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
