Cattle Kate (17 page)

We nodded to each other and then went back to our picking, and when I had enough, I turned to go back to the house and they were already gone. I wondered what they were going to do with their berries—I was making jam, but that certainly didn't seem like something that would happen in an Indian camp.

“I don't even know if Indians like jam,” I said to myself out loud.

Well, I was right. The berries made the most beautiful and delicious jam, and I had four pints sitting out cooling the next day when there was a knock on my cabin door, and I found the Indian girl standing outside. She smiled at me shyly, and then held out her hand. In it was a piece of cloth, dyed red, and I realized this was what they did with their berries—they made colored cloth. She shoved the piece toward me and I understood it was a gift, and I thought, won't this look nice on my table.

I took the cloth and smiled at her and waved my arm to ask her inside, but she shook her head and started to leave.

“Wait,” I yelled, and it made her stop, even if she didn't know the word. “Here, I hope you like jam.” I handed her one of my pints. And the smile on her face convinced me that Indians like jam as much as we do.

“Ella,” I patted my chest. “My name is Ella.”

She looked at me a moment and then mimicked my motion, her hand patting her chest. “Shashas.”

As she walked away, I knew this wasn't the last time I'd see her, and it struck me as queer that one of the first friends I made out here was an Indian girl.

When I told Jimmy about it, he reminded me that he'd told me a Shoshone band came through by the creek now and then, but I'd forgotten all about it. I wouldn't forget it again. Twice a year I'd find them there, and pretty cloth wasn't all they had to offer. The beadwork Shashas did—it was magnificent. Her grandma taught her and I saw the pride in the old woman's eyes when I admired Shashas' work.

The welcome spring of '87 went on and you know how life is, life goes on.

One of those life-goes-on things in W.T. those days was fighting the cattlemen for your claim. Jimmy was right—they have filed hundreds of claims on land they never touch, just to tie it up.

“Two or three men would control the entire Sweetwater Valley if we didn't stop them,” he swore. My Jimmy was determined to stop them.

If you made a pecking list, Bothwell was at the top. Jimmy said he not only was greedy, but he was mean. He already owned miles along the Sweetwater River, and he kept trying to get more. Another hunk of river land was owned by John Durbin, who would be second on Jimmy's list, although some days he moved to the top. I never was clear exactly what had happened between Jim and Durbin, but whatever it was, it was nasty, and Durbin shared the disdain for my man. And just for good measure, Jimmy was fighting with a guy named Conner over a hayfield near Horse Creek. To be honest, I didn't know a big rancher in the valley that my Jimmy wasn't battling any way he could.

If you wanted one word to explain all this turmoil, it was water.

Water meant everything here in W.T. and controlling it was a full-time job. Some say a man values his water rights over the value of his children. I thought that was stretching it until I saw what men would do to get water.

Without a reliable source of plentiful water—or as plentiful as water got in these parts—your land was worthless. It couldn't be planted for crops. It couldn't grow hay. It couldn't feed a calf. It couldn't keep a family alive. So everybody tried to get land with water.

That's why Jimmy's and my claims were so valuable—we controlled a big hunk of Horse Creek. Now don't go thinking this was like controlling a big hunk of the Sweetwater River. That was a real river, with water all year round. Our creek had water most of the year, but it was a skinny little thing that shouldn't matter so much. But it did.

Jimmy sucker-punched Bothwell and all the others with our claims—before they knew it, we were all snug and secure and controlled a mile of Horse Creek. You should have seen Bothwell when he realized he no longer had access to the little creek that watered one of his hayfields! I thought the man was going to shoot Jimmy on sight the day he stormed up to the roadhouse and screamed that Jimmy was a low-down thief.

He yelled, “That water has been mine for years,” and said Jimmy had no right to block him. Oh, he went on and on and Fales, who usually was quick with a laugh on any situation, certainly wasn't laughing that day.

The only one who didn't seem upset was Jimmy, who stood there looking smug. He told Bothwell he could certainly have water from the creek—if he bought an easement from the claims of James Averell and Ella Watson.

“An easement??” Bothwell screamed, as though he'd been sentenced to hell. “You expect me to buy a fucking easement for water from Horse Creek? Are you fucking nuts?”

