playing rough and getting grimy—something allowed little boys but not nice little girls. Although her parents attempted to keep her in the house with Josie, Ann either ran away or did her housework so ineptly that Josie would do the work herself.
In The Colorado Magazine Ann tells of her pride in an Indian costume she was given and of bursting into a roomful of visitors from the east “all done up in war paint and eagle feathers.” She contrasted this to her sister Josie, “all perked up in starched gingham and ruffles to announce dinner.” It was tiresome to Ann to be constantly compared to Josie, but it would have been more tiresome to have copied her. She continued to be a wild, unbroken colt of a girl, slipping away to the bunkhouse to listen to the cowboys’ talk and picking up incidentally a vocabulary that she sometimes used even when she had turned into an elegant young woman. When she was just a little thing, it is said, she would use those words as she threw stones when one of the unpopular Hoy brothers happened to ride past the schoolhouse yard.
There was a cruel streak in Ann. She herself told how she could not keep from laughing when a “slow” little boy named Felix Myer would try to recite. Although the teacher remonstrated and her mother whipped her, Ann still laughed. The teacher could only send her out to sit on the steps whenever poor Felix had to recite.
Dick Dunham tells a story in Flaming Gorge Country involving a bride of one of the Rife brothers, who bragged excessively at a community supper about a cut-glass bowl she had brought from the east. At this time Ann was old enough to be helping the women wash the dishes. No one could ever be sure that it was intentional, but Ann picked up the bowl to polish it, juggled it for a moment, then watched it go crashing to the floor.
Yet there was kindness and loyalty and a demand for justice in her that balanced the cruelties of her nature. She was never hesitant to speak up in defense of the weak or the oppressed. In her childhood the Utes were still slipping back into Brown’s Park to hunt and to dry their jerky. They camped at the mouth of Vermillion Creek, not too far from the Bassett ranch, and Ann would go down to play with the Indian children, just as Sam and Josie had. Because the Indians were her friends, she was always to defend them and espouse their cause, even in the face of the distrust and contempt that many whites felt for an “Indian-lover.” Actually, throwing stones and cursing the Hoys was a child’s way of thirsting for justice.
The children had a wonderful life. They worked hard, but they accepted this as natural. They also fell naturally into the fellowship of adults which their work earned them. Children were not segregated and given children’s activities in Brown’s Park. Instead, they were incorporated into the full life of the community and were genuine participants at the house parties, on the roundups, and at the horse races down on the old Indian track below Harry Hoy’s place.
The Bassett children had a particular possession of their own, a private retreat up in the great outcroppings of polished maroon rock behind their home. They could climb up the rocks to what they called “the cave,” although it was actually a geologic oddity more delightful than a cave. In past eons an ancient spring had poured its water on one of those huge slabs of rock until a perfect circle, almost six feet across, had been melted out of it. The water had hollowed out a large room beneath the opening and had carved a huge opening on one side. Sunlight streamed down through the roof and made patterns in the loose sand in which the children buried their treasures, and from their “picture window” they could see their whole world laid out below them. They played their games in a setting that seemed created just for the delight of children.
Even though strangers rode through the Park, and though peculiar characters sometimes camped in a secluded wash, there was no thought that the children should be sheltered from every possible harm. Once their chores were done, they could ride the hills as free as the jackrabbits that bounded away at their approach. The one incident that has come down to us in which this freedom might have been dangerous is found in Glade Ross’s files:
Sam and Josie went up Bull Canyon to get horses, Sam on a scrawny iron grey and Josie on a sorrel mare which looked good but was not as good a horse as she looked. As they were coming back down, a tall man—ugly, dirty, red stubble about an inch long, riding an old grey horse just about played out [stopped them]. He had corduoroy [sic] pants on, stuffed in his boot tops, no sign of a gun and no pack or supplies. The horse was shod. Said, “Sis, let’s trade horses.” Josie refused but he insisted, took her off her horse and changed saddles. Sam said, “Better let him do it, Jose,” but Josie was mad and really cussed him out. He said, “O.K. kids, I’ll see you around,” and left on her horse. No one knew who he was, and Mr. Bassett tried to find out but never did. Knew the country or he couldn’t have gone through the country so light and avoided everyone. The grey horse was much better than the sorrel and Josie had him several years until he died. Everyone kidded Josie about being quite a horse trader, but she didn’t like it.
The children’s most meaningful education was carried on informally in their own cabin as they listened to their father read aloud. There were readings from the Bible, of course, but also from Shakespeare, Emerson, Sir Walter Scott and all the other writers whose books filled Herb’s shelves. However, formal schooling was also provided for Brown’s Park children from the first possible moment after Herb’s arrival. He organized a public school in 1881, just after the first survey party came into the Park to establish the Colorado-Utah line. Herb had eked out the number of pupils required under Colorado law by enrolling his own Josie, even though she was still a bit under age, and rounding up Jimmie Reed’s half-Indian children.
The first school building was concocted from an abandoned barn belonging to the deceased Dr. Parsons, the doctor who had attended Ann’s birth. Herb partitioned off a section with a tarpaulin, covered the windows with oiled paper, and built a fireplace. A dugout down by the river was used during another school term. Eventually a real school building was erected, and the people had a community meeting place at last.
Elizabeth celebrated Christmas as lavishly as possible, baking pies and cookies, making candy and popcorn, and stringing berries from the wildrose bushes for the Christmas tree. Christmas once past, the children started their stint of formal education, which ended before the time for spring chores. The ranchers in the far reaches of the valley eventually built tiny cabins around the school where their children could stay for the three-month term under the care of a grandmother or an older sister. Josie recalled that during her first school year in the Park she was sent to stay nearer the school in the teacher’s crowded dugout, going home only for Saturday and Sunday.
As the family grew and the ranch prospered, the Bassetts’ original two-room cabin was expanded to a cross-shaped building of five spacious, many-windowed rooms, each with its own fireplace. It acquired a finished look, surrounded by hay meadows, vegetable gardens and well-constructed outbuildings. The apple orchard matured so that Elizabeth no longer had to ration out the store bought apples at one per child per day.
The cabin itself was charming. Herb had replaced the original hard dirt floor with puncheons, splitting green cottonwood logs and smoothing the thick slabs on each side with his broad-ax, then fitting them close together throughout the house. With the picturesque bear and buffalo skins scattered on the good puncheon floors, the beautiful old furniture from their Arkansas home, the truly impressive collection of books, and the marvelous organ that added so much to the lives of their neighbors, it became something of a local showplace. In addition to what the Bassetts had brought with them, Herb added to its beauty, as Ann relates:
Birch grew in profusion along all the streams. Rawhide was plentiful. He [Herb] solved our problems by making small tables and chairs of all sizes, using birch for the frames and rawhide strips for seats and backs. There were high chairs and easy ones, of the various types devised by his ingenuity. Cushions were of buckskin stuffed with milkweed floss. . . . The curtain problem was mother’s to solve, which she did with most satisfactory results. She traded Indian Mary ten pounds of sugar for a bale of fringed buckskins, smoked to a soft tan. Father fashioned rods of birch and
