Authors: Jana Bommersbach
“If he'd have lived, Frank Buchanan would have been inside that grand jury hearing and he would have named names,” people in Rawlins long said.
“I can see him pointing to those men one at a time and calling out their names.”
“You can't be so brave to try and stop a hanging and then run away.”
“No sire, that's the move of a coward, and Frank Buchanan was no coward.”
“When he didn't show up, I knew he was dead.”
***
The grand jury convened on October 14, 1889 in the case of
Territory of Wyoming vs. A.J. Bothwell, John Durbin, Robert Galbraith, Robert Conner, Tom Sun and Ernie McLean
. Judge Samuel T. Corn presided.
The prosecution was unable to produce a single witness to testify against the men.
Frank Buchanan wasn't the only one unavailable to testify.
Little Gene Crowder couldn't tell what he knew, either. He had disappeared, too, and except for the rumors about Bothwell's wolves, nobody had any idea what happened to him.
Everybody knew what had happened to Ralph Cole. Jim's nephew had mysteriously died under the care of the news-
papermen in Bothwell's fake town. He was now buried in one of Bothwell's pastures. Suspicions that he'd been poisoned ran so high, his stomach was sent for testing. Nobody ever named the laboratory it supposedly went to. Everyone was told there was no sign of poison and that was the end of it.
John DeCovey ran all the way to Colorado, where he wrote back a long and passionate letter detailing what he knew about the hanging. But there was no sense calling him back for the grand jury hearing because he hadn't seen the lynching itself, only the abduction.
The judge had no choice. He set the six men free for lack of evidence.
In Rawlins and throughout rural W.T., the outrage that justice had been cheated was overwhelming.
In Cheyenne, the boys thought the outcome was just fine.
Chapter TwentyâAnd in the End
Everyone knew what happened to Ella Watson and Jim Averell. Everyone knew how Ralph Cole ended up. Everyone suspected the end of Frank Buchanan and the horrifying rumors of how little Gene's life was devoured.
But the years passed and people moved away or moved on, and the final stories of the lynchers got lost. Until now.
**Ernie McLean caught the last train out of Rawlins the night after the lynching. By then, his conscience had gotten the better of him and he'd blabbed the whole lynching story to a neighbor. John Durbin bought him the twenty-nine-dollar train ticket and ranch records show Durbin paid Ernie two hundred forty dollars in “wages.” The man who pushed Ella off the rock was never heard from again.
**Robert Galbraith was re-elected to the Wyoming Territorial Legislature in November of 1889âless than four months after the lynching. He went from the lower house to the upper house that is now called the Senate. But he received so many threats about the lynching, he eventually left Wyoming and settled in Arkansas, where he became a prominent banker. He died in 1939 at the age of ninety-five.
**Robert Conner left Wyoming soon after the lynching, making millions on the sale of his ranch, and moved back to Pennsylvania. He died in 1921 at the age of seventy-two.
**John Durbin faced “relentless public humiliation” after the lynching and sold his holdings two years later, moving to Denver. He died in 1907 at the age of sixty-four.
**A.J. Bothwell continued ranching in the Sweetwater Valley for the next twenty-seven years, taking over Ella's and Jim's land claims, buildings, and frontage on Horse Creek. He remained on the executive committee of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association until 1902. He finally sold his holdings in 1916 and moved to Los Angeles, where he died in 1928 at the age of seventy-three. Those who knew him in his later years say he never voiced a bit of remorse over the hanging of Ella Watson and Jim Averell.
**Tom Sun's family still ranches in the Sweetwater Valley. A public mural in Rawlins exonerates Sun for his part in the lynching, saying “Tom Sun was against the affair.” He died in 1909 in Denver at the age of sixty-five.
**Thirty-three months after the lynching of Ella Watson and James Averell, on April 9, 1892, fifty Wyoming cattlemen and Texas hired guns invaded Johnson County to free it of “rustlers,” in one of the most outrageous events of the WestâThe Johnson County War. Some believe the cattlemen were emboldened because everyone got away with the murders of Ella and Jim.
**The legend of Cattle Kate as a rustler and a whore lives on to this day in dozens of magazine articles, books, movies, and websites. Zane Grey's version was titled
Maverick Queen
.
**On July 20, 1989, on the hundredth anniversary of the lynching, a group of Ellen Watson's nieces and nephews gathered in the Sweetwater Valley. She and Jim's grave now lay under the new Pathfinder Reservoir. A marker was erected in the vicinity. It reads: “These innocent homesteaders were hanged by cattle ranchers for their land and water rights.”
