’m taking them.” And she took them! She and Mr. Metcalf had some kind of set-with . . . she didn’t use “U P” anymore, she had the cattle rebranded.

Once the decision to return had been made, Herb undoubtedly responded with good grace and enthusiasm. While he was neither physically nor psychologically prepared to learn the cattle business, he made contributions of his own to the growth of their homestead. He piped the spring to bring water close to the cabin and to provide irrigation for crops. He established hay fields, becoming the first man in the valley to do more than just mow the natural grasses for winter forage for their horses. He planted an apple orchard. He brought in four-strand barbed wire—another Brown’s Park first—and fenced the home fields. When they started summer grazing their cattle in Zenobia Basin up on Douglas Mountain, he built a three-room cabin and a corral with closely placed upright cedar posts to protect the horses from wild predators. (Bears and mountain lions were so thick in the high mountains that horses were belled for protection, and ranchers went on organized lion hunts.) His granddaughter, Edna Bassett Haworth, recalls Herb experimenting with seeds and new plants in a special plot and grafting new varieties of fruit onto existing trees in his orchard.

In addition to cattle, the Bassetts raised horses, and eventually made themselves a local reputation as good breeders; not in vain was Elizabeth the granddaughter of a breeder of thoroughbreds. Esther Campbell’s notes describe the day when Ann Bassett first saw Esther’s buckskin horse. Ann immediately recognized it as one of a “Nugget” breed that had originated on the Bassett ranch:

They owned the original mare, the “Tippecanoe” mare, and raised many good colts from her. Her father [Herb] bought the mare from some people traveling through the country from Tennessee. She was high-lifed and they had a wire tied around her tongue to control her. Her tongue was almost cut in two. Mr. Bassett felt sorry for her and bought her. Her colts were always full of life and willing to travel. Ann had a team of buckskins [Tippecanoe’s colts] for a buggy team. She drove them from Douglas to Craig from sunup to sundown, and they would be pulling at the bits when they trotted up the last hill to Craig.

Breeding good horseflesh to use on the ranch and for an occasional sale was valuable, of course, but their success depended on their cattle. Elizabeth soon learned that even in her remote valley there were intruders.

In earlier days, when the only cattle in Colorado were the Longhorns driven up from Texas, cattle drovers had used Brown’s Park as a safe wintering place for their herds. Grass and water were plentiful, and snowfall was normally light because the valley was sheltered by its ring of mountains. Even in a “killer winter” which destroyed herds on the plains, cattle usually survived in Brown’s Park. Yet the Park was never large enough to accommodate huge herds. As the land in the Park was homesteaded, continued attempts of outsiders to winter there caused serious overgrazing problems for the full-time inhabitants, who watched their range anxiously for signs of overuse.

As if the damage to “their” range was not enough, cowboys running a large herd often collected local cattle which then were driven out of the area and often lost to the local ranchers. Every rancher expected to lose a few cattle to the weather, a hungry neighbor or an equally hungry mountain lion, but to lose them to an intruder on one’s own grass was too much to bear. In retaliation, the ranchers were not too careful of an outsider’s ownership rights, and they often carried newborn calves home on their saddlehorns, to be fed in their own home corrals.

Taking home an unweaned calf was, of course, illegal—far removed from the perfectly legal practice of putting one’s own brand on a maverick. Originally a maverick had been defined as a yearling which had not been branded, but common practice was to assume that any calf which had left its mother’s teats was a maverick, and this was often stretched to include a calf almost weaned to grass.

There is no legitimate doubt that small ranchers all over the Basin took as many mavericks as they could lay their hands on, and that the beef on their tables was from cows with an outsider’s brand. The common saying was, “Only a tenderfoot eats his own beef.” Considering the conditions under which they were struggling to survive, these illegal brandings and butcherings are as understandable as a slum kid’s snitching an apple from a grocer’s pile of fruit.