“No,” Jimmy said, real slow, “and watch your language around the lady. We aren't nuts. We're just the rightful owners of the land that fronts the creek, and if you want water from there, you must buy an easement from us. I suggest all you need is one about fifteen feet wide and about 3,300 feet long.” Jimmy said all this with a perfectly straight face, as though he were telling A.J. that a good bottle of whiskey was only two bucks.

I wondered how Jimmy could recite something so absurd. I knew settlers all over the Sweetwater Valley would instantly see the humor in this, and I had an awful time hiding the smile on my face as our neighbor turned purple in anger.

Bothwell was so shocked and so mad, he got on his horse without a word and hightailed it out of there. But in the end, he did buy that easement and, while I was right that it became a big joke in the valley, Fales never once laughed about it. That should have told us something. But it didn't. Nor did Fales smile when I announced I wanted an irrigation ditch from the creek to my pasture—he dug that ditch in silence. At that moment, Jimmy and I were full of ourselves. Maybe if we hadn't been so arrogant, we'd have seen the omens.

What I saw was red. Because even with filed claims and improvements under way, those cattlemen were still trying to scam us. It made me so darn mad! One of Bothwell's pals came after me. Edgar Schoonmaker filed a timber claim on my land—imagine, a timber claim on land that has no trees—and I had to go to court to fight him. I did and I won. Jimmy helped me, but it wasn't hard to prove his claim was bogus and he hadn't done a thing on the land, while I'd built a house and corrals, so I just scooped him out of his boots.

I know it's un-Christian, but I gloated, knowing Bothwell and Schoonmaker were mad as hornets when they went to bed that night.

These men were used to writing the rules, not playing by them.

Like the rule on claims—the first rule was you have to improve the property with a cabin. I've got scars and scabs to prove how hard it is to build a cabin, but rather than put in all that hard work like I was doing, they hauled around their cabin-on-logs from one fake claim to another. The first time I saw it, I was insulted that they'd cheat so badly.

Like the rule on fences—you could only fence the land on your claim, but they'd run mile after mile of fence on land they didn't even own and then sit there smug, like they could do whatever they wanted.

Like the rule on being honest—those cattlemen hired “stock detectives” and paid a princely sum to catch “cattle rustlers,” so of course, the detectives caught lots of “rustlers.” Thankfully, our judges and juries aren't so stupid they can't see a setup when one is shoved in front of their faces, and they would turn those innocent folks free. Then the cattlemen screamed they couldn't get “justice.” They never seemed to accept that the first rule of justice was you've got to be just—they didn't care. It was one more rule they wouldn't follow like decent folks.

Jimmy said it was justice he was after when he wrote his letters exposing their tactics and their land grabs and of course, they didn't like that one bit. But we didn't care.

In my book, the worst one of all was Bothwell. This wasn't on the first page, but it gave a good idea how awful he was—he killed a colt to feed those gray wolves he kept as pets. It's true because I heard it from a cowboy who saw him do it. Can you imagine, killing a wee horse to feed wolves? Made no sense to me, but then, hardly anything that man did made sense to me.

He had his men tear down my barbed-wire fences that were all legal, when he put up his own fence across a public road that he had no right to. The county commissioners finally made him take it down, but he tried to get away with it, and that told a lot about him.

Oh yes, the other horror story they told in these parts about A.J. Bothwell was that he once shot a horse out from under a man. Some have tried to say he was in his rights on that one, but I don't care—shooting a horse out from under a man is a real mean thing to do. I never thought about him without the word “mean” coming to mind.

But I wasn't thinking of any of that nastiness when the big day came. May 25, 1887. I wore my best dress and the shawl I'd eventually send my Ma. I pinned up my hair and put on my only bonnet, and Jimmy and I rode the sixty miles into Rawlins to the Carbon County Courthouse. I climbed the steps to the double front doors and then climbed up two flights to get to the clerk's office. I filed my Declaration of Citizenship. I got a fancy certificate, just like the one Jimmy got when he declared his intentions to become a full-fledged citizen.

Within five years, if I kept myself out of trouble, learned the laws of the land and the history of the country, and could pass the test, I would be a citizen. By then, we both hoped it wouldn't be a citizen of Wyoming Territory, but a citizen of the State of Wyoming. Jimmy was certain we'd be a state by then and I believed him because I wanted it so bad.

