and notebook with suspicion, knowing the damage caused by other would-be reporters. Our later friendship and understanding is a source of great pleasure to me.
Through Amy Lube I met and interviewed her parents, Flossie and Crawford MacKnight of Jensen, Utah, and her brother and sisters: Frank McKnight of Vernal; Betty Eaton of Craig, Colorado; Belle Christenson of Encampment, Wyoming; Dorothy Burnham of Bountiful, Utah; and Jane Redfield of Salt Lake City. The life blood of this book came from the MacKnight family, and my gratitude is profound for their endless courtesy and patience.*
I interviewed three other members of the Bassett family: Elizabeth Bassett’s granddaughter, Edna Bassett Haworth of Grand Junction, Colorado; Arthur “Art” McKnight of Vernal, not a blood relative but the son of Josie’s first husband by a later marriage; and Edith McKnight Jensen, widow of Josie’s younger son, Chick.
Other people to whom I talked and from whom I received material will be named in other sections of this book or in the notes at its end, but special mention should be made of three contemporaries of the Bassett sisters. First and foremost is Esther Campbell of Vernal. Although younger than Josie and Ann, she was a close friend to both of them in their later years. Her recollections of them, her collection of their personal letters to her, and her voluminous files of written material have been invaluable. Then there is Hugh Colton, a Vernal attorney still in practice. He was not a personal friend of Josie, but his recollections are one of the high points of my story. Mr. Colton referred me to Joe Haslem of Jensen, Utah, who knew both Josie and Ann, and who has earned the right of a good neighbor to speak of the sisters’ faults as well as their virtues.
Much important material comes from the sisters themselves. In her old age, Josie taped several interviews with the personnel at Dinosaur National Monument, who kindly opened their files to me. Josie’s own descriptions of her childhood, her neighbors, and some of the more lurid episodes in Brown’s Park history have given the spark of life and authenticity to what others have said about her and her family.
Ann Bassett Willis has left even more material, for she turned to writing in her later years. The most accessible of her memoirs is the autobiography entitled “Queen Ann of Brown’s Park” which appeared serially in 1952 and 1953 in The Colorado Magazine, the official publication of the State Historical Society of Colorado. The beginning chapters of another book, Scars and Two Bars, were published in The Moffat Mirror of Craig, Colorado, in the 1940s, and many of her letters and fragments of unpublished material are still in existence. Ann’s writings are a mixture of truth and fiction. She idealizes and embroiders upon her childhood in the interests of a good story. I have felt more comfortable with Ann’s stories when I have been able to find corroboration for them, and have used discretion in quoting her material.
A story based on tradition and hearsay should be presented for just what it is—a story of ordinary people who played extraordinary roles in the settlement of the west. The story does not lend itself to the precise and scholarly footnotes that are possible in biographies of persons who lived extensively in the public eye. Rather than clutter the text with source references, I have described the origins of my information in more generalized chapter notes at the end of the book.
I make no apologies for my speculations as to the motives, inner thoughts, and reactions of my characters. These are based on a certain amount of logic and an equal amount of intuition. This intuition comes almost automatically after many months of research and “Bassett talk” with a variety of people, some of whom loved the Bassett women, some of whom disapproved, and others who withheld judgment. As we talked, a shrug of the shoulder, a slight hesitation, an outpouring of emotion, or a side-stepping of a question gave me valuable clues.
The research for this book was pleasure. In the following months of the drudgery of putting it on paper, I was sustained and assisted by the editing and comments of my son Stephen McClure, my daughter-in-law Judith Flagle McClure, and my friend Marile Creager. Joseph D. Wells of Northridge, California, generously shared his editorial and publishing expertise. My debt to them is surpassed only by my gratitude to William L. Tennent of the Museum of Western Colorado and Dr. Gene M. Gressley of the University of Wyoming, not only for their willingness to check my book for historical accuracy but also for their enthusiasm and encouragement.
During the pre-publication period I have been supported magnificently by the Ohio University Press/Swallow Press editorial staff. However, they threw me into panic when they asked me for a map. My final thanks will go to Fred Tinseth, who rescued me with his imaginatively conceived and painstakingly executed drawing of Brown’s Park and the surrounding countryside.
GRACE MCCLURE
Tucson, Arizona
November 1984
NOTE
*The seeming discrepancy in spelling the family name which appears in this paragraph will appear throughout the book. Crawford always insisted on the Scottish “MacKnight.” All others, even his son Frank, held to the “McKnight” used by Crawford’s father.
INTRODUCTION
In the towns along the tracks of the Union Pacific Railroad in southern Wyoming, and down in the cattle country in Colorado and Utah, the locals still tell stories about the Bassetts. And when they do, they are talking about the Bassett women, those unorthodox and controversial Bassett women, compared to whom the Bassett men are almost shadows.
There were three of these women: the original pioneer, Elizabeth, and her two daughters, Josie and Ann. Elizabeth Bassett is remembered as “head of the Bassett gang.” Ann was first called “Queen of the Cattle Rustlers” by a Denver newspaper reporter, and she was known as “Queen Ann” forever after, partly because of her notoriety but also because her imperious ways and her regal bearing made the name a fitting one. The other daughter, Josie, gained her notoriety another way: in a time when divorce was almost unheard of among decent people, she acquired and discarded five husbands, at least one of whom she was suspected of killing. Still, Josie might now be forgotten except that, when almost forty years old, she piled her possessions into a wagon with a spare horse tied to its tailgate and left her childhood home in Brown’s Park to establish a homestead of her own. She found that homestead near Jensen, Utah, only forty miles away as the crow flies, but actually in almost another land because of the ruggedness and wildness of the intervening mountains. Josie lived there until her death almost fifty years later. As those years passed, she acquired the respectability of age (despite the stories still told about her) through the sheer strength of her personality, her generosity, her unaffected sense of humor, her companionability, and her stubborn insistence on living the way she wanted to. In her very old age she was as much a legend to the people of her countryside as was her sister Ann.
The Bassetts were early pioneers in a section of northwestern Colorado belonging topographically to the Wyoming Basin, a high arid land of broad plains, undulating hills and occasional outcroppings of rock. This vast, irregular bowl is bordered by high mountain ranges with snowy peaks and thick pine forests; within its boundaries it is divided again and again by lower ranges of bare brown mountains only occasionally relieved by the stunted cedars which grow in country where water is scarce. There is infinite variety in this land of canyons, mesas, ridges, peaks and mountains; there is also infinite monotony in the coloration of its brown grasses, dusty green sagebrush and sober-toned rock. It is magnificently and grimly beautiful. In its bareness and brownness the skeleton of the earth seems revealed.
The Wyoming Basin was the last frontier in “cattle country,” which extended as far south as Texas and as far east as Kansas and the Dakotas. In the late 1870s when the Bassetts arrived, the land west of the Rockies in Colorado was still reserved