The large cattlemen of Wyoming had formed themselves into the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, which almost completely controlled every aspect of the area’s cattle business with the cooperation of state and national legislation. On the basis that members owned eighty percent of the cattle in Wyoming, the Association was authorized to conduct the spring and fall roundups and to exclude unacceptable small homesteaders from participation. All mavericks at these roundups were divided among the Association members. Eventually even cattle branded with “unregistered” brands (those not registered by the Association) were confiscated. The ostensible reason was to control rustling, but the real effect was to badly cripple a new settler from the east or a cowboy who had managed to save some money and acquire a few cows of his own.

To these small, persecuted individuals, owners of perhaps one hundred cattle or a few hundred at the most, self-preservation required that they recoup their losses in any way possible. Because the Association itself was composed of rich and greedy men, Wyoming’s small ranchers retaliated in the only ways open to them.

The Brown’s Park ranchers shared these problems. As the Basin filled up with cattle and the cattle drives from Texas became a rarity rather than a common annual occurrence, the outsiders who had been using the Park for winter graze faded away, only to be replaced by neighbors who presented even more serious problems. The most sinister was an outfit called Middlesex Land and Cattle Company—known from its brand as the Flying VD—which had its headquarters only about twenty-five miles northwest of the Park’s boundaries. The owners of Middlesex were big-money men from Boston who had bought up several small ranches, put a ruthless man named Fred Fisher in charge of operations, brought in several thousand head of cattle, and prepared to dominate their own portion of the public domain. Fisher openly announced his intention of driving out all small ranchers in his territory.

Middlesex wanted to establish a base of operations in Brown’s Park from which it could spread out and take over the whole valley. Using the techniques of a Chicago blockbuster, Fisher approached several ranchers in the west end of the Park and offered to buy them out at attractive prices. The Park ranchers held a meeting and decided to hold firm; no one sold and the “blockbusting” failed.

Actually, the Brown’s Parkers were in a much better position than small ranchers in more open sections of the country. It is easy to visualize this thirty-five mile valley as one huge corral. If Middlesex cattle managed to wander down through the steep mountains that surrounded it on three sides, the ranchers could delightedly appropriate these strays. If Middlesex made a deliberate effort to bring its herds in through the eastern access, the ranchers would be well aware of that fact and could either drive the herd back or cause enough damage that Middlesex would think twice before trying it another year. The ranchers in the Park may have considered themselves a beleaguered group of “little guys,” but by banding together and capitalizing on their geographical advantage, they managed to protect their home range with considerable success.

After the Meeker Massacre the Park acquired another large new neighbor not too far from its eastern entrance. Up in Laramie, Wyoming, a highly successful self-made man named Ora Haley was quick to realize that the banishment of the Ute Indians to the Uintah Reservation over in east central Utah had opened up an important new range not yet appropriated by anyone.

In 1881 Haley bought a spread on Lay Creek, about thirty miles as the crow flies from the site on which the Bassetts were then establishing their new homestead. Bringing down cattle from his extensive holdings in Wyoming and buying others in Utah, Haley put twelve to fifteen thousand cattle on his new range. According to John Rolfe Burroughs, this was by far the largest herd ever assembled in northwestern Colorado under one ownership up to that time. Haley’s brand of two slanting bars gave the outfit its common name, the Two-Bar.

In the early years, Two-Bar caused Brown’s Park ranchers little trouble and made no real effort to appropriate their range. Still, cattle wander. They drift in small groups, paying no attention to whose range is being invaded or whose water is being used. There was little, if any, supervision of these herds except at the semiannual roundups when the Middlesex and Two-Bar cowboys moved the herds—in the spring to the mountain plateaus for summer grazing and in the fall to the more temperate lowlands. Two-Bar’s cowboys would come into the Park and search for their cattle at these times.

During these roundups the new calves were branded and cattle ready for market were cut out of the herd. Usually a large operator expected a ten percent “leakage” each year from death, rustling, and casual butchering on the range by persons unknown. This leakage factor also took into account the utter impossibility of finding all the thousands of cows in hundreds of square miles of gullies, washes and canyons. However, because of the magnitude of his operation, the large cattleman still made a profit—if not too many cattle had winter-killed and if the bottom did not drop out of the price of beef.

