Cattle Kate (31 page)

On handcarts:
“Tongue nor pen can ever tell the sorrow,” says a heartbreaking film on the tragic 1856 Mormon handcart disaster at the Handcart Historic Site operated by the Mormon Church on Tom Sun's original ranch. The site is open daily and proves a memorable visit. Mormons fled from Illinois to the Utah Territory after the murder of their founder, Joseph Smith, in 1844. Brigham Young became their new leader and founded Salt Lake City as their heaven on earth. He promised Mormons religious freedom, and an opportunity to build a wonderful new life. At first, converts came by wagon trains, but he realized many of his converts couldn't afford that expense. Brigham Young came up with the idea of handcarts—people would pull their own wooden carts almost a thousand miles from Iowa or Nebraska to Salt Lake City. As incredible as that sounds, it was embraced by many, including hundreds of foreign converts who'd immigrated to America so they could find their Zion in Salt Lake City. It actually worked, until disaster hit when two companies of handcarts started out from Nebraska in August of 1856—way too late to get through Wyoming before winter. The converts in the Martin and Willie Handcart Companies were converts from England and Scotland. The snows came early that year, and while some wanted to turn back until spring, others pressured to move forward. They got as far as Devil's Gate and couldn't make it any farther. The lucky ones froze to death. The unlucky ones starved to death. Children watched their parents die and parents watched their children perish. A thousand people started out and over two hundred died. Brigham Young wasn't aware these two units were still out there. Although he eventually tried to save them, it was too late. He canceled all future handcart travel.

On Big Nose George:
Averell was in jail with Big Nose George at the time of his lynching, confirms Wyoming historian Rans Baker. A mob pulled George from jail, tied his hands behind his back, put him on an empty kerosene barrel with a rope tied around his neck and kicked out the barrel. But the rope broke, allowing George to fall to the ground “where he begged to be shot,” according to “The Legend of Big Nose George” pamphlet published by the Carbon County Museum. As the lynch mob got a ladder and a heavier rope, George managed to untie his hands. When the ladder was pulled away, he was able to hold himself for a time but eventually, “gravity pulled him down, slowly choking him to death.” The body was left hanging for several hours, and when it was inspected, it was found to have no ears, as the hanging rope had worn them off. His body was skinned; the flesh was tanned and made into a pair of shoes proudly worn by John Osborne, the first Democratic governor of the State of Wyoming, to his inaugural ball in 1893. The Carbon County Museum, 904 W. Walnut Street, Rawlins, displays Big Nose's death mask, lower skull, and the infamous shoes.

On Yellowstone:
The idea of setting aside land for the public's benefit was revolutionary when President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill creating the first national park in the world—Yellowstone National Park, on March 1, 1872. It covered two million acres in the northwest corner of Wyoming Territory and spilled into Idaho and Montana territories. The bill protected Yellowstone from private greed and ordered the area be “dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people,” notes “The Place where Hell Bubbled Up” by David A. Clary, Office of Publications, National Park Service, 1972. But the idea of a national preserve continued to be controversial, and Yellowstone had none of the protections found today for the national park system. It was defenseless to “poachers, squatters, woodcutters, vandals and firebugs,” Clary reports. In 1883 Congress debated the value of such publicly owned land, with some arguing that private enterprise should be in charge. In 1886, Congress stripped all money to protect Yellowstone and the Secretary of the Interior called on the Secretary of War for help. After August 20, 1886, Yellowstone came under the protection of the U.S. Army.

On brush in front of teepee:
According to Grace Raymond Hebard's
Washakie: Chief of the Shoshones
, brush in front of a teepee meant the occupants were away but returning, while graves were often adorned with a cherished item of the deceased.

