eighty miles to the south over the Utah line in a place called Brown’s Hole.
Sam Bassett had been a teenager when he left the family home in Illinois. He had wandered the west from California back to the Dakotas as a miner, prospector, guide for travelers, and scout for General Miles of the Union Army. In 1852 he had done some prospecting in Brown’s Hole and had liked it well enough that he returned in 1854 to make it his headquarters between wanderings.
Brown’s Hole had been a rendezvous in the 1830s for the fur trappers. For a time there was a small trading post there named Fort Davy Crockett (nicknamed “Fort Misery”), but it vanished when the scarcity of game, as well as the fall from fashion of beaver hats, made trapping unprofitable. When Sam Bassett chose it as his headquarters, he became one of the first white men to live there permanently since the days of that early trading post.
Sam Bassett kept a journal during his early days in the west, and its disappearance is a tragedy, judging by the fragment that survived, quoted by Ann Bassett in her memoirs:
Browns Hole, November, the month of Thanksgiving, 1852. Louis [Simmons] and I “down in.” Packs off. Mules in lush cured meadow. Spanish Joe’s trail for travel could not be likened to an up-state high lane for coach-and-four. Mountains to the right of us, mountains to the left of us, not in formation but highly mineralized. To the South, a range in uncontested beauty of contour, its great stone mouth drinking a river. Called on neighbors lest we jeopardize our social standing. Chief Catump, and his tribe of Utes. Male and female he created them. And “Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed so fine.” Beads, bones, quills, and feathers of artistic design. Buckskins tanned in exquisite coloring of amazing hues, resembling velvets of finest texture. Bows and Arrows. “Let there be no strife between me and thee!”
Sam had kept in touch with his family over the years. He was a sociable, outgoing man who loved good company almost as much as he loved his solitary prospecting in the mountains; a reunion with his brother must have been a joyful moment for him. It would be equally joyful for Herb to meet again the brother who had written so eloquently of his adventures. The two tenderfeet from Arkansas most certainly did more listening than talking, for Sam was a guide to what they might expect to find when they reached California.
Since Sam had tried California and had not liked it, it is most probable that he discouraged them from going any farther west. Mountain man that he was, he would have told them that California was too crowded, that the good land was all gone, and that, along the coast at least, the air was too foggy for an asthmatic. With the enthusiasm that any man has for a spot he himself has chosen, he would have expounded on the beauty of his own Brown’s Hole, its comparative emptiness, its available ground, its mild winters and clean pure air.
Whatever their reasons, Herb and Elizabeth decided not to go on to California but to stay in Wyoming. Herb turned down Sam’s offer of hospitality in Brown’s Hole, however; he intended to live in town and look for a job compatible with his experience and education. Although he had grown up on a farm in Illinois and had the necessary knowledge to homestead, he lacked the physical stamina required. More importantly, he lacked the desire. Although he had described himself as “farmer” on his enlistment papers, he had actually been a schoolteacher in his youth, and his descendants remember him as a one-time teacher who was a “complete misfit” in Brown’s Park.
An undocumented source states that Herb worked a short while in Evanston, Wyoming, as a bookkeeper for a mercantile firm. His grandson, Crawford MacKnight, says he taught school for a term in Green River City. Neither job, however, would have been worthy of his capacities, and he must finally have decided that success in this new land could be found only in homesteading. So word was sent to Sam, and Sam came to guide their wagons on the journey to Brown’s Hole.
BROWN’S HOLE
Sạm Bassett must have shaken his head in disbelief when he saw the belongings that Herb and Elizabeth were bringing to a wilderness. There were spooled bedsteads and the feather mattresses to go on them; there were walnut bureaus from Elizabeth’s girlhood home. These were practical enough; for that matter, so was the huge iron cookstove, even though nothing like it had yet been seen in Brown’s Hole, where people still cooked over fireplaces. There were, however, box upon boxes of books, and more boxes of china, silver and dainty glassware. Most wondrous of all, there was an organ! To these had to be added the barrels of flour and sacks of coffee and sugar and beans, the kettles, the skillets, the axes, the hammers, the rifles and shot, the barrel of nails. Any supplies they did not take with them in those two wagons would have to wait until they returned to town in late autumn to buy their winter’s supplies.
They made their move at the earliest signs of spring, as soon as the mountain passes were clear of snow. There was an urgent reason for this—in less than two months Elizabeth was due to deliver their third child. Elizabeth’s own enthusiasm for this new endeavor can be judged by the fact that she was willing to take the risks of the trip and the hardships of homesteading in her late months of pregnancy.
The wagons swayed and bumped southward over rocks and through sagebrush, following the faint tracks made by those who had gone before. For long stretches they were on comparatively level ground, but for equally long stretches the track took them over formidable hills. Then, like those before them in the trek west, Elizabeth and the children would get down from the wagons, to lighten the load for the straining oxen on the inclines and to save themselves from a turnover on the downgrades if the brakes should fail. One can imagine her walking with a child by each hand, picking the easiest path, mindful of the cumbersome burden she carried within her and matter-of-factly adjusting herself to it.
Josie remembered that first trip:
I don’t know how many days we were coming—I just barely can remember it. I was four years old. And one reason I remember it so well, they had a team of oxen, and wasn’t I afraid of those oxen! Oh! But I rode with them—I rode with Uncle Sam Bassett and his oxen all the way. But when I was on the ground I wasn’t with them, I was someplace else. And that’s how I come to remember our trip so well.
There must have been almost a holiday feeling to their journey. Elizabeth was not a woman to be transformed into a semi-invalid by pregnancy. Strong and resilient, she could take discomfort in stride. When they made camp for the night and the men had the fire burning well, she would have helped cook the dinner and put the children to bed with a song. If the two men lingered at the campfire, she would have entered into the conversation as eagerly and as gracefully as if she were sitting safe and secure in her old Arkansas parlor. And it may have been at one of these campfires that Elizabeth started her campaign, often mentioned by old-timers, to change the name of Brown’s Hole.
Back in 1869 and 1871, a one-armed Union Army veteran named Major John Wesley Powell had made two voyages of scientific exploration down the hitherto uncharted Green River. In Brown’s Hole itself, the Bassetts were to know the Green as a strong but serene ribbon of water pursuing a snakelike course through the valley that the river itself had created. However, to the north and south of Brown’s Hole the Green was a treacherous man-eater. It charged through high-walled red-rock canyons so narrow that for miles there would be no place for a boat to land, and poured over rocky beds of boulders that created giant whirlpools. Before Powell’s expeditions, the river had been considered nearly unnavigable; it was, in fact, never completely mastered until the construction of Flaming Gorge Dam in the early 1960s.
Major Powell’s journals of his voyages had been widely published, and if the Bassetts had not read them back in Arkansas they surely must have read them in the days when they were planning to make their home on the banks of the very river of which Powell wrote. Elizabeth would have read the names that the poetically inclined Powell had given to the landmarks he passed, and would have learned that he had called her future home Brown’s Park rather than Brown’s Hole.
“Oh
