Cattle Kate (27 page)

Making it sound like he had visited the death scene, Towse wrote, “Yesterday morning the bodies were swayed to and fro by a gentle breeze which wafted the sweet odor of modest prairie flowers across the plain. The faces were discolored and shrunken tongues hung from between the swollen lips, while a film had gathered over the bulging eyes and the unnatural position of the limbs completed the frightful picture.”

And then the young editor exonerated the lynchers.

“An inquest may be held over the remains of the thieves, but it is doubtful if any attempt will be made to punish the lynchers. They acted in self protection, feeling that the time to resort to violent measures had arrived.”

He ended his story with the most understated sentence he'd ever write. “This is the first hanging of a woman in Wyoming.”

Ed Towse might have wanted to leave the impression that other states and territories had already hung their share of rustling women, but he knew that wasn't true. He knew that hundreds had been lynched or legally hung for rustling, and until now, every single one of them had been a man.

***

Ed Towse had his feet propped up on his desk and was smiling. He was rereading his story on the hanging when the newsboy finally delivered a copy of the competition. Towse handed over six cents—a nickel for the
Sun
and a penny for the kid—and the front page article on the hanging brought his boots hammering to the floor.

“Dammit,” he swore. Slack had the story, too, but hadn't the cattlemen told Ed this was his scoop? That's the way he heard it. Obviously, that's not the way it turned out.

Towse didn't get past the first paragraph when he began swearing like a sailor. “Goddamnit, fuck you, Slacker.” His blood pressure kept rising as he read. It incensed him that Ed Slack had out-scooped him on two big points: not only had he actually named the woman, but given her the most delicious title of “Cattle Kate.”

Towse scrambled to search through his paper's archives, and it wasn't until he found something breathtaking that he stopped swearing.

The following day, Towse did Ed Slack one better: He declared his inept competition had completely misidentified the woman hanged in Carbon County. Her name wasn't Ella Watson at all. Her name was Kate Maxwell, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more despicable woman in all of Wyoming Territory.

The July 24 edition of the
Cheyenne Leader
contained Ed Towse's lasting contribution to the legend:

“Cattle Kate Maxwell, the woman lynched with Postmaster Averell, has been a prominent figure since her advent in the Sweetwater country three years ago. She had been a Chicago variety actress…fond of horses, she imported a number of racers…It is said Kate poisoned her husband…a colored boy made away with Kate's diamonds…when the queen and Averell joined issue, Kate was but a poor tramp of the worst kind.” Later, Towse would improve upon his title, and call her “Queen of the Sweetwater.”

In the thousands of words that Ed Towse would write about the lynching, he never would correct his mistaken identity. And then he'd complicate it further with yet another mistake, reporting the hanged woman was the “Ellen Watson” arrested for drunkenness and prostitution in Cheyenne in June of 1888. There were two things wrong with that: there would have been no such arrest, because prostitution wasn't illegal in the territory. And in June of 1888, the real Ella Watson wasn't even in Wyoming Territory—she was home visiting her family in Kansas.

Her family read the horrible stories coming out of Wyoming in the
Omaha Bee.
Papa Watson wasn't sure, at first, that it was his daughter they were talking about. Sometimes there was no name. Sometimes the name was different. They said all kinds of things he knew weren't true. He had no idea who this Kate Maxwell was. Maybe there was something going on there that he didn't know and his girl was still safe in her cabin. He held on to that myth for a long time, until a letter finally came informing him of the truth he'd known all along. His oldest child had been lynched.

***

Out in rural Douglas, W.T.—far from the powerhouse dailies of Cheyenne—reporters and editors at the weekly papers didn't get their information from the stock growers over crystal glasses of whiskey. They got their information the old-fashioned way—from eyewitnesses and people at the scene. And that's how the weekly
Bill Barlow's Budget
learned the truth about the lynching in the Sweetwater Valley.

Bill Barlow was thirty-two years old and a veteran of Wyoming Territory journalism. He worked in Laramie and Rawlins before he and his wife landed in Douglas and created a paper known for its progressive tone and its honest reporting.