On their wedding:
Public records show that James Averell, thirty-five, and Ellen Liddy Andrews, twenty-four, applied for a marriage license in Lander, Fremont County, Wyoming, 105 miles west of the Sweetwater Valley. The license was issued on May 17, 1886. The application and the marriage license were signed by the county clerk and include the county's seal. A third document, a “certificate of marriage,” was not filled out or signed. Hufsmith says it wasn't uncommon for this last document to be overlooked, since the marriage license was already signed and sealed. Historians are unanimous in agreeing that Ellen Liddy Andrews was Ellen Watson. They surmise she changed her name just enough to protect her homestead claim in case this license would be discovered before her land was “proved up.” If the marriage had been discovered, she would have lost her own claim and it would become her husband's.

Chapter Nine
—
My Claim, No. 2003

On items stocked at the roadhouse:
These were gleaned from a variety of sources, including
The White House Cookbook
;
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book
, and
Mrs. Snow's Practical Cook Book
.

On Irish potato soup:
Ella's recipe from a historic cookbook started with washing and peeling six large potatoes, cutting them thin, like she cut the four onions. Into a pot they went, with a couple chicken cubes, six pieces of chopped celery, dried parsley, garlic, salt, and pepper. She covered the pot and heated them to soften, then added four cups of milk and stirred it all until the soup thickened. To top it off, she stirred in three cups of grated cheese.

On Canzada and Boney Earnest:
The true stories told of Canzada outwitting the highway men and the couple's friendship with famous western characters comes from Ruth Bebe's
Reminiscing Along the Sweetwate
r. Bebe is the daughter of cowpuncher Joe Sharp, who was horrified by the hanging of Ella and Jim and confronted Bothwell about it the day after the hanging. Sharp later helped with Jim's estate and bought Jim's elaborate wall clock, that ended up in Ruth Beebe's home. Beebe's thorough and wonderful history of the Sweetwater Valley was an invaluable help to this author. But her
Reminiscing
, published in 1973, does not include any discussion of the hanging. It wasn't until a 1997 book by Mark Junge,
The Wind is my Witness: A Wyoming Album
, that the chapter on Ruth Beebe explained why: She said she went to see the descendants of Tom Sun “and told them that I was going to write a book, try to write a history of the Sweetwater Valley and its occupants, and how they came there and different things that happened. Oh, they just jumped on me and they said, ‘You can't write a book!' I taught school for thirty years, but they said, ‘You can't write a book. No, that's impossible.' And just shoved me off. I went home and I said to my sister, ‘Why don't they think I can write a history of it?' She said, ‘Because they think that you're going to expose that Cattle Kate thing again.' So I went back down and told them that I didn't intend to mention Cattle Kate, and I was gonna leave that part out. And they went to their museums, they got papers out, they got history of different things out that the first Mr. Sun had compiled, and they helped an awful lot with my book.”

On Andrew Carnegie:
One of the world's wealthiest men, Carnegie, 1835-1919, gave away over $350 million during his lifetime. One of his passions was free public libraries, and he's credited with founding 2,509 libraries in the English-speaking world. As the Columbia University Information Services reports: “Many persons of wealth have contributed to charity, but Carnegie was perhaps the first to state publicly that the rich have a moral obligation to give away their fortunes. In 1889, he wrote
The Gospel of Wealth
, in which he asserted that all personal wealth beyond that required to supply the needs of one's family should be regarded as a trust to be administered for the benefit of the community.”

On the Statue of Liberty:
There was much controversy about the American people paying for the pedestal to hold the female figure that was a gift from France in honor of America's independence of 1776. According to
Enlightening the World: The Creation of the Statue of Liberty
, by Yasmin Sabina Kahn, many felt the one hundred thousand dollar-plus expense was frivolous. The
New York Times
said, “No true patriot can countenance any such expenditures for bronze females in the present state of our finances.” The Statue of Liberty was dedicated on October 28, 1886.

On Owen Wister:
Author Owen Wister, who would pen the defining book on the American West,
The Virginian
, visited Wyoming several times in his youth, his journals note.

On Bothwell threatening Ella:
Accounts of his threats and intimidations are detailed by Hufsmith and Meschter, including the skull left on her doorstep.