Both Middlesex and Two-Bar knew that their leakage factor would be doubled if their cattle strayed into Brown’s Park, and if they classed all Park inhabitants as no better than the rustlers who were reputed to hang out there, those inhabitants only smiled grimly and hoped their bad reputation would protect their range from deliberate invasions. They were fighting for their own protection, and thought themselves no less honest for gathering mavericks or even unweaned calves, and eating Two-Bar’s beef.

There were actually not very many badmen and professional rustlers in the Park once the homesteaders arrived. Back in the 1860s and early ’70s, the truly vicious Tip Gault gang had often used Brown’s Park as a hideout between its raids on the wagon trains of west-bound pioneers, but that gang had been broken up before the Bassetts and other homesteaders had arrived. For the most part, the badmen who came through the Park in the Bassett days were small-fry criminals running from the charge of stealing a horse or shooting a man in a saloon brawl. Their principal rendezvous was at Powder Springs, twenty-five miles northeast of the Park, and any lawbreaker who came into the Park proper usually behaved himself. If the ranchers themselves had been asked to describe the lawlessness in their valley, they most probably would have talked about their own respectable neighbors, Jesse S. and Valentine Hoy, who were perpetrating legal thefts far more serious, in Brown’s Park eyes, than the occasional theft of a horse.

Everyone in the Park started as a squatter because the land had never been surveyed, and it was even unclear exactly where the state of Colorado ended and Utah began. Not until the summer of 1884 was a survey completed, allowing the homesteaders to establish clear title to their acreage. As the survey party brought its chains and transits into the valley, some of the local people were hired to help them, including Valentine Hoy as the party’s cook. Herb Bassett may also have been hired; it is certain that the party camped temporarily near his ranch.

When the survey was completed, Major Oates, the leader of the party, gave Herb the metes and bounds of the Bassett property, and the legally knowledgeable Herb went immediately to the county seat at Hahn’s Peak and recorded his claim, as shown by the county records of September 22, 1884.

Not all the ranchers were as prompt. Valentine Hoy, having gained early knowledge of the legal descriptions of the ground, was able to claim certain parcels whose occupants did not move quickly to record their land. With his brother Jesse, he hired outsiders to file claim on desirable parcels; when these hired homesteaders had acquired clear title, the Hoys bought them out and enlarged their own holdings of valuable pasture land along the river bottoms.

All this was completely legal, exactly what other well-to-do ranchers were doing all over Wyoming, but the neighbors resented the Hoys bitterly. Ann called Valentine Hoy a “land grabber.” Josie described his scheme in her taped memoirs, using a quaint colloquialism, “swift,” the exact meaning of which seems to have been lost:

The Hoys came first . . . and tried to make a monopoly of everything . . . V. S. Hoy wasn’t a good man. . . . You see, when the survey was made, V. S. Hoy was a smart man [as] all the Hoys were. . . . V. S. Hoy was cook with the survey party. He had a nice business, he was there for a purpose. . . . Now he knew the numbers of places and put swift on them, bought the land, and what he didn’t buy with swift he had people coming here from Fremont, Nebraska and Leavenworth, Kansas . . . to take up homesteads. Then he met them at Glenwood Springs, where they’d take up proof, paid them each a thousand dollars and they were gone. He had their homes and that’s how the Hoys got all of the Hoy bottoms . . . .

He tried to swift my father’s place, but my father’s filing on the homestead had gone in just before his swift got there, so that didn’t work. My father never liked the Hoys, that made a bad spot. My dad was a very forgiving man but he never forgave that, no sir! He said, “I’ve been a friend to V. S. Hoy and thought he was a friend to me, and to have him do that—I’ll have nothing to do with him.” And he never did.

Valentine was more active in acquiring land than his brother Jesse, but Jesse was still deeply enough involved to earn his neighbors’ anger. Furthermore, they resented Jesse’s readiness, over the years, to write letters to the newspapers denouncing lawless conditions in Brown’s Park, and his equal readiness to file suit upon even a suspicion that someone was tampering with Hoy property. Most of the ranchers were too busy or too unlettered to take court action, and they preferred to handle their own problems, either firing a dishonest cowhand and running him out of the Park or quietly retaliating later. Glade Ross’s files contain a comment by an early rancher: “Horses weren’t worth anything. So when someone branded a horse belonging to another, no fuss was made because it wasn’t worth anything then. If they came up in price, then we’d brand one of his.”