Few realized that Bill Barlow was a pen name—the real name of this journalist was Merris C. Barrow—so even his closest friends called him Bill. He'd been a fixture in Douglas since he opened his weekly newspaper in June of 1886, just three months before the railroad came to Converse County.

By the time Bill Barlow read the first stories out of Cheyenne, he knew they all were bunk. It didn't surprise him in the least, because he was used to the kind of fanciful fiction that was often passed off as journalism from the capital.

Ed Towse particularly irked him, and Barlow bellowed about “Ed Towse's mythical compositions.” After blasting one Towse story, Barlow wrote: “If there is one true statement therein, I am unable to find it.” On another, he complained, “it reads like the third chapter of
Pop-Eyed Sam
.”

For himself, he saw what had happened and wasn't afraid to say so: “Of course, the hanging of James Averell and Ella Watson was nothing but murder—and a murder of the coldblooded, premeditated order, also.”

***

Ed Slack was none too happy when he got a scathing telegram from his friend and fellow newspaperman, Bill Barlow. Barlow laid out the real story and took Slack to task for the lies that had filled the first
Sun
article.

As a booster for the cattlemen, Slack wanted to ignore it. As a newspaper man—“I've got printer's ink in my blood”—he couldn't. But he couldn't eat crow, either. So without comment, on July 25, he printed Barlow's entire telegram. It was the only moment in the entire annals of this story that a Cheyenne newspaper reported the truth.

THE TRUE STORY

Of the Lynching
of James Averell
and Ella Watson

Graphic Details of the Affair
Given by Eye Witnesses

The Coroner's Verdict
Implicates Some Very
Prominent Men

A Sheriff's Posse Arrests
Sun, Bothwell and Others

“The dime novel literature telegraphed from Cheyenne Monday night regarding the lynching of James Averell and Ella Watson Saturday last is the veriest bosh,” Barlow had telegraphed. Even readers with a limited vocabulary knew you couldn't get any more false than “veriest bosh.”

Barlow told everything, from Buchanan riding for help to the grave that held the bodies.

“Sheriff Watson and party then proceeded to the ranch of Tom Sun, who admitted he was one of the lynchers and readily gave the name of the others.

“Taking Sun into custody the party next proceeded to the ranch of A.J. Bothwell, who also readily admitted that he had assisted at the hanging. He told Buchanan and Healy that both would go over the range in the same way if they did not leave the country, and on being told he was under arrest and would be taken to Rawlins, he warned the sheriff to take a good look at every tree he came to on his way back to Casper for he would be likely to find six or eight more cattle rustlers hanging by the neck. The two men who furnished these facts left the party there and returned to Casper. Watson probably had no trouble in arresting the balance of the lynchers and should have reached Rawlins with them sometime today.”

If the true version of what had happened embarrassed Ed Towse or his
Cheyenne Leader
, they never let on. Nor did they ever acknowledge this version of events. When Towse reported the arrests, he wrote it matter-of-factly. “A Rawlins telegraph says that all the men were arrested by Sheriff Hadsell of Carbon County and given a preliminary hearing…Bail was fixed at $5,000 each and surety promptly furnished.”

If Towse knew, he didn't care that Wyoming law didn't allow bail for a capital offense, and a lynching definitely qualified as a capital offense. But the lynchers were charged with the lesser crime of “manslaughter,” as though the hangings were an accident. Alarm bells should have gone off everywhere with the charge and the bail, even an astronomical $5,000, but they didn't to the
Leader
or the
Sun
. Nor did the papers notice the absurdity of what happened next—what “surety promptly furnished” meant: Each of the accused men wrote a $5,000 check to bail out each other.

Papers in Cheyenne didn't notice, but everyone else did. Papers in Casper and Rawlins and Douglas and Bessemer were outraged, calling it nothing but a “farce,” to let accused murderers out on bail in the first place and then allow the accused to bail each other out.

