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ARKANSAS TRAVELERS
A highly unlikely partnership began in Hot Springs, Arkansas, on September 21, 1871, when Amos Herbert Bassett took Mary Eliza Chamberlin Miller to be his bride. The incongruity of their marriage is equalled only by the incongruity of their later migration to a Western wilderness where Herbert was to endure manfully his distaste for pioneer life and his wife, joyfully accepting that life, was to become known as “head of the Bassett gang.”
Herb was born on July 31, 1834, in Brownsville, Jefferson County, New York, where his forebears had lived for generations. At some time in his younger years the family moved to Sweetwater, Menard County, Illinois. In 1862 he was twenty-nine years old, living on the family farm and teaching school in the winter, when he responded to President Lincoln’s call for thirty thousand volunteers from the President’s home state. Private Herbert Bassett served in Company K of the 106th Regiment of “Lincoln’s Brigade.” Since he was a musician, he was assigned to the company band with the official title of Drummer.
While in the Army, Herb was beset by the ill health which later caused him to move to the west. In 1863, barely a year after his enlistment, he suffered from what Army records call a “debility” and was sent home on sick furlough for a month or so. At the end of the war Herb, still a private, was mustered out at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and chose to stay in that part of the country, very possibly because he had found a Southern branch of his family living there. The name of Bassett is found in Arkansas county records as far back as 1833. This kinship with an old pioneer family evidently smoothed his way despite his being a Yankee, for he eventually became Clerk of the Court, a respected and even powerful position in the communities of the last century.
Herb has been described as a “little old maid of a man.” He was only five or six inches over five feet tall, and his legs seemed too short for his torso. Aside from that he was handsome, with thick and curly dark hair, strong features, and well-set blue eyes. Herb’s education was better than average and he was a competent musician on both piano and violin. He was deeply religious but not puritanical; although strongly disapproving of tobacco and alcohol, he enjoyed dancing and playing cards, if no money changed hands. He was gentle, kind and good-humored, and despised arguments. Unfortunately, considering the life which lay ahead of him, he appears to have been a passive man with no qualities of leadership.
Mary Eliza (she preferred to be called Elizabeth) had been born in Hot Springs County on August 25, 1855. She was a spirited girl and so voluble a conversationalist that the Utes were later to call her “the Magpie.” According to contemporary descriptions, she had the graciousness that marks a Southern gentlewoman, and an inborn magnetism. With this magnetism, an iron will, strong ambition, and indomitable determination to get her way, she controlled the people around her by so intriguing their imaginations that they willingly followed her. She was normally affable and serene, but when she lost her temper she was violent.
Elizabeth and her sister were very young when their parents died, and the girls were raised by their maternal grandfather, Judge Crawford Miller, a breeder of thoroughbred horses. Surprisingly, they were raised with his name. This suggests that something more than an ordinary tragedy may have caused their parents’ death. Judge Miller had come from around Newark, Virginia (Elizabeth was always proud of being from one of Virginia’s “First Families”), and it is curious that a lineage-conscious Southerner would deprive his granddaughters of their father’s name. Elizabeth’s daughter Josie was later to tell a grandchild that there was a suicide in each generation of the family. Josie gave no details, but she may have been referring to old and better-forgotten violence. Elizabeth herself possessed qualities which, given bad fortune, could have led her to disaster. But her fortune was good—she married Herb Bassett, who was always to be her balance wheel, even when he could not control her.
If there is a mystery surrounding Elizabeth’s parents, there is an equal mystery surrounding her marriage to Herb. Why would the attractive teenage daughter of a well-to-do family marry a graying, middle-aged man?
Perhaps the orphaned girl saw in this kindly and gentle man the father she had never known, although that answer seems rather superficial for someone as complicated as Elizabeth.
Mary Eliza, herself better-educated than many women of the time, would have been contemptuous of a very commonly held opinion that an educated female ran the risk of a withered uterus if uncommon strain were put on her brain. She would have been in complete sympathy with the growing tide of feminism and of women’s demands for educational opportunity and equal treatment under the law. At the same time, she was always a lady with strict ideas of propriety, and would have been completely out of sympathy with Victoria Woodhull, who was espousing “free love” on the lecture platforms in the east, and with Amelia Bloomer, who had urged women to replace their petticoats with pants.
A deeper look at Herb shows a man who was progressive and liberal for his time. In later years, for example, he considered his daughters’ education as important as his sons’. Herb must have reflected Elizabeth’s own ideas—progressive, but conventionally so. She would have felt safe with him, knowing he would treat her as a person of intelligence, despite her womanhood. Moreover, she could trust him to give her the freedom to express herself in her own way and for her own purposes. Her self-awareness must have made it clear to her that she could never tolerate domination. Herb’s very passivity and lack of force may have attracted her.
When they married, Herb was thirty-seven years old; Elizabeth had just turned sixteen. Judging by reports of their later years, it was a love match on both sides, which bore up well even under any painful stresses caused by their differences of character.
They settled down in Hot Springs to the life typical of a well-bred couple in comfortable circumstances. In 1874, three and a half years after their marriage, their daughter Josephine (Josie) was born. Less than two years later Elizabeth delivered their first son, to whom they gave the family name of Samuel. Life could have continued in a placid routine except that Herb’s health had seriously deteriorated in Arkansas, where the summers are humid and the winters cold but no less humid. Herb described his physical condition when he applied for an Army pension:
Was treated in Arkansas 20 years ago for liver and heart trouble—had chills and fever frequently for several years after the war was over—was treated by Dr. Henry C. Baker who stated that my liver was in very bad condition—that the chills and fever that I had were very hard to control. While he was treating me I had a very hard chill which threatened congestion and he advised me to leave there at once. I sold out and came here [Brown’s Park] in April 1878.
In addition to his “debility,” which was probably malarial, Herb was asthmatic. The doctors of those times could offer little help to tuberculous or asthmatic patients except to prescribe a change of climate. It is said that half the people in early Colorado had come there because of “pulmonary afflictions” that might benefit from the dry mountain air.
As if Herb’s chills, fever and attacks of asthma were not enough to disturb the couple’s tranquillity, in 1874, after six years as Clerk of the Court, he lost his job, possibly because of a change in political climate occurring at the end of postwar Reconstruction in Arkansas. At the time they made their decision to migrate to the west in 1877, Herb may have realized that his future in Arkansas could never hold more than an obscure clerical job or, even worse, working on Judge Miller’s horse farm. Elizabeth, with her drive and ambition, may have urged the migration. At the least she would have cooperated enthusiastically in this search for better fortune.
It would seem that they had no firm plan in mind when they boarded the train that would take them west. Family tradition says that their destination was California (another popular haven for asthmatics) but it is very probable that when they left Arkansas they were still not sure where their home was to be. In any event, they broke their journey at Green River City,
