talk, it was decided to permit the squaw to become my wet nurse and me to become a foster twin to her papoose, a boy named Kab-a-weep, meaning Sunrise.
Indians do not coddle newborn infants by covering the head. I’ve been told it was storming when they carried me to the Indian wickiup, and I can imagine how I must have blinked and grimaced as the snow settled on my little face.
It was the custom of the Indians to move from the river bottoms where they wintered, to cooler summer camp grounds on the mountain tops. For that reason my Uncle Sam built the “double cabins” for mother at the head of Willow Creek, so she could be near my foster mother. To this cabin See-a-baka came at regular intervals to feed me. I nursed her for six months, until cow’s milk could be provided. It was Judge Conway who rounded up a milk cow and presented her to me, so I got into the cow business at a decidedly early age.
Uncle Sam had built the cabin up on Willow Creek by the time the milk cow arrived, but the location of the cabin satisfied neither Herb nor Elizabeth. This was the least of their problems, however; more depressing was the scanty and monotonous diet. Sam had helped select the food supplies they had brought to the Park—beans, flour, coffee, sugar, pork sideback. Sam lived on these staples and may have been satisfied, since they could always be supplemented by game he shot. To Herb and Elizabeth the menu was unappetizing, and for the little children it was a disaster. Judge Conway’s milk cow must have been a godsend to them all.
Elizabeth’s experience on an established farm in civilized Arkansas could not have prepared her for that first summer, with two small children, a newborn baby, and a sickly middle-aged husband whose muscles had yet to be hardened after years of sedentary life. Sam surely must have helped, but he was neither rancher nor farmer, and preferred prospecting in the mountains. It was late in the growing season by the time Herb cleared enough ground for a vegetable garden of sorts. Because their future was to be in raising cattle, they bought a few head and began the task of learning what to do with them. The cattle were too precious to be used for food, and if Elizabeth did not already know how to use a rifle she must have learned that summer so that she could shoot wild game. The Indians showed her how to make jerky from the deer she shot and told her which fruits and roots were edible among the wild things growing on the mountains.
Somehow they survived the winter, although old-timers have reminisced that the Bassetts were sometimes hungry. The Park women helped as they could; if someone were coming the Bassetts’ way, they would send along a few eggs or a loaf or two of bread, whatever they could spare. Such things were offered with tact, as gifts from one neighbor to another. With that same tact Elizabeth brought gifts in later years to other struggling newcomers.
The second summer was better. Herb’s health had improved and Elizabeth was acclimated. They had a proper garden, and the problem of food became less pressing. Then in late September of 1879, just as they believed the worst was over, news reached the Park of the Meeker Massacre at the White River Agency station only seventy-five miles away.
This uprising of the Utes resulted in the cancellation of the trust fund set up by treaty and the loss of hunting privileges in their traditional territory in western Colorado. The massacre was used as proof by both the white settlers and the government back in Washington that the Indians could not be trusted to keep the peace. Yet in truth the tragedy was the direct result of what could be described as acts of war by a white man, the Indian agent Nathan Meeker, who had almost life-and-death control over the reservation.
Nathan Meeker was an author and journalist who, under the sponsorship of Horace Greeley (owner of the New York Tribune and coiner of the phrase, “Go west, young man, go west!”), had founded Union Colony on the plains of northeastern Colorado, now the prosperous city of Greeley. His colony was to be run on idealistic principles based to a certain extent on the ideas of the French socialist Fourier, who advocated communal endeavor and equal sharing of communal income. A visionary and a romantic, Meeker turned out to be a very poor businessman.
At the end of five years, Union Colony was on the verge of collapse from drought and devastating grasshopper plagues, as well as from Meeker’s inexperience and mismanagement. Moreover, his excessive moralism was splitting the Colony apart. According to Marshall Sprague, author of Massacre, a definitive book on Meeker, he not only opposed tobacco, liquor, gambling, billiards, dancing and the theatre, but also believed that fishing was cruel to trout and picking wildflowers was childish. His self-righteousness was abrasive as he imperiously insisted upon imposing his extreme ideas.
Meeker personally was ruined financially, and was being sued by Horace Greeley’s estate for repayment of loans. (Greeley had died not long after the Colony was founded.) To rescue himself, he applied for the job of Indian agent and was appointed in May 1878. Meeker believed that the only solution to the “Indian problem” was to “civilize” them. He was determined to turn the Utes into farmers as quickly as possible.
The Ute Nation had been getting along quite well with the white men. The principal chieftain, Ouray, realizing the folly of resisting iron cannon, had generally kept the tribal hotheads under control. The Utes continued to wander freely in their old hunting grounds, supplementing the dwindling game supply with the rations distributed by the Agency. Their principal occupation was still hunting, and their hunting was profitable to them, for there was a great demand for their beautifully tanned buckskin, which, according to Dr. Meeker’s own statement, sold for $1000 a ton at the railhead. Yet in the report that Meeker sent to Washington (in August 1879, just prior to his murder), he showed no desire to build on the Utes’ traditional talents. Instead, he complains of their refusal to plow, to plant, to send their children to school, to forsake their customary hunting expeditions, even as he comments that farm equipment is inadequate and out-of-date, that the schoolroom is rude and ill-equipped, and that the seed furnished by the government had been full of cockleweeds. He suggested a solution to his strongest complaint, that the Utes went hunting:
If government would take away all the horses in the vicinity, except such as could be useful, the Indians would not go abroad; and if cattle were given instead they would, or could, or should engage in a profitable industry, and one to which they take readily and naturally. To permit any class of human being to do as they please, and, at the same time to be supplied with food, inevitably leads to demoralization. After I get hold of these Indians I can tell a great deal better what can be made of them. I should like to have plenty of land in cultivation, with tools all ready; take away their horses; then give the word that if they would not work they should have no rations. As to how much they would work and produce in such a case, and as to how fast they would adopt a civilized life, is merely to speculate, but my impression is they would not starve.
One of Meeker’s early acts had been to plow forty acres and plant it in potatoes although there had been “opposition from the Indians to the occupancy of this valley, since its use to them had been for winter grazing of their horses.” Moreover, contemporary accounts say that he ordered their race track plowed up—the track for the displays of horsemanship that were so important to their culture—because they ran races on the Sabbath. Then the well-meaning tyrant ordered that only heads of families could collect the rations on which they depended so heavily, meaning that if the men went hunting, their wives at home would go hungry.
During the summer of 1879 there was increasing petty vandalism against the white settlers throughout the Ute territory. In August the older and wiser heads of the tribe went to Denver to discuss their grievances with the knowledgeable and sympathetic Governor Pitkin. The governor understood the gravity of their complaints and the possible consequences, but he was helpless in the face of the chains of command in the federal bureaucracy. By September the Utes were disillusioned by the lack of response to their peaceful complaints and wild with anger at the man who had so sanctimoniously trampled on their traditions.
The final straw was the news that soldiers were being sent to the reservation to keep order. On hearing this, a radical group of Utes attacked and killed all nine white men stationed at the White
