In this rustlers’ hangout, surrounded by warring cattlemen, the Bassetts lived in a world of rustling and thievery, of lynching and other forms of murder. Their neighbors could comprise the standard cast of a Hollywood western: honest ranchers, rough and tough cowboys, worthless drifters, dastardly villains, sneaking rustlers, gentlemanly bank robbers, desperate outlaws, and ruthless cattle barons. Most Americans assume this world vanished long ago, yet people alive today remember Queen Ann striding along in her custom-made boots and Josie riding to town for supplies with her team and wagon.
Ann died in 1956 when the Korean War was already part of history. When Josie followed her in 1964, the race to put a man on the moon had already begun. Both women were raised in a wilderness but lived to see an atomic, electronic world. Both women brought to that new world a combination of pioneer values and an utter disregard for any conventions that ran counter to their own standards of right and wrong. They were sometimes condemned by their more conservative contemporaries—understandably so, for what they did was not always admirable. They lived their lives as they wished, doing what they wanted to do or what they felt they were compelled to do, with never a serious qualm when they overstepped the bonds of “proper” society.
Since the day when the Pilgrims first stepped on Plymouth Rock, an independent woman has been no rarity in a country which always had a new frontier. Courage, resourcefulness and strength of will were necessities in wilderness communities, and people who possessed these qualities were valued and respected regardless of their sex. It is not surprising that the first crack in the wall of political discrimination against women appeared in frontier Wyoming, where in 1869 the territorial legislature gave women the right to vote in territorial elections. When those Wyoming women went to the polling booths, they were the first women in the United States—even the first in all the world-to cast ballots.
Elizabeth and her daughters were not active feminists; rather, they were pupils of the feminists who had prepared the way for them. And they were apt pupils. They were unusually independent and exceptionally autonomous, for even on the Wyoming frontier the typical woman was a follower of her man, not his leader. If the Bassett women seem forerunners of the feminists of the 1980s, it is because they were indeed in advance of their times in seizing the freedom which the frontier offered. Even so, their story would not be worth the telling if it were not for their personal qualities—audacity and strong will, high temper and obstinacy, good humor and open-handedness, unashamed sexuality—qualities that their contemporaries summed up as “the Bassett charm.”
Josie’s cabin still stands and can be seen today in Dinosaur National Monument in northeastern Utah. When the old lady died, the National Park Service bought the five acres she still owned and added them to its three hundred square miles of mountains and barely accessible canyons carved out by the Green and Yampa Rivers. The homestead is on the fringe of this wilderness, as is the Monument’s museum, a huge, greenhouselike structure covering the remnants of the vast cache of dinosaur bones which gave the Monument its name.
Twice a day the Park Service loads tourists onto a large open-sided bus and takes them out along the Green River, past the red sandstone bluffs with their pictographs left by long-gone Indian tribes, and down across Cub Creek to Josie’s homestead.
While the tourists are still on the bus, the Ranger uses his loudspeaker to tell them the legend of Josie Morris. “She was raised in an outlaws’ hangout . . . Some people say that Butch Cassidy was one of her sweethearts . . . . She was married five times, and there’s a story that she took a shot at one of her husbands but she denied it—she said that if she had been the one to shoot him she wouldn’t have missed. . . . Perhaps she got tired of men, for she came here when she was almost forty years old and lived out here—alone—for fifty years, with no running water, no electricity, no telephone. A real pioneer.”
The outlines of a carefully laid out working ranch still show despite the years of disuse and the tangle of late-summer weeds. The Park Service has done little to preserve the place except to board up the cabin’s windows and put a plywood canopy over the roof to protect it from the heavy winter snows. Even so, it is obvious that this is no hermit’s shack, no squatter’s cabin.
Peering through the slits in the boarded-up windows, one sees a smallish, square living room with a good brick fireplace and the faded remnants of once-gay blue wallpaper. To one side of this main room is a kitchen, to the other are two small bedrooms. There are porches on two sides of the cabin. On one of these Josie used to sleep, even during the bitter winter months.
Outside, a log fence still bars the mouth of the box canyon where Josie penned her livestock, although the canyon itself is now a thicket of brush and young trees. In what was once her garden area, old fences sag from the weight of her grapevines turned wild. The orchard is a graveyard of gnarled, dying trees. Wild watercress grows in the damp soil near the spring which still fills the pond where Josie kept ducks and geese, before spilling into the meadows below. The chicken house and an old corral still stand, but the springhouse where she stored her butter and the sty where she kept “Miss Pig” can only be imagined.
The Park Service’s benign neglect has given a poignant authenticity to what remains of Josie’s homestead. The visitors walk and speak softly, as if from respect for the pervading quiet of the place, a quiet broken only by the gurgle of the spring water from an old iron pipe. One can imagine the loneliness of living in such a silent place and the serene strength of the woman who could endure that silence. The silence is provocative, raising questions that the Ranger’s rehearsed information does not answer, questions as to what kind of woman Josie really was and where she came from.
If the ghost of Josie Morris could be asked those questions, it is doubtful that she could provide answers, for Josie was always too busy to spend much time on idle introspection.
And if Queen Ann’s ghost were at Josie’s side, her answer might only raise more questions. “She was a Bassett! A Bassett of Brown’s Park!” To Ann, that would explain everything.
The Bassett Women
ARKANSAS TRAVELERS
A highly unlikely partnership began in Hot Springs, Arkansas, on September 21, 1871, when Amos Herbert Bassett took Mary Eliza Chamberlin Miller to be his bride. The incongruity of their marriage is equalled only by the incongruity of their later migration to a Western wilderness where Herbert was to endure manfully his distaste for pioneer life and his wife, joyfully accepting that life, was to become known as “head of the Bassett gang.”
Herb was born on July 31, 1834, in Brownsville, Jefferson County, New York, where his forebears had lived for generations. At some time in his younger years the family moved to Sweetwater, Menard County, Illinois. In 1862 he was twenty-nine years old, living on the family farm and teaching school in the winter, when he responded to President Lincoln’s call for thirty thousand volunteers from the President’s home state. Private Herbert Bassett served in Company K of the 106th Regiment of “Lincoln’s Brigade.” Since he was a musician, he was assigned to the company band with the official title of Drummer.
While in the Army, Herb was beset by the ill health which later caused him to move to the west. In 1863, barely a year after his enlistment, he suffered from what Army records call a “debility” and was sent home on sick furlough for a month or so. At the end of the war Herb, still a private, was mustered out at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and chose to stay in that part of the country, very possibly because he had found a Southern branch of his family living there. The name of Bassett is found in Arkansas county records as far back as 1833. This kinship with an old pioneer family evidently smoothed his way despite his being a Yankee, for he eventually became Clerk of the Court, a respected and even powerful position in the communities of the last century.
Herb