Back in Cheyenne, Ed Slack proved he hadn't had a come-to-Jesus moment by printing the telegram. The very next day, on July 26, he editorialized. “The honest ranch men and stock growers were met only by threats and fresh depredations. Averell constantly threatened death to those who interfered with him and the wretched woman he kept was equally desperate and uncontrollable. Buchanan was known to be one of the gang. Bothwell, Sun, Durbin, and other prominent settlers had received intimations that their lives would be taken. Neither the property or the lives of these men were safe at any time. The worthless wretches who carried on these depredations completely controlled and terrorized the whole region and the conditions of life there became unbearable.”

Bill Barlow sat in Douglas shaking his head that the truth didn't matter to Ed Slack, but he spent only a moment wondering why. It was clear the Cheyenne editor had been “shown the light” and was marching to the drummer of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association.

Slack proved it once again when he swallowed his words that the hangings were the result of a land conflict. Boy, was that the wrong message to send. So he just reversed himself: “It was not and is not a conflict between large stockmen and poor ranch men, but a question of life and death between honest men and cut-throat thieves. The heroic treatment must prevail and the gentlemen who have resorted to it are entitled to the support and sympathy of all good citizens.”

But the controlling interests of Wyoming Territory had a problem on their hands. An inquest had named some of the most prominent ranchers of the area. It couldn't be allowed to stand. It took pulling just a few strings for someone to declare the first inquest—the one that not only named the men, but brought about their arrest and their release on the farcical bond—wasn't valid. A second inquest was staged.

Ed Slack crowed in the
Cheyenne Daily Sun
on July 27, “The verdict was that the parties came to their death by violence by persons unknown to the jury. This is more like it.”

Outside Cheyenne in the territory, one newspaper after another reported a totally different story—all praised Jim Averell as a fine and honest man. “Did I know Jim Averell?” asked Jim Casebeer of the
Casper Weekly Mail.
“Well, I should say I did—knowed him as a pretty decent fellow, too. They talk about Averell stealing cattle. It is all bosh and buncombe. The writer was personally acquainted with him and knows that he expected there would be serious trouble over land affairs in the valley. As to the woman, she was never accused of using rope and branding iron by anyone near her.” Casebeer surmised that a “legal hanging” seemed to be in order for those who had taken these lives.

Meanwhile, John Friend of the
Carbon County Journal
in Rawlins gave his testimonial: “Jim Averell was one of the biggest-hearted men in the country. No one ever went hungry from his door and his house was always open for all.”

Most of the rural weeklies defended Ella against the rustling, but repeated the prostitution charge, not realizing that was a Cheyenne invention, too.

It didn't take long for the battlefield to be divided. As John Friend wrote in the
Carbon County Journal
on August 3, “The Cheyenne papers are the only ones in the territory that condone the Sweetwater lynching!”

But none of this haggling ever got beyond the borders of the territory. As far as the rest of the nation—and papers in Europe—were concerned, two bad-ass rustlers had gotten their just rewards at the end of ropes held by honest, struggling cattlemen.

At home, nobody was paying much attention to what was being written elsewhere. They had a real murder case on their hands. And so the focus was on what the justice system would do. The next step was a grand jury hearing to issue a “true bill” that would bring the lynchers to trial.

But as the weeks passed, the writing was on the wall.

Everyone could see justice slipping away. Men who had admitted their guilt when Sheriff Watson came to arrest them, now used the guise of the “second” inquest to deny they had anything to do with it.

The only chance for justice was the eyewitness testimony of Frank Buchanan, Gene Crowder, and John DeCorey, but everyone worried about that.

“That settles it probably,” Bill Barlow wrote with sarcasm dripping from the page. “Averell and Watson committed suicide, probably! Buchanan will disappear, probably, and that will be the end of the matter—probably!”

Sadly, Bill Barlow was a good predictor.

Chapter Eighteen—Pa Wept at Her Grave

By the time Thomas Watson arrived in Wyoming Territory a month after the lynching, the roadhouse was no longer home to anyone.

Ella's father had expected to stay there, learning face-to-face from Ralph and John and Gene every detail about her final hours.