On the way home Jim reminded me of something that made me so proud and happy—it took five years for our land to be proved up for ownership and five years to get citizenship. Those two monumental events would happen one after another. By 1892, we'd be land-owning citizens of this great new nation that promised a fair chance for everyone.

“We have so many happy years ahead.” I snuggled up next to the man I loved and fantasized about the grand celebrations we'd throw.

I was in dreamland the whole way home.

Chapter Eleven—I Love Being a Homesteader

They were ugly cows, but I didn't care.

I was wearing a gray bonnet and a blue work dress, and I stood up straight so I looked like I was ready for business. I crossed my arms across my chest and walked around the small herd, looking like I knew what I was looking for and shaking my head in disapproval now and then to make it look like I didn't like what I saw.

It was a fine October morning in 1888 near Independence Rock, and I intended to relish every moment of this important step in my new life.

“Fales, these are some poor-looking critters,” I said, as stern as I could sound. That was his cue to amble over, slow, like there was nothing to hurry about, and take over the lookin'. I went to stand next to the Nebraska wrangler who was trying to sell these straggling cattle on his way to the Territory of Washington. We watched my ranch hand look like these were the worst cows he'd ever seen.

Fales pulled on their ears, ran his hand over their hides, peered into their eyes, smelled them, and reached under to heft their balls. I bet no critter had ever been so inspected. Then Fales dropped down on his haunches—his favorite sitting spot, although I couldn't imagine it being comfortable and knew I'd never get up if I ever got down that far. He rolled himself one of his smokes and sat there like he was thinking the deepest thoughts in the territory.

“They're in pretty bad shape. Skinny as hell. Ain't worth much, to my way of thinkin',” he slowly drawled.

The wrangler jumped in. “I know they ain't the best, but they'll fatten up and there isn't a sore on 'em.” There was a hint of desperation in his voice, because we figured he was counting on these cows for the last money he'd see out of W.T.

Fales came back with the obvious. “Thing is, they can't make it all the way to Washington, so if we don't take 'em off your hands, what you gonna do with 'em, shoot 'em?”

That was my clue that these cows could be bought for the lowest possible price. Fales had told me ahead of time the cheapest I could get these stragglers was three or four dollars a head.

“You wouldn't just shoot them and let them rot out here in W.T., would you?” I asked the wrangler in my best girly voice, betting he would mistake my concern for a sign of weakness.

Sometimes it's tiring, how predictable men can be because he bit like a trout on a fat worm.“I'll tell you what, little lady. I'll give 'em to you for five dollars a head—now that's a real bargain because your neighbor's been payin' as much as twenty dollars a head.” To shine his point, he pulled out of his shirt pocket the stub of a pencil and a dirty piece of paper with the handwritten title: “Bill of Sale.” He looked at me like he'd just caught the brass ring, all poised to fill it out with the little lady's name.

“Maybe,” Fales said slowly, showing he thought the price tag had been gussied up. “Say you got that much. That was for good cows and we all know these ain't good cows.” Fales stood up from his haunch without the least bit of trouble and flicked away his cigarette stub.

The wrangler screwed up his nose at this intrusion of reality and turned back to me with hope in his eyes that this “little lady” would understand what a great deal this was. I could see he was already counting up his money when I finally spoke.

“I'll give you fifty cents a head,” I said in a strong, clear voice. I'd have to be blind to miss the shock on both men's faces. Fales looked at me like I didn't know the value of cows on the hoof, and the wrangler looked at me like I was a woman whose idea of a bargain was getting something for free.

“Fifty cents!!” he spit out like he'd just tasted rancid stew. “There's never been a cow sold in the territories for fifty cents. Ma'am, I know you're new to this, but you've got to be reasonable. Fifty cents isn't even a respectable offer. Okay, I'll go to four dollars a head.”

“Seventy-five cents,” I came back, just like I hadn't heard his scolding.

The wrangler spit on the ground and walked around like he was a dog lookin' for a place to lay down, pulled off his John B. and threw it on the dirt and acted like he was the most insulted man to ever see dawn in Wyoming Territory. I was finding all this very entertaining.