Jesse S. Hoy is one of the more interesting and controversial of the many controversial personalities of Brown’s Park. He had had certain successes in Wyoming before he settled in the Park permanently and persuaded his brothers Adea, Henry and Valentine, and his uncle Frank to join him. While still in Wyoming he had served one term in an early legislature, and after moving to Brown’s Park he represented Wyoming as justice of the peace.

Hoy was an educated man, passionately fond of all animal life. In his old age, when his judgment was slipping, he managed to burn his barn to the ground by lighting smudge pots in it to protect his horses from flies. Almost without question he was a eunuch. There is one romantic tale that he was castrated by a jealous medical student during a stay in Paris; a more mundane but plausible version is that he had suffered a severe and permanently damaging case of mumps in his childhood. Whatever the cause, the fact remains that some of his more disrespectful and unsympathetic neighbors called him “the old steer.”

Perhaps because of his physical handicap, he was an embittered and unsociable man who quarreled violently with his own family; he was never on speaking terms with all his brothers at any one time. As he grew older, he became suspicious of his neighbors almost to the point of paranoia; if a man had business to transact with Hoy he turned it over to his womenfolk to handle. Hoy took self-righteous pride in the fact that he had never in his life butchered so much as one cow belonging to someone else. The Brown’s Parkers, however, never quite forgot the way he had acquired some of his lands.

In his old age, Jesse retired to Denver and wrote his memoirs describing his early life on the plains and his years in Brown’s Park. These memoirs, known as “The J. S. Hoy Manuscript,” were unearthed from the files of a publisher in Denver. They had been mercilessly edited, probably by a Hoy relative who either feared libel suits from the people in Brown’s Park or who believed that the old man had unjustly blackened his neighbors’ names. The manuscript contains only the barest information on his Brown’s Park days, and no particularly specific accusations have survived the censor’s scissors. Even in its expurgated form, however, it clearly shows that J. S. Hoy felt that most of his neighbors were thieves and rustlers and that the worst ones were the Herrera brothers and Elizabeth Bassett.

While the manuscript contains mentions of “the Bassett gang,” Elizabeth herself is mentioned only once. After a censorship of several pages, one sentence remains which condemns as it excuses: “In fairness to Elizabeth Bassett it must be said that . . . “ There follows a moving paragraph on the hardships women endured in pioneer life.

Whatever the Hoys’ opinions of Elizabeth, tradition says that her fellow ranchers admired her spunk, her ability, and her leadership. Among the ranchers, Elizabeth’s voice was respected. As for Herb, they thought enough of him to elect him their representative on the county commission of Routt County in 1882. County records show his $5000 bond was made by Pablo Herrera, Anton Prestopitz, and Griff Edwards. He evidently served only one term, for in those days it was impractical for Brown’s Park to be represented at regular county meetings held three days’ journey away at Hahn’s Peak. However, from 1884 until his resignation in 1892, Herb still represented authority in the Colorado part of the Park, for he was appointed justice of the peace, with Griff Edwards and Solomon Rouff as his bondsmen.

Indeed, Herb was a leader in many community affairs. His education was broad enough that he could give good advice on subjects affecting the ranchers’ welfare. While they might think him a poor sort with cattle, they never questioned the integrity of this man who, on many a Sunday morning after an all-night Brown’s Park party, would lead the hymns and conduct a simple religious service for this churchless community.

Even after the early days of building, Herb Bassett took no active part in running the cattle and bossing the cowboys; that was Elizabeth’s bailiwick. Even though Herb’s health returned and he lived to be very old, it is hard to picture this quiet little man, who had always been a clerical worker, directing six-foot cowboys at roundup time.

Equally incongruous might be the picture of a woman in a sidesaddle bossing six-foot cowboys. Elizabeth was a successful manager, however, using that famous “Bassett charm” the old-timers speak of. She did not issue orders; she made requests, and she accompanied them with a warm, very feminine smile. Skeptical cowboys soon found that they had an efficient boss who would work right along with them. She had put in her apprenticeship before they had arrived and had learned her lessons well. One woman who knew her said, “She was as good a cowhand as any man.”