He expected to slap Ralph on the back in gratitude.

He expected to praise John for being so brave.

He thought he might hug Gene. Mrs. Watson said that if he thought it was right, he should bring Gene home to them and they'd continue raising the boy. After all, he was the closest to a child that Ella ever had. And it was obvious she'd loved him.

He expected to shake hands with Frank Buchanan and thank him for doing all he could to save his daughter.

The Watson family learned about the boys from the letter Ella had been writing the whole month of July—the one she never got a chance to send. But thankfully, they'd finally gotten it. They almost didn't. That letter had told them about the real life being lived out here—one you'd never recognize if you read the stories coming out of the territory.

Once they got the letter, Tom Watson knew he had to come.

He arrived in Rawlins on the Union Pacific Railroad the afternoon of August 26, 1889. He immediately went to the law office of George W. Durant.

“Mr. Watson, I'm so pleased to finally meet you,” the tall attorney said as he did a two-handed shake in greeting. “I am so sorry for your loss. How was your trip?”

“Fine,” Mr. Watson said, managing a weak smile.

George Durant was just what Tom Watson had imagined about the man who was Carbon County's official coroner and had been named the executor for the estates of James Averell and Ella Watson. His hair was neatly trimmed, his spectacles were perched on his nose, and his suit was well tailored. Right away, he seemed a nice man, and Tom Watson would never be dissuaded of that thought.

“I'm sorry it was so hard to find you,” Durant began, as Watson settled into a leather arm chair on the client's side of the desk. “Nobody seemed to know who to contact.”

“You'd think the sheriff would have figured that out,” Watson said, and Durant agreed that would have been the decent thing to do. But if the sheriff had tried, he'd failed miserably.

It was Tom Watson himself, with his daughter Annie's help, who made the first contact. Annie read her family the horrifying stories from Cheyenne reprinted in the O
maha Bee.
Surely, the woman described in the stories wasn't their Ella. Surely, there was some terrible mistake. When no word came, Annie wrote a letter seeking information, sending it to: “Post Office, Sweetwater, Wyoming.”

What they didn't know, is that the letter was sent to one of Ella's killers. To add insult to injury, A.J. Bothwell inherited the postmaster job after Jimmy was lynched.

He'd come by the roadhouse a couple times a week to check on the mail and check on Ralph Cole, who was still living there. Ralph was scared of the man, but he felt an obligation to handle his uncle's estate, and that took some time, and so he was forced to coexist with Jimmy's killer.

The only moment he was glad for this arrangement was the day a letter arrived from the “Watson Family, Kansas.” Ralph grabbed the letter and stuffed it in his pocket—he knew if Bothwell saw it, it would never see the light of day. Ralph went to Jimmy's house, shut the door, and sat down to read the words from Ella's people. He immediately began a lengthy letter in return. He told the family not to believe the lies coming out of Cheyenne. He told how John had tried so bravely to get help. He told how Buchanan had tried with all his might to stop the hanging. He told of the burial and the arrests. He filled the family in on Bothwell and his new postmaster job. And he directed them to George Durant as the man officially in charge.

Ralph urged someone from the family to come to W.T. and said he would, of course, want to meet with them and tell them anything he could. “Of course, you'll stay here at the roadhouse. Uncle Jimmy has a very comfortable home and you are welcome here,” he wrote.

“And I am enclosing a letter that Ella was writing to you, but never got a chance to send. I saw her many times, when she had a spare moment, writing on this letter. She often joked that she needed to make it a really good letter because she'd been so tardy in writing.” He sent the picture of Ella on Goldie and a copy of the newspaper article with Jimmy's letter to the editor. “She wanted you to have all this, and I'm so sorry it has to come like this.”

Annie read the letter slowly because she couldn't stop crying. Here was her real sister, with so many hopes and so many dreams. Here was the girl the whole family knew, filled with joy and a good sense of humor and so proud of her secret husband. By the time she finished the letter, everyone knew that the newspaper stories were all lies.