“Ma'am, with all due respect, I've got to remind you that full-grown cows can be worth sixty to seventy dollars apiece and it makes no economic sense—none whatsoever—to think you'd get that kind of return with an investment of seventy-five cents. Ma'am, that's just downright mortifying! The least I could possibly go is three dollars a head.”

I didn't budge and I didn't open my mouth. Silence in a bargaining moment can be painful. This was one of those moments. After a minute or two, I even turned like I was going to mount Goldie and ride off without any cows.

“Two dollars,” the wrangler almost screamed to stop me in my tracks and Fales had that pleading look like I'd better turn around because I was stretchin' the quilt too far. But I didn't. I took another step or two and the wrangler couldn't stand it: “Ma'am, if I don't get at least a dollar a head for these cows, I am going to shoot them, right here in front of your eyes.”

“Sold,” I yelled! I could hardly suppress the giggle building in my happy chest. I took three quick steps back, reached over and took the bill of sale. I filled in the date and signed my name, then folded the paper and put it in my dress pocket. “Fales, give the man twenty-eight dollars cash money, that's the dollar-a-head he says he wants.”

That wrangler stood there with a mouth so open, flies thought they'd found themselves a hotel.

I turned and walked away. Nobody could see the smile plastered on my face. “Fales, thanks for helping out, and be sure you wave at Mr. Bothwell when you herd these cows past his ranch on the way to my corral.”

And that's how I, Ella Watson, became a cattlewoman in Wyoming Territory.

Fales would retell that story a thousand times, regaling neighbors with my sheer pluck. I'd always blush a little and aw-shucks it, but I was real proud of myself.

***

That night over supper, a happy and chortling Fales picked at his teeth and said in his drawl, “Now, Miss Ella, since you got yourself a herd, you'd better get yourself a brand. And aren't you in luck to have me?”

I sure was. True to his reputation, John Fales knew just about everything there was to know about what he called the “almighty brand.”

“You make it sound like a religion,” I joked.

He wasn't even grinning when he came back, “It pretty much is.”

“Miss Ella, you gotta understand that to a cattleman, a brand is more important than his name. You've seen it yourself, those big outfits, they don't have the man's name on the gateposts to their ranches, they have their brand. Some of the rich ones have it etched into silver platters that they serve their steaks on.”

A few days later, while we were working on the corral, Fales decided to start my formal lessons, and like he always did, he started at the beginning.

“Miss Ella, a brand is the way a cow says, ‘that's who I belong to', and you want your cows to say that real loud. You want your brand simple but clear, but not so simple that it can be easily changed—if somebody wants to alter your brand, you've got to make it hard on 'em.”

That's when I learned there are only three ways to read a brand—from left to right, from top to bottom, or from the outside to the inside. “You can tell a tenderfoot right off if he is looking at a ‘Circle A' brand and he calls it ‘A Circle'. It's a dumb mistake and I don't want you to ever say it wrong, because nobody will take you serious if you can't read a brand and you've got enough problems….”

He stopped then, short, but the message was real clear. I couldn't be a rancher—even as small as I was—without understanding brands. I especially couldn't be a woman rancher. If I ever said a brand wrong, the cowboys would laugh me out of the Sweetwater Valley. So I took my lessons seriously.

Fales wrote down two sets of numbers and letters and challenged me to read them. First he wrote down 2-X, and then he stacked a 2 over a line over an X. “That's the same brand, two different ways. What is it?”

I answered right away, “That's a two dash X brand.”

He smiled like he had a promising student on his hands. “We don't say dash when we talk brands, we say bar,” he explained. “So try again.”

And that's how I learned what a Two Bar X brand looked like.

Of course, that was an easy one. I had so much more to learn.

There were “tumbling” brands where the letter was falling over and “lazy” brands where it's lying down and “crazy” brands where it's upside down. There were “flying” brands with little wings on the letter and “rocking brands” that had a half circle under the letter and “swinging brands” where the half circle was on top of the letter. I noticed that all the brands he printed out were in capital letters and when I mentioned it, Fales just said, “Well, sure.” But that made him realize he also had to tell me that the letter “O” was always called a “circle.” I was dizzy by the time that first lesson was over.

