The Bassett Women
Grace McClure
THE BASSETT WOMEN
Swallow Press/OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS
Athens
Copyright © 1985 by Grace McClure
All rights reserved
First printing 1985
97 96 7 6 5
Swallow Press / Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McClure, Grace
The Bassett Women.
Bibliography: p.
1. Women pioneers—Colorado—Biography. 2. Bassett family. 3. Cattle trade—Colorado—History—19th century. 4. Frontier and pioneer life—Colorado. 5. Colorado—History—1876-1950.
I. Title.
F781.B37M33 1985 978.8
813’ .52–dc 20
85–7143
CIP
ISBN 0-8040-0876-0 cloth
ISBN 0-8040-0877-9 paper
To Amy MacKnight Lube who opened the doors
CONTENTS
Apricot Brandy and Chokecherry Wine
Appendix: “Confidentially Told”
Locator Map of Brown’s Park Area
PREFACE
A good share of Western history is oral, based on stories of the old-timers passed from neighbor to neighbor and from one generation to the next. As these stories reached the printed page, they were only as reliable as the people who told them.
The story of the Bassett women has been almost smothered under a blanket of these half-true legends. Seemingly, at times the truth about them and their neighbors in Brown’s Park has been deliberately distorted for the sensationalism that sells most readily to the tabloids. They have become almost unrecognizable over the years.
Like other Western writers, I have relied heavily on oral interviews to guide my research in the courthouses, libraries and newspaper files of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. As I conducted interviews with the family and friends of the Bassett family, I promised no whitewash (nor did they ask for one) but only a balanced and authenticated account, substantiated by printed facts wherever possible.
My first inkling of the distortion of the Bassett story came from Amy MacKnight Lube of Vernal, Utah, when she characterized her notorious grandmother Josie Bassett Morris as a “little brown wren.” Our first interview was painful: I was uneasy at bringing up family history which might be embarrassing to her, and she viewed my tape recorder and notebook with suspicion, knowing the damage caused by other would-be reporters. Our later friendship and understanding is a source of great pleasure to me.
Through Amy Lube I met and interviewed her parents, Flossie and Crawford MacKnight of Jensen, Utah, and her brother and sisters: Frank McKnight of Vernal; Betty Eaton of Craig, Colorado; Belle Christenson of Encampment, Wyoming; Dorothy Burnham of Bountiful, Utah; and Jane Redfield of Salt Lake City. The life blood of this book came from the MacKnight family, and my gratitude is profound for their endless courtesy and patience.*
I interviewed three other members of the Bassett family: Elizabeth Bassett’s granddaughter, Edna Bassett Haworth of Grand Junction, Colorado; Arthur “Art” McKnight of Vernal, not a blood relative but the son of Josie’s first husband by a later marriage; and Edith McKnight Jensen, widow of Josie’s younger son, Chick.
Other people to whom I talked and from whom I received material will be named in other sections of this book or in the notes at its end, but special mention should be made of three contemporaries