Ma Watson tucked the letter in the family Bible, expecting to keep it the rest of her life.

***

“I'm just glad that nice Cole boy wrote to us,” Tom Watson began, and noticed that George Durant's color seemed to fade before his eyes. “He says we can stay at the roadhouse in Jim's house…” and he couldn't continue because Durant was now clearly in distress.

“I'm so sorry to have to tell you this,” Durant began. “You've already been through so much. But I'm afraid I have more bad news. We just got word that Ralph Cole died two days ago.”

Tom Watson sucked in his breath, feeling anguish for a boy he'd never met. “How much more…” he said, before he put his head in his hands.

“I know, I know,” Durant soothed. “The sheriff went out there today. There's fear that he was poisoned because he was an eyewitness…” and then Durant thought he ought to stop because this was an awful lot of heartbreak for a man already grieving.

“They think the boy was killed?” Watson shrieked in disbelief. “Because of my Ellen?”

“We don't know,” Durant back stepped. “There's just rumors. The boy got sick and went to his neighbors—those editors at that newspaper in the phony town Bothwell is promoting. They took care of him for several days and he just got sicker and sicker and then he died. I'm told Bob Conner—he's one of the lynchers—was there a few days ago. Feelings are so raw here, that I think people jumped to conclusions. So we shouldn't do the same thing,” he ended, hoping that final message came through.

“But they wouldn't poison him, would they?” Watson asked, incredulous at the thought.

“No, I don't think so,” Durant lied.

“What about the other boys?” Watson anxiously asked. “Her last letter home said she was raisin' a boy named Gene and had a John working for her.” Durant was already shaking his head before the sentence ended.

“They've both disappeared,” he said, and let the sentence hang there.

“They're just boys,” Watson said in a shocked voice. “What do you mean, they disappeared?” Durant explained that nobody knew where the two younger boys had gone, but within seventy-two hours of the lynching, they were nowhere to be found.

“People here think they were just afraid and ran away. Everyone hopes they're safe somewhere,” Durant reported. He silently prayed nobody would share with Mr. Watson the rumor that eleven-year-old Gene had been fed to Bothwell's wolves. Durant himself didn't believe it, but then, things were so strange these days in these parts that he could understand such a ghastly rumor.

And he decided he'd better complete the lineup because Mr. Watson had a right to know everything: “And the man who tried to save your daughter, Frank Buchanan. He's on the run. He's the one who actually saw the lynching, and they'll need him to testify against the murderers, so folks are pretty concerned that he stay safe.”

“Of course, without him…” Watson responded, and both men nodded as they imagined the murder charges falling apart. But neither man was ready to face that horrible possibility, so they agreed Buchanan was probably hiding out to keep himself out of harm's way. That just
had
to be it. There had to be
somebody
left to sit in a courtroom and identify the men who killed Ella and Jim.

In his mind's eye, Pa Watson had been inside that courtroom, watching Frank Buchanan point his finger, one after another, at each of the six lynchers. Even with this news, he refused to let that image fade.

“So there's nobody to tell me about that day,” Watson concluded, and Durant finally had something positive to share: “No, but there are people in town who are anxious to talk with you. They want you to know what they knew of Ella.” Watson finally had hope that there would be some comfort in this trip.

That night, a small group gathered at the Rawlins City Hall and one of the ladies brought cookies and a pitcher of lemonade. Everyone warmly greeted Tom Watson and as they sat in a makeshift circle on wooden chairs, they told nice stories about Ella and Jim and offered their sympathy.

The next day, Tom Watson took George Durant up on a generous offer. As Tom talked, Durant's male secretary wrote down the words so the family back home could know what was happening. He started the letter by reporting on the city hall gathering: “The chairman of the meeting said that the hanging of Ella Watson and James Averell was one of the most cold-blooded murders on record, and that something must be done to prevent such crimes. A fund was started to bring those criminals to justice, and there was $75 raised and $100 subscribed that evening.”

Tom Watson had been very moved by the generosity and loving words of the group, and thanked them profusely—hiding the watering eyes that almost gave him away. He didn't add that to his missive, but asked the secretary to keep the letter so he could add more later.

