The first school building was concocted from an abandoned barn belonging to the deceased Dr. Parsons, the doctor who had attended Ann’s birth. Herb partitioned off a section with a tarpaulin, covered the windows with oiled paper, and built a fireplace. A dugout down by the river was used during another school term. Eventually a real school building was erected, and the people had a community meeting place at last.
Elizabeth celebrated Christmas as lavishly as possible, baking pies and cookies, making candy and popcorn, and stringing berries from the wildrose bushes for the Christmas tree. Christmas once past, the children started their stint of formal education, which ended before the time for spring chores. The ranchers in the far reaches of the valley eventually built tiny cabins around the school where their children could stay for the three-month term under the care of a grandmother or an older sister. Josie recalled that during her first school year in the Park she was sent to stay nearer the school in the teacher’s crowded dugout, going home only for Saturday and Sunday.
As the family grew and the ranch prospered, the Bassetts’ original two-room cabin was expanded to a cross-shaped building of five spacious, many-windowed rooms, each with its own fireplace. It acquired a finished look, surrounded by hay meadows, vegetable gardens and well-constructed outbuildings. The apple orchard matured so that Elizabeth no longer had to ration out the store bought apples at one per child per day.
The cabin itself was charming. Herb had replaced the original hard dirt floor with puncheons, splitting green cottonwood logs and smoothing the thick slabs on each side with his broad-ax, then fitting them close together throughout the house. With the picturesque bear and buffalo skins scattered on the good puncheon floors, the beautiful old furniture from their Arkansas home, the truly impressive collection of books, and the marvelous organ that added so much to the lives of their neighbors, it became something of a local showplace. In addition to what the Bassetts had brought with them, Herb added to its beauty, as Ann relates:
Birch grew in profusion along all the streams. Rawhide was plentiful. He [Herb] solved our problems by making small tables and chairs of all sizes, using birch for the frames and rawhide strips for seats and backs. There were high chairs and easy ones, of the various types devised by his ingenuity. Cushions were of buckskin stuffed with milkweed floss. . . . The curtain problem was mother’s to solve, which she did with most satisfactory results. She traded Indian Mary ten pounds of sugar for a bale of fringed buckskins, smoked to a soft tan. Father fashioned rods of birch and sawed rings from the leg bones of deer carcasses. When hung, these draperies were the cause of much complimentary comment.
The pleasant cabin saw many parties. It was the custom in the Park for the word to be sent out to everyone that so-and-so was entertaining, and people came from all over the valley for a dance that would go on until dawn. As the evening progressed, the children would be laid crosswise on the beds like so many sardines in a can as they fell asleep, one by one, listening to John Jarvie play his concertina or Herb Bassett his organ. Herb also loved to play the violin; when he later lost two fingers to blood poisoning he would have his grandsons tape the bow to his mutilated hand and then play until the tight bindings stopped his circulation. Guns were checked at the door at Brown’s Park parties, and any drinking was done in the barn. If a man took a few nips too many and became objectionable, he was relegated to the barn for the rest of the evening. There was no saloon atmosphere at these community parties, especially at the Bassetts’.
When it was another neighbor’s turn to have a party, the Bassetts piled their organ into their wagon and took it along. It is said that the organ traveled the rutted roads of the Park so often that it finally succumbed from overexertion. Its passing was mourned by everyone, for its music had given beauty to people who would travel thirty miles by wagon for one of these lively parties.
THE HARVEST
As the country opened up and more people came in, Brown’s Park was still at the end of the world. It was not until 1890 that a permanent post office was established there, replacing an unreliable mail delivery (which had ended completely two years before) to John Jarvie’s store at the far west end of the Park. Herb was appointed postmaster of “Lodore,” Colorado in January of 1890. The government’s mistake in spelling the name made the post office no less welcome.
Herb built a separate cabin to serve as post office and store stocked with a modest selection of supplies. The mail was brought in each week from May-bell, Colorado, a miniscule hamlet sixty miles away, delivered to Herb by a carrier who spent the night at the Bassett ranch before making his return trip. The carrier usually forded Vermillion Creek or rode across the ice during the winter. Since fording was dangerous during the spring runoffs, Herb devised a pulley system to be used at such times. The mail was transported across the creek to him by use of this pulley, and he in turn sent blankets and food to the carrier, who was forced to spend the night in the open.
Herb loved his post office. Gradually he moved in his books and newspapers, turning it into his own private retreat. It gave him a personal responsibility of his own, unconnected with Elizabeth’s ranching operation.
In that same year of 1890, Herb also applied for an Army pension based on his old “debility.” The records of the National Archives are not clear as to exactly when this pension began to be paid, but most probably the first checks were spent on school tuition for Josie. She had been sent to board in Craig to acquire the high school education not available in Brown’s Park. Then, in 1890, she was enrolled in St. Mary’s of the Wasatch in Salt Lake City.
Josie loved St. Mary’s and loved the nuns. Reared on the classics and good poetry and always a receptive student, she responded well to the educational standards and insistence on “social polish” in this excellent Catholic convent school. Both parents must have taken pride in her good record at the school, and Herb may have hoped that perhaps, given an understanding of potentials in life outside the Park, Josie might escape completely. He had never been happy there, and he wanted better things for his children. Unfortunately, Herb’s hopes were never to be fulfilled. His children were all given educations far beyond the norm of the times, but they were to love ranch life as much as their supremely contented mother.
In the autumn of 1892, as she looked at what she had achieved in their twelve years of homesteading, Elizabeth had good reason for her contentment. She and her friends had weathered the terrible blizzards of 1886 and ’87 that had wiped out Middlesex; the threat of Two-Bar was well contained, and Brown’s Park had been more or less converted into a cattle “empire” belonging to the ranchers who lived there. Herb had his post office and his pension, which relieved the constant search for hard cash that was the affliction of most small ranchers. And Elizabeth and her good friends Isom, Matt and young Jim McKnight had reached a level where they were all prospering. She must have looked at their comfortable home, their well-fenced fields, and their strong herd of cattle on the range, and reflected with pride that her labors had been fruitful and the future was secure. Being Elizabeth, she must also have had many more plans for the future.
But sometimes the unthinkable happens.
In December 1892, just as Elizabeth would normally have been starting her Christmas preparations, she took to her bed with an illness, the cause of which is still obscure. At the end of two weeks, Elizabeth—so full of vigor and boundless energy, at the height of her capacities, only thirty-seven years old—was dead.
Josie was to say later that appendicitis killed her mother, but Ann’s story to Esther Campbell, which seems to fit more closely with the available facts, was that Elizabeth had a miscarriage.
While still in bed, her favorite milk cow was caught up in a herd of cattle being rounded in the Park. In a fury, Elizabeth rose from her bed, saddled her horse, and gave chase. She retrieved her cow and cut it out of the intruder’s herd, but at the cost of her life. As Josie described it:
She went to bed at night all right, and woke up about four o’clock in the morning just deathly sick. Just terribly sick. Father was there and Jim