The Bassett Women
By the Book Ladies
Special to the Morning News

“The Bassett Women” by Grace McClure is a fascinating look at one of the early pioneer families in northwest Colorado. The Bassett women were fiercely loyal to their family and friends and to the ideals that brought them to the Brown’s Park area in the late 1800s. They fought hard to make a living in a hard country, and they fought hard against big cattle producers who threatened their rangeland.

Herb and Elizabeth Bassett arrived in Colorado in 1878 to visit Herb’s brother Sam who was a trapper in what was then called Brown’s Hole. Elizabeth is credited with changing the name from Brown’s Hole to Brown’s Park when she said that she preferred living in a park rather than in a hole.

Herb Bassett was always a reluctant rancher; he had been a teacher before moving west and eventually became postmaster in Brown’s Park. Elizabeth was the one who wanted the ranching life, the love of which she passed on to her five children, including daughters Josie and Ann. It was also that unconventional marital arrangement (she worked the ranch) that, according to McClure, affected her daughters’ relationships with men throughout their lives.

Elizabeth was strong willed and a talented manager of the men who worked for her. The Bassett ranch was a stopping-off site and gathering place for the scattered ranchers, the homesteaders and the travelers through the park—a place to get a meal, a job, a place to sleep. Those neighbors and visitors included Isom Dart and Matt Rash who became friends of the family. Dart and Rash were later killed, reportedly murdered by the infamous Tom Horn. Horn had been hired by the cattlemen’s association that represented the large cattle baron’s interests. McClure handles the death of Dart and Rash without judgment, but leaning heavily on the facts that were known at the time she gathered information for the book.

After five children--Josie, Sam, Ann, Eb, and George-- Elizabeth, at 39, died, possibly of blood poisoning, possibly from a miscarriage. Not long after her mother’s death, Josie married Jim McKnight and had two children (the only children she had). By the time Josie was 39, she had been married five times. At the age of 40, after raising her sons and running several boarding houses in Craig and Rock Springs and missing her home in Brown’s Park, Josie homesteaded not far from Jenson, Utah, on Cub Creek where she lived for fifty years, enjoying her eight grandchildren, raising a few cows, a few sheep, a garden and an orchard. Through the voices of Josie’s grandchildren, McClure describes Josie’s good-hearted nature, her occasional struggles with sister Ann and her ongoing efforts to become a rancher.

The story of cattle in northwest Colorado is told through Ann. McClure describes Ann’s ongoing battle with the large out-of-state cattle barons including the Two-Bar ranch, how she married Ora Haley’s foreman, Hi Bernard, divorced him and continued the fight through two court cases where she was finally acquitted of rustling but during which she acquired the title Queen Ann. At one point, McClure describes Ann’s behavior as finally reaching beyond the law of the land and stepping dangerously close to renegade, not just rustler.

After her second trial in Hahn’s Peak, Ann left the area except for occasional visits home to see her sister and brothers. She married Frank Willis in 1923, and they spent many years traveling around the U.S.

McClure paints a compassionate picture of this famous family. Even when reporting on controversial topics, she avoids judgment and uses her extensive knowledge of the family and the times to describe motives and behaviors. Often, when a researcher/writer spends as much time with her subjects as McClure obviously did, she can use that experience to fill in the gaps in history or in memory. McClure may have treated the Bassett women with more gentleness than others before her, but that approach does not diminish in any way the fascinating story of Elizabeth, Josie and Ann.

“The Bassett Women” by Grace McClure is published by Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1985, $12.95. ISBN: 0804008779.

The Book Ladies write a weekly book column and can be reached at 824-5343.