Then he and Durant climbed aboard the mail stage to Sand Creek, riding several hours to get as close to the ranch house as the stage went. Durant hired a buggy to take them the last twenty miles and on the way, Durant had some sage advice: “I think outside Rawlins, you should travel incognito,” he said, and Watson had already been in W.T. long enough to see the wisdom.

They arrived at the roadhouse as the sun was thinking of setting, finding two men on the property. One was picking through a stack of old wood. The other was picking the ripe tomatoes from Jimmy's garden. Whatever suspicions Watson had, disappeared when the men immediately greeted Durant warmly. “These men are friends,” Durant whispered, and Watson could see they were and revealed himself.

“Oh, Mr. Watson, this was just terrible,” said J.S. Sapp, who had been Bothwell's foreman. But Sapp had vigorously confronted his boss on the hanging and of course, Bothwell wouldn't stand for that and fired him on the spot.

“He fired me before I could quit,” Sapp declared. “I couldn't work for that man after what he did.”

Watson clasped his hands in gratitude and said it was a brave man who stood up for what was right. “Tell that to my missus and three kids,” Sapp joked. “They're wondering where the next paycheck is coming from.” The men laughed and Durant offered that Sapp was such a seasoned ranch foreman, he wouldn't have trouble finding work on another ranch. Nobody then knew that Bothwell would blackball Sapp so nobody in the Sweet-
water Valley would hire him. He ended up moving his family to
Rawlins, where the best he could get was odd jobs.

The other man was Joe Sharp, who had worked the roundup that ended the day of the lynching. “Mr. Watson, I am so sorry for you and your family,” he said in a kind voice. “I couldn't believe it when I first heard it. I still find it hard to believe.”

“How did you first hear?” Watson asked, and Sharp answered: “It was that boy Ella was raising.”

Then he told how brave little Gene Crowder had run into Bothwell's pasture on Monday morning, where cowboys were getting their orders for the day, and sobbed out the story about the hanging and that the posse from Casper had just arrived. He named all six men who'd been involved. “I was saddled up right next to Al Bothwell and I turned to him and said ‘Why, you didn't hang them, did you Bothwell?' and he never said a word. He just looked at the ground and cowboys all around me were grumbling and swearing and Bothwell reined his horse around and just rode off. We tried to comfort the boy, but he was really broken up. He bolted and ran back toward the ranch house.”

“What happened to the boy?” Watson asked, hoping someone out here would know more than the people in town. Sharp took a secret look at Durant, as if asking for permission to tell the rumor, but Durant was shaking his head in rebuttal, and so Joe Sharp gave the same story everyone would tell Tom Watson: “He just disappeared. Nobody knows what happened to him.”

Sharp was anxious to change the subject. “Mr. Watson, do you want to see your daughter's grave?”

He gently led the man to the place where Ella and Jim shared a common grave. Watson stood there silently for a long time, his hat in his hand, his head bowed. “I wish my little girl had listened to her mother,” he finally said. “She told her not to leave home. If she had listened to her mother, she wouldn't be buried here today.”

And then Tom Watson started to sob uncontrollably. Sharp wept his own tears as he watched the man and thought, “His poor little girl, his firstborn baby, lay murdered under all that soft, fresh dirt.”

From the garden and the larder, there was enough to pull together a supper, and Watson was surprised to find he slept through the night. The next day, Durant drove him over to Ella's claim. He walked into her log cabin and ran his hands over her few belongings.

He found the eagle feathers and a nice saddle blanket. He found the dress she was sewing. He saw that she'd already started canning. He thought it looked like a nice home, but he was glad Ma wasn't here to see any of it.

In the corral, Goldie was eating hay—the other ponies were gone and nobody seemed to know where. He had brought Jim's western saddle along—he remembered that Ella didn't yet have one. He saddled up the old horse for a ride to find the place his daughter died. He had gotten a good description of the site from Sapp, and it didn't take long before he found the place.