In Where the Old West Stayed Young, John Rolfe Burroughs writes:

It is impossible to overemphasize the loyalty that Mrs. Bassett inspired in the breasts of the homeless and oftentimes outlawed young men, any one of whom it is said “willingly would have died and gone to hell for her.” If high strung, she was a strong-willed, self-controlled woman not at all motivated by romantic considerations. But such was her vitality, her personal magnetism, and her sympathetic understanding of the essential loneliness of her footloose constituency that men willingly flocked to her standard.

Elizabeth was too practical to rely on only that “personal magnetism,” which was, after all, instinctive and not contrived. More important, she gave her men the privilege of building their own herds so that a man could work for himself as well as for the Bassetts. This attracted the ambitious, for many outfits had halted the practice, believing that it tempted the poorly paid cowhands to change a few brands for their own benefit.

Equally important from a human standpoint, she welcomed her ranch hands almost as guests within her family circle. Her bunkhouse was comfortable and her food was good. If a man liked to read, Herb’s library was available. If he enjoyed children, the Bassetts could supply him with five, of assorted ages. Ann Bassett has described bucking contests where each small child had for a bronco a cowboy who would do his best to throw his rider into the clean hay strewn in a makeshift arena.

Aside from the fact that Elizabeth was a good cowhand and a good range boss and Herb was not, Herb’s complete separation from the cattle side of the ranch was possibly because he disapproved of the way Elizabeth was running things. Herb was a deeply religious man with a strong moral sense; moreover, in Arkansas he had been an officer of the court, sworn to uphold the law. It could be that he refused to have anything to do with any activities smacking of illegality, no matter how Elizabeth and the neighboring ranchers might justify them.

An example of the opposing attitudes of husband and wife is the story Ann tells of the day on which one of their cowhands, Jack Rollas, was shot:

He was a pleasant-mannered young fellow from Texas who came to the Bassett Ranch in 1882. A good hand with horses, he was hired to break broncs on the ranch. It was in the late fall of that year that three strange men arrived about noon, and were asked to eat dinner with the family. While Mrs. Jaynes, who cooked for us at the time, was preparing the meal, one of the strangers asked her if Jack worked there. Mrs. Jaynes replied, “Yes, that is Jack saddling a horse at the corral.” The three men walked from the kitchen and went on down to the corral. One of them pulled a gun and shot Rollas as he was reaching for a bridle. He ran behind a barn, where he fell, mortally wounded.

The ranch hands, Herb, and Elizabeth managed to get the men at gunpoint while Mrs. Jaynes rushed out and gathered the children into the shelter of an outbuilding. Rollas had been carried into the bunkhouse, and the furious Elizabeth marched the marauders in to confront him.

The one who had done the shooting said his name was Hambleton and that Rollas had shot and killed his brother in Abilene, Kansas. Hambleton had trailed Jack Rollas for two years to kill him. Rollas confirmed Hambleton’s statement in part, explaining that a man of that name had married his sister. He abused the sister and Rollas had killed for it.

Mother spiritedly informed Hambleton that it was not the custom of the northwest to shoot an unarmed man in the back. By the determined threat of her leveled Winchester, she lined the trio up against the bunkhouse wall, and directed the wounded Rollas to kill his assassin, or all three men, if he wanted to.

Rollas was too weak to hold a gun, and he died a few hours later. While mother and Mrs. Jaynes were administering to the dying cowboy, father and Perry were guarding the prisoners. Harry Hindle went to notify the settlers of the park, and to get Charles Allen, Justice of the Peace, to the scene of the crime. [This was before Herb’s own appointment as justice of the peace.] Night came and father began to think with deepening apprehension. A lynching could be in the making. He advised the captives to go to the barn and feed their horses, and he warned them to ride directly to the county seat, over a hundred miles away, and surrender themselves to the law. When neighbors arrived at the Bassett ranch, the murderer and his companions had escaped. Naturally, they failed to do as father had instructed, and were never heard of again. . . . The method subscribed to by father in the matter of advice to the shooters would have been in direct conflict with the opinion of mother and Mrs. Jaynes. Therefore, he did not commit himself and tell the true story for some time afterwards. . . . [italics added].