On maverick law:
Fales correctly tells the legal basis of the hated Maverick Law, passed by the Territorial Legislature in 1884. The law is painstakingly spelled out by both Hufsmith and Meschter.

On the M brand for maverick:
This was a “rolling M” that originally was owned by Eliza A. Kuykendall, wife of Judge W. L. Kuykendall of Cheyenne. “It is said to be the first brand registered inside the boundaries of this state. In 1884, the symbol was transferred to the Wyoming Stock Growers Association. For a long time, that group used it as the official mark to place on mavericks…during roundup seasons.” This quote is from an article for the series,
Highlights in Wyoming History
, titled “A Backward Look at Early Branding Days” by Clarice Whittenburg on file at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. This is an original manuscript with the author's handwritten editing and has no date or publication information.

On the milk cow story:
Rawlins'
Carbon County Journal
created an uproar over the Larson cow incident and got the cow returned, Meschter notes.

On being pushed to becoming a thief:
This is a paraphrase of a quote from Helena Huntington Smith in her “The War on Powder River.”

On the value of cattle in Wyoming Territory:
This was virtually the only industry in the territory and when the “golden days” came, they came fast. Wyoming historical records show that in 1870, there were only eleven thousand head roaming the open ranch lands. But by the 1880s, they counted cattle in the millions—sturdy Texas Longhorns and the broader, white-faced Herefords that could survive the harsh Wyoming winters. By the time Bothwell founded his ranch, a cattle investment could bring from twenty-five to sixty percent profit. Every single year. Plenty of gold mines didn't give that return.

On the “goose question”:
In her historical novel,
The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton
, Jane Smiley wrote about this code used to discuss slavery in Kansas. The author wondered if there were a similar code to discuss homesteaders. Historian Rans Baker of the Carbon County Museum said the equivalent in Wyoming Territory was “the rustler problem.” Baker assisted both Hufsmith and Meschler as they each spent decades researching the lynching. He says “the two books together tell the whole story.”

On Rawlins School House:
A new school was built in Rawlins, W.T., in 1886 and is described as it appears in photographs from that time.

On newspaper stories Ella reads to Jim:
These were published in the August 14, 1886, edition of the
Carbon County Journal.

On Geronimo:
Perhaps the most famous Indian in American history, Geronimo was an Apache born in June of 1829, who lived most of his life in what is now Arizona. He became a famous guerilla warrior who fought against the white invasion of his ancestral lands. Historians debate whether he was a “murderous renegade or courageous warrior.” At one point, one fourth of the entire U.S. Army was in Arizona Territory trying to find Geronimo and his band of thirty-six. He finally surrendered in 1886. On September 18, 1886, the
Cheyenne Mirror
noted in the “Wired Words” column: “Now that they have got Geronimo they don't know what to do with him. Turn him over to the cowboys and let them brand him and bury him.” Geronimo lived many years as a prisoner of war, but became a celebrity—marching in the inauguration parade of President Theodore Roosevelt. He died on February 17, 1909, after falling from his horse. His nephew said his deathbed words were: “I should never have surrendered. I should have fought until I was the last man alive.” To this day, the name Geronimo stands for bravery and daring. On May 2, 2011, when American forces found and killed Osama bin Laden, the mission was named “Operation Geronimo.”

On the fair:
The first Wyoming Territorial Fair was scheduled September 14 to 17, 1886, according to territorial newspapers.

Chapter Ten
—
I Wanted a Nice Christmas

On howling wolves:
The Shoshone legend said a howling wolf was good luck, according to
Washakie
by Hebard.

On “Auld Lang Syne”:
On September 8, 1886, the Fourth Cavalry Regimental Band was on hand when Geronimo and the last free Apaches were marched from Fort Bowie to Bowie Station to be sent by train into exile in Florida. The band played “Auld Lang Syne” to mock Geronimo.