hear Uncle Sam say hole? I thought we were going to live in a park! To live in a park would be so much nicer, wouldn’t it?”
Elizabeth mounted an unremitting campaign, and she won it. At her insistence, neighbors began to use Major Powell’s name for their valley, and in doing so they forgot the major completely, giving Elizabeth sole credit for the more euphonious name.
On the fourth or fifth day the wagons entered the eastern end of Brown’s Park (as it shall be called from now on) through Irish Canyon. Then they turned west to reach Uncle Sam’s cabin, located eighteen or so miles up the valley. As they traveled they surely must have stopped at any cabins along the way, despite Elizabeth’s advanced pregnancy. In Arkansas she might have followed the custom that required pregnant women to retire from public view, but in isolated Brown’s Park that custom would have seemed rather silly. The shared experiences of the handful of people living there were to create an intimacy in which old customs, old backgrounds, and disparities of education and personality became insignificant. Their lives were to be so intertwined that the Bassetts’ neighbors are essential to the Bassett story.
The first homestead on their way belonged to José (“Joe”) and Pablo Herrera, two brothers who had fled New Mexico as political refugees.* After a period of time in which they had lived by their wits and their success in the gambling halls in Wyoming, they had come to Brown’s Park and established themselves with the help of fellow Mexicans who worked for not much more than their board and room. They carried on a brisk trade with the Utes for their exquisitely tanned buckskin, did a great deal of drinking and gambling, and offered an open house to anyone who happened to drift into the Park. A photograph still in existence shows José Herrera to be a burly, handsome Castilian, well-dressed to the point of foppishness, with an air of strength and breeding. It is difficult to reconcile the sophisticated man of this picture with the one who, J.S. Hoy said, would start sharpening a long knife while talking to someone who disagreed with him.
One of the Herreras’ drinking companions and full-time lodgers was A. B. Conway, a practicing lawyer in Iowa before personal problems sent him west. Conway eventually abandoned an aimless and alcohol-dominated existence in Brown’s Park and went on to become “Judge Conway,” Chief Justice of the Wyoming Supreme Court. When he died, the eulogies of his admiring fellow citizens rang across his grave. This brilliant man’s fondness for the Herrera brothers would indicate that, villains though they might be in the eyes of some of their strait-laced Anglo-Saxon neighbors, they were still men of polish. Indeed, in the years before the Herreras returned to New Mexico to engage once more in political agitation on behalf of their fellow Mexicans, the well-bred and well-educated Bassetts counted them as friends.
The wagons then passed the Hoy Meadows on their trip up the valley, although it is possible that Sam would not have bothered to stop here. There were five Hoys—four brothers and an uncle—holding choice meadow lands along the Green River. They claimed to be the first to set up a ranching operation in the Park (the Hoys would not have considered the Mexican Herreras “ranchers”) and had originally hoped to hold the Park as their private domain, attempting to shut out any competition from incoming homesteaders. This had proved to be impossible, but they still stayed more or less to themselves and were not intimate with their neighbors.
There were others in the Park whose names will appear from time to time in the Bassett story. There was the Spicer family, and there were the two Australians, Griff and Jack Edwards, and Jimmie Reed, who was living in a dugout at the lower end of the Park with his Indian wife and their children. There were Scotsman John Jarvie and his wife Nellie, who ran a trading post up at the far west end of the Park. Jarvie was later to build a storage house of stone, reputedly cut by an ex-convict destined to be hanged from the Bassetts’ corral gate.
Another neighbor in those early days was James Goodman, a member of Major Powell’s expedition down the Green who had come back to settle on this peaceful section of the wild and treacherous river he had helped explore. The Bassetts also soon met “Buffalo Jack” Rife, who was eventually joined by his brothers Ed and Bill. At this time Jack was a bachelor cowboy working up on Diamond Mountain for Jim Warren. He later gained the nickname “Buffalo Jack” by establishing a private sanctuary for the few remaining buffalo, paying the Indians in salt and other supplies to leave them unharmed. His boss, Jim Warren, was an ex-priest (presumably Catholic) and an ex-rustler who had turned rancher when he met and married a good and moral woman.
Soon to come to the Park was another man whose name will appear over and over in the Bassett story: Charley Crouse from Trap Hill, North Carolina. At the time the Bassetts arrived, Charley had a ranch on nearby Diamond Mountain but he moved down into the Park within a year or so. Charley Crouse was an uncouth, rough-talking, hard-drinking semiliterate who had run away from home at the age of nine. His ruling passion was good horseflesh, and he raised fine horses that he took as far away as Nebraska to race for large stakes. When his horses won, Charley was in the money; when they lost, he was not above appropriating a few loose cattle to mend his faded fortunes. Matt Warner, an outlaw who was in and out of Brown’s Park, referred to Charley in his memoirs as “that lovable old rustler.”
Charley was erratic and more than slightly dishonest, but he was a good businessman. He raised three good children, although the credit for this was given to his wife Mary, daughter of a Mormon convert from England. Mary was well thought of by everyone in the valley, for she was a fine woman who involved herself in all the acts of neighborliness that are so important in a frontier community. Genteel Mary Crouse may have suffered from living with a man whom Joe Haslem describes as “meaner than a bitch wolf in a rainstorm,” a man who called his own sons “the red-headed bastard” and “the black-eyed son of a bitch.” However, he provided a good living for her, and her own good reputation gained both of them an entree into Brown’s Park polite society. Although Charley participated in that polite society, he much preferred a bottle of whiskey and a game of cards with the men who lived in his bunkhouse.
These people considered themselves neighbors, even though their homes were spread out over an area of almost three hundred square miles. Elizabeth’s most important neighbors in those early days were the Yampatika Utes who camped on the banks of Willow Creek only a stone’s throw from Sam’s cabin. In times to come, Elizabeth was sustained by the Ute squaws and educated by them in wilderness ways, and Josie and young Sam played with the Ute children. The bonds of neighborliness were strong between the Bassetts and the Indians as long as the Utes were free to return to Brown’s Park.
When Elizabeth first saw Uncle Sam’s cabin she must have fallen silent until she remembered her manners. (Josie remembered it as “a funny little old log cabin with two rooms, no floors, no windows.”) Uncle Sam may also have been dismayed as he looked at his bachelor’s quarters and then at the two wagons full of belongings, the two extra adults, and the two lively little imps who undoubtedly started climbing on his bed, getting into his tobacco jar, and fingering his guns and hunting knives within five minutes of their arrival.
The plan had always been, of course, to erect a cabin for the new arrivals. Although surely it must have been begun, the cabin was not finished a month later, on May 12, 1878, when Elizabeth delivered the first white child to be born in Brown’s Park. The infant, Ann, was an active, intense little mite who pulled strongly at Elizabeth’s breast and screamed with rage when her hunger was not satisfied. Perhaps because of her spartan life, Elizabeth’s breasts did not fill and she had no milk for the baby. Potential disaster was averted, according to Ann’s memoirs, when Buffalo Jack Rife stopped by:
A troop of Ute Indians were camped about two hundred yards from the cabin, among these was an Indian mother, See-a-baka, who had a new-born papoose. Buffalo Jack Rife, good old “Buff”, spoke their language like a Ute, so after consultation with Dr. Parsons [this elderly doctor died the next year, to everyone’s sadness, since there never again was to be a medical man in residence] he held a pow-wow with Chief Marcisco and Medicine Man Mush-qua-gant, “Star.”