I'm afraid I was snookered about “Cattle Kate” just like everybody else. My ignorance lasted a few years. It took nearly a century for history to get wise.
I got serious about western history when I went to work for
True West
magazine in 2002, and two things soon became obvious. First, women helped settle the Wild West, but you could read a hundred history books and never know it. And secondly, even if you read all those books, you'd be forgiven if you concluded the
only
women in the West were whores or “soiled doves.”
While popular western history tells us all about the bandits and bad boys, the gunfighters and goons, we know almost nothing about the women who held it all together with grit and spit. They say history is written by the victors, and it was clear men thought they alone won the West. It doesn't take much digging to discover they're wrong. So I knew that women had never gotten their due.
True West
Editor Bob Boze Bellâa real western man who isn't afraid of real western womenâsuggested I create a new series called Women of the West. Starting in January of 2004, I spent five years writing a monthly column that profiled courageous and outrageous women.
“Cattle Kate” wasn't on my original list of women to explore. I had the likes of Esther Hobart Morris and Sarah Winnemucca and Donaldina Cameron and Ann Eliza Young and Biddy Mason and Sharlot Hall. These are women whose names might not be familiar, but that makes my point. Each one of them has a fabulous story to tell. “Kate” just played into the stereotype of “bad, wanton women” that history had shoved down our throats, and that's not the kind of woman I was writing about.
But then I read an award-winning story by Lori Van Pelt in 2004 that questioned the official take on Cattle Kateâit didn't exonerate her, but raised some real questions. Then I was set on my heels by the assessment of Wyoming historian and State Librarian Agnes Wright Spring that the lynching of Cattle Kate was “the most revolting crime in the entire annals of the West.”
So Kate wasn't a worthless footnote in history, but the victim of a “revolting crime”âso revolting that in some minds, it takes first place in a century of revolting crimes. The 2005 story I wrote for
True West
was headlined: “So-called Cattle Kate Rises from Rubbish: Evidence points toward Ella Watson's innocence.”
I soon found I was only the latest to come to this horrifying story.
George W. Hufsmith spent twenty years digging into the truth for his 1993 book,
The Wyoming Lynching of Cattle Kate 1889
. Hufsmith wrote, “When I first began probing into the so-called âCattle Kate' affair, I had no idea that the whole story was pure fabricationâ¦.Not one shred of substantive evidence exists to show that those two settlers were anything but hard-working homesteaders, trying to eke out a living from a primitive and difficult environment.”
The same assessment came from Daniel Y. Meschter, who spent twenty-five years pouring over legal documents to give an exhaustive history of the lynching he self-published in 1996 called
Sweetwater Sunset
. As he notes, “The fact is that Ella Watson was never called Cattle Kate or Kate Maxwell or even plain Kate in her own lifetime.”
Then there were the words of John Fales, the neighbor and handyman who knew Ella and Jim well. “Neither of them ever stole a cow,” he told the Wyoming Historical Society years later. “And those who say that Ella Watson slept with the cowpunchers, are slandering a good woman's name.”
Suspicions leapt when I realized Jim Averell had credentials that couldn't belong to a “pimp.” Appointed postmaster for the Sweetwater Post Office by President Grover Cleveland; named a notary public by Wyoming Governor Thomas Moonlight; named a justice of the peace by the Carbon County Board of Commissioners. And only twelve days before he was strung up with Ella, he was an election judge when voters came to his roadhouse to chose delegates to the Wyoming Constitutional Conventionâthe same roadhouse the Cheyenne press would later brand a “hog ranch” full of prostitutes led by “Cattle Kate.”
As Meschter discovered, “Whatever else anybody might have said about Jim Averell later that summer of 1889, he certainly was not the low scoundrel, murderous coward, mavericker, and cur the Cheyenne press chose to call him in defense of his lynchers.”
I'm no stranger to knowing history can be dead wrongâmy first book was about the infamous “Trunk Murderess” Winnie Ruth Judd and the 1930s murder in Phoenix that shocked the nation. By the time I finished researching that award-winning non-fiction bookâand found the living Winnie Ruth Judd for extensive interviewsâI knew history had told a false story about her. So when these doubts about Kate started rising, they didn't feel strange to me. They felt very familiar.
I had a long and startling telephone interview with Ella's great-nephew, Daniel Watson Brumbaugh, in October of 2008âme from my home in Phoenix, him at his home in Ohio. Since 1988, he had been traveling and searching to find the truth. He had found plenty of evidence to refute everything history said about his aunt, and plenty more to attest to who she really was. “She was a strong, Scottish woman who went West on her own because she wanted to own her own land, like her grandfather and father,” he told me.