Fales insisted from the start that I shouldn't have a simple brand. I should do something interesting—both letters and numbers—and when it came to designing my brand, he'd help.

I started thinking about symbols. My initials? Would that be EW or EA? Neither one of them looked like a pretty brand—and Fales didn't laugh when I said that because he said a cattleman might not use the word “pretty,” but that was one of the things we were after.

I decided to forget my initial, but to use a “W” in honor of Pa. “How about a crazy W, since my Pa thought I was crazy for coming out here in the first place,” I suggested one day.

Fales came back, “A ‘W' can't be a crazy, because you turn a W upside down and it becomes an M.”

I never thought of that. “I could have a ‘rocking W',” I offered next, where the W would have a half circle under it, but Fales said that would be the easiest brand in the world to alter if you just closed the circle and made it a Circle W.

“You've got enough problems without handing a rustler an easy way to steal your cattle,” he reminded me and then launched into one of his stories to make his point.

“One spring somebody was stealin' fat calves and steers from the ‘Bar S' ranch down in Texas and the owner complained to Judge Roy Bean,” Fales began, writing out the brand as “-S.”

“Well, Bean appointed himself a range detective and went out lookin'. Sure enough, six days later he came back with 20-some head of steers, all branded ‘48' and with a rancher tied-up behind 'em. A crowd gathered outside his saloon—that's where he held court under a sign that said ‘Law West of the Pecos,' I know you heard of him. Now, this tied-up rancher insisted Judge Bean was nuts; that this was his own registered brand and these were his own cows and he had burned that brand on them himself.

“‘You burned it, alright,' Bean said, ‘but wait.'

“Right there, he shot one of the cows dead and when everyone started thinking he was nuts after all, he skinned back part of the hide. The crowd moved in to look and everyone could see the underside of the steer's skin showed a blackish ‘-S' brand real plain, but around and over it, was a reddish raw burn that made the ‘-S' into a ‘48'. They hanged that rustler within a half hour.”

I got the point. I thought about it a long time and doodled as I cooked, and finally made a decision. My first choice was a TW brand in honor of Pa, Thomas Watson, but Fales knew immediately that wouldn't work because that was one of Bothwell's Broken Box Ranch brands!

I shrieked, “That's the last brand I'd ever want.”

But my mistake sent Fales on a new mission. “Miss Ella, it's about time you know about your neighbors out here in the valley. I think I've told you all I know about Bothwell, and I know you hate the sound of that man's name, but I haven't told you about the other ranchers that you're gonna brush up against when you try and get a brand. I've gotta be honest, it's not going to be easy. I don't think a woman has ever had her own brand in W.T. You know Bothwell will be fighting any brand you want, but so will some of these others. I always think information about your enemies is good ammunition, so let me load you up.”

That sounded logical to me, and besides, I loved Fales' stories and I completely agreed with him at how powerful information can be, so my new lessons began.

“Might as well start at the top,” he said one morning as I rolled out a pie crust and he took a coffee break. “That would be John Durbin and his UT Ranch. You're not gonna find a bigger cattleman in these parts than Durbin. They say he's got a million head out on the range and I don't doubt it for a second.”

I watched Fales take a long drink of boiling coffee—I never understood how he could drink it like that—and he settled in.

“He was a Civil War hero, you know, marched with Sherman to the sea and was at the Siege of Vicksburg, too. That was back East somewhere. Then he brought his whole family out to Cheyenne, his two brothers, his Ma and Pa. His family's real big in Cheyenne—they call his Pa ‘Father John.' Those Durbin Brothers could do anything. They were carpenters and tinsmiths and paperhangers, and then they got in with Amos Peacock and his butcher shops.”

Fales took two bites of pie and wouldn't say another word until he'd washed down the last bit. Then he pushed on.

“Anyone ever tell you most of Cheyenne burned down in '70? Well, it did and if it hadn't been for the railroad, that would have been the end of Cheyenne. After the fire, Peacock sold his butcher shops to the Durbin boys and they made a fortune. They ran their own cattle, so they had free meat to cut up and sell. Got government contracts, that was the big thing; supplyin' the forts. And of course, they shipped beef back East. Don't know anybody shipped more than them. That family has the Midas Touch—everything they touch turns to gold and I'm not just sayin' that.”