from his house with a log chain around his neck, one side of his head smashed, and part of a barrel-stave driven through his body. His wife and daughter were nowhere to be found. They had been carried off by the Ute attackers.
The horror of Meeker’s death and the resulting fear for their own skins left the whites throughout the area in a state of panic. While the soldiers were out chasing down the captors of the Meeker women, settlers from outlying areas were leaving their homes in droves. Those near the Rocky Mountains headed for Steamboat Springs, a new cattle town at the foot of the Rockies, or its older neighbor, the mining community up at Hahn’s Peak. South of Brown’s Park in Ashley Valley (later to become Vernal, Utah) the Mormons built a fort for their protection.
Although Brown’s Park was in the center of Ute country, its own permanent community of Utes seemed little affected by the happenings at White River. Still, the Brown’s Park people felt themselves naked against the threat of an uprising among their heretofore peaceful neighbors. All ranchers of this period lived with the threat, however obscure, of being the victims of some maverick Indian; the present situation was much more dangerous since a whole powerful tribe might unite to drive the white men out of their territory. Most of Brown’s Park’s population fled, although Indian-wise Uncle Sam Bassett trusted the good will of his Ute friends and stayed where he was. A good number stopped at the ranch of Charley Crouse’s brother-in-law, Billy Tittsworth, who lived halfway between the Park and Green River City. They stayed the winter with Billy, living on his supplies and keeping a sharp lookout for the red men with their scalping knives.
According to Josie, her mother was not afraid of the Indians but her father was. When Herb decided that he would take his family to the safety of Green River City, Elizabeth could not argue with the prudence of leaving. Abandoning their cattle and leaving most of their possessions in Sam’s keeping, they pushed hastily in a lightly loaded wagon down the valley and through the pass at Irish Canyon toward the security of town.
Homesteading had not been Herb’s first choice, and it is very possible that he was happy to leave Brown’s Park and had no real intention of ever returning. But Elizabeth had grown to love the valley, with the red bluffs of its foothills giving way to the green expanses of meadows along the river, and the high mountain ranges that seemed to shelter the valley whichever way she looked. She could have almost enjoyed the hardships of their first months, which demanded so much creativity and which challenged her capacities. It may have been the first time in Elizabeth’s life she had been given a chance to live up to her full potential, and it is difficult to believe that she was not heartbroken at their defeat.
NOTE
*The phrase “political refugees” is Ann Bassett’s. There was serious unrest in the New Mexico Territory for many decades after the Mexican war in 1846 as its Mexican inhabitants struggled against adverse political and economic conditions.
CATTLE FEVER
In all the unpeopled miles through which the Union Pacific Railroad passed, two separate towns were built only fifteen miles apart—Rock Springs and Green River City, Wyoming.
The first transcontinental railroad had been completed in 1869 when the Central Pacific, building from the west, and the Union Pacific, building from the east, had joined their rails with a golden spike at Promontory Point, Utah. As part of its contract to build the railroad, the Union Pacific had been given alternate sections of land along its right of way. As the construction crews moved across the country, the railroad established towns and sold the land for as little as seventy-five cents an acre, advertising for new settlers who would become customers for its freight and passenger cars.
When the construction crews reached the “dry country,” where the typical homesteader could not rely on crops of wheat and corn and barley, the Union Pacific continued to sell land and “choice lots” in its newly established towns; but the land could not sustain enough people to give the towns permanency and, when the construction crews moved on, they became ghost towns. The hopeful investors in “choice lots” moved away, damning the railroad for chicanery and perhaps themselves for gullibility.
Green River City, Wyoming, was spared this fate when the Union Pacific established its yards there permanently. Then the railroad established Rock Springs, where there was coal to be mined for its own use and for shipment to outside markets. Rock Springs was a profitable investment; by giving itself favorable rates on hauling coal, the Union Pacific could undercut its competitors.
Both Green River City and Rock Springs had the unrelieved drabness of any new town established in treeless country, but Rock Springs suffered the additional ugliness of the mine dumps which showered dust on the shoddy clapboard shacks thrown up hastily to house the miners. Green River City, on the other hand, was the county seat, very proud of itself and of its future. It was very nearly a “company town,” and its merchants almost “company merchants.” Because new businesses were discouraged, being considered dangerous to the financial well-being of the established concerns, ambitious newcomers necessarily turned to Rock Springs to set up their shops.
Keenly aware of the general unfavorable opinion of their town and anxious naturally to get on in the world, these merchants showed all the initiative that Americans are supposed to have, and proceeded to outsell and outsmart Green River City in every way. As time passed, they even used municipal funds to cut a good road through territory belonging to their neighboring state of Utah to entice Brown’s Parkers to buy their supplies in Rock Springs, instead of either Green River City or the new town of Craig, east of the Park in Colorado.
Although still ugly, Rock Springs today seems more alive and prosperous than the much more pleasant Green River (as it is now called), which is small, sleepy, and a little down-at-the-heels—the final blow to its importance having come as the Union Pacific’s role dwindled. However, at the time the Bassetts fled Brown’s Park it was indeed unfortunate that Herb’s quest for work landed them in dirty, dingy little Rock Springs. When they arrived in 1879, Rock Springs had a population of around three thousand, a disproportionate share of whom were “foreign labor,” brought in by the railroad to work in the mines while being squalidly housed, poorly treated, and abominably underpaid. The good housing for the “whites” was almost as squalid and at a premium, and opportunities for work were limited.
The Bassetts stayed in Rock Springs for over a year and a half before returning to Brown’s Park. There seems little question that Herb preferred town life, even in Rock Springs, to chopping brush on a homestead, and perhaps only a lack of funds prevented him from finally taking his family to California. Their eventual return to Brown’s Park must have been at Elizabeth’s insistence.
Elizabeth may have regretted their flight almost immediately, but it would have been impossible to return in the middle of that first winter, even after the threat from the Utes had subsided. Prudent people do not attempt to pull wagons through the snows of the Wyoming Basin if they can avoid it. Even if she took the winter’s delay philosophically, however, she could not have received the news of another pregnancy with joy, for it meant more wasted time. By the time Elbert, always called Eb, was born in June, the short summer season was too far advanced to reestablish themselves. Waiting through another winter must have been nearly unbearable to her, as she sat in a makeshift house in the primitive little mining town, watching cattlemen coming in for supplies.
Elizabeth had contracted a very severe case of “cattle fever,” the same fervid enthusiasm that was then infecting investors in Boston, in New York, and even in Scotland and England. In that vast, unsettled western territory belonging only to the United States government there were thousands of square miles of grassland that in previous ages had supported huge herds of buffalo. Since the buffalo had been all but exterminated, all those thousands of square miles were available for the raising of cattle.
Corporations
