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.