Although Ann’s accounts of Brown’s Park life are sometimes slightly colored, Elizabeth’s domination and Herb’s subservience in this instance have a ring of unvarnished truth.

While Elizabeth was undoubtedly the head of the Bassett family, J. S. Hoy exaggerates when he calls her head of a “gang.” (As far as is known, the term “Bassett gang” was used only by Hoy, not by other contemporaries.) She was primarily a rancher managing a herd of legitimately acquired cattle which was increased by calves from legitimately owned cows. It is unbelievable that this woman, this gentlewoman, was a “night rider” engaged in actual rustling on a large scale. Moreover, since large-scale rustling was unacceptable to all ranchers, large or small, her neighbors would have stopped her, distasteful as it might have been to them to prosecute a member of the “weaker sex.”

But while Elizabeth may not have been a night rider there is a tradition that she did brand more lost calves and butcher more stray beef than less energetic ranchers might have done. There is also an undocumented story that she added to her herd by buying cattle at cut-rate prices from professional rustlers, who normally took their stolen cattle either to Rock Springs to be butchered and sold to the mining camp, or down to the Mormon farmers in Ashley Valley, always ready customers. Given Elizabeth’s character, it would not be surprising if she had done so, especially in those earliest days when the family was living hand to mouth. She absolutely had to build a herd, or “turn tail and run” for an uncertain future in California. In that sort of dilemma, Elizabeth would have put her own survival before a rich man’s property rights.

An interesting story is repeated by Burroughs, in Where the Old West Stayed Young, involving five hundred head of Middlesex cattle purportedly made off with in a single raid. “Cornered in Zenobia Basin on Douglas Mountain, it is said that Elizabeth Bassett and her helpers ’rim-rocked’ the herd, i.e., drove them over the cliff into Lodore Canyon, thus destroying the evidence that might have been used against them.”

Elizabeth’s grandson, Crawford MacKnight, made a notation in the margin of his copy of Burroughs’ book: “I think this ’rim rock’ business is all B. S. What in hell would they do with that many cows, even if they had gotten away with them?”

Crawford’s objection is practical, for rustling is a stealthy business, and hiding five hundred cows would be as difficult as hiding a Greyhound bus. Still, old-timers remember the pile of whitened bones that could be seen in Ladore Canyon for decades.*

There is a possibility that Middlesex had decided to summer some of its own cattle in Zenobia Basin and that Elizabeth, enraged at this intrusion on “her” range, told her cowboys to rim-rock the cattle. Possibly the story grew in countless tellings into a case of rustling. If, for whatever reason, Elizabeth actually did push those cattle into Ladore Canyon, she must have sincerely mourned the destruction of good beef.

A more credible story is told by Edna Bassett Haworth, who remembers Herb telling her mother Ruby about the early days at the ranch. Herb heard a terrible bawling out in the corral and went out to find that it was full of calves. The calves were not yet weaned, so the corral was besieged on all sides by cows bearing various brands, bellowing loudly for their young ones to be returned to them. In the middle of the uproar was Elizabeth, calmly using her branding iron.

Herb had a habit of clicking his heels, a silent way of showing disapproval or frustration. When Ruby asked Herb what he had done about it, Herb told her that he had “clicked his heels and walked away.”

Poor Herb! He was a strictly moral man in a world where morality was sometimes considered an unaffordable luxury. Left alone, he might have been defeated by the special needs of survival in this harsh situation. Everyone respected him—his grandson Crawford says that he was the finest man he ever knew—but his wife, his children, and his neighbors all knew that in Brown’s Park he was entirely out of his element.

NOTE

*The most spectacular elements in Brown’s Park are two cliffs between which the Green River leaves the Park. John Wesley Powell, the explorer of the Green, named them “The Gates of Ladore.” In establishing a Brown’s Park post office, the Post Office Department spelled it “Lodore.” The two spellings have existed simultaneously ever since.