During the summer of 2009, I read Philippa Gregory's
The Other Boleyn Girl
âa historical novel that grabbed me from the start and took me back into the days of Henry VIII like no history book ever could. I loved how Gregory defined historical novelsâ“History is the skeleton; the fiction is the breath.”
I was sitting on my mother's beautiful backyard patio in North Dakota reading that book, when I heard the words “I never thought I'd die like that.”
I remember holding the book to my chest as I looked aroundâI'm not kidding, it sounded like someone had said it out loudâand I told the birds feeding in the backyard, “That's what Ella would have said.”
This is how I came to write this historical novel that lets Ella Watson largely tell her own story.
By the end, I don't know what outraged me moreâthe lynching of Ella and Jim or the filthy way it was excused. My only comfort was that everyone who has come to this table has gone away with the same heartache. And the same heartburn.
Historian Hufsmithâthe first to actually go back and read
all
the newspaper coverage of the case to get the real pictureâended his groundbreaking book like this:
“The evening shadows regularly and gradually throw a heavy, black veil across the now deserted site of Ella's and Jim's eager and desperate hope for the future. That hope was arrogantly and brutally smashed to pieces on the selfish, iron will of one man's insatiable greed. That terrible immolation sadly cannot be undone, but the twisting contortions of a Cheyenne reporter's pen, which has hoodwinked the whole world for a century, is finally exposed for what it was. May that luckless and guiltless couple find an ultimate vindication at last.
Requiescat in pace!
”
I couldn't have said it better myself.
This historical novel is a work of fiction based on the life, death, and times of Ellen “Ella” Watson. These Endnotes provide a blueprint to the real-life facts, dates, and events.
Chapter One
â
I Can't Believe This is the End
On Ellen “Ella” Watson:
She was a twenty-nine-year-old immigrant homesteader the morning of July 20, 1889, when six of her neighborsâamong them the most powerful cattlemen in Wyoming Territoryâkidnapped her and her secret husband, James Averell. He was the thirty-eight-year-old postmaster of the Sweetwater Valley and had just been named a justice of the peace. He owned a roadhouseâa general store that also sold liquorâabout sixty miles north of Rawlins, on the main road to growing Casper. Ella cooked hot meals for their customers. The vigilantes were A.J. Bothwell, John Durbin, Robert Conner, Cap'n Robert Galbraith, Tom Sun, and Ernie McLean. They claimed Ella and Jim were cattle rustlers.
On homesteading:
President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862 to encourage development of the western territories. It provided one hundred sixty-acre homesteads for both men, single women, and female “head of households,” provided they “proved up” the land by adding a home and improvements and lived on the property at least seven months a year for five years. Two million people sought patents on land through the Homestead Act, which ran from 1862 to 1976. Historians note the cherished Homestead Certificate was usually framed and proudly hung on the cabin wall. But the law was greatly misused. The National Archives reports that of the five hundred million acres dispersed under the Homestead Act, only eighty million went to homesteaders; the rest went to speculators, cattlemen, miners, lumbermen, and industrial interests.
Chapter Two
â
They First Called Me Franny
On Ellen Watson's family history:
According to Ellen Watson's great-nephew, Daniel Watson Brumbaugh, who spent twenty years researching her life:
On washday:
In
Westering Women
, Sandra Myres notes there was no more detested day on the frontier than washing day. First, women had to make the lye soap; then they had to haul water, usually from some distance; and then began the eleven-step “receet” for washing clothes that she quotes with all its original spellings:
“1. bild fire in back yard to het kettle of rain water.
2. set tubs so smoke won't blow in eyes if wind is peart. 3. shave 1 hole cake lie sope in bilin water. 4. sort things. Make 3 piles. I pile white, I pile cullord, I pile work britches and rags. 5. stur flour in cold water to smooth then thin down with bilin water [for starch]. 6. Rub dirty spots on board, scrub hard, then bile. Rub cullord but don't bile just rench and starch. 7. take white things out of kettle with broom stick handel then rench, blew and starch. 8. pore rench water in flower bed. 9. scrub porch with hot sopy water. 10. turn tubs upside down. 11. go put on a cleen dress, smooth hair with side combs, brew cup of tee, set and rest and rock a spell and count blessings.”
Chapter Three
â
I Agree with Pa
On the letter from Kansas:
Although the precise wording no longer exists, Brumbaugh notes it was a letter from an old friend who had immigrated to Kansas that led Thomas Watson to move his family there. He established residency on one hundred sixty acres near Lebanon, Kansas, on November 18, 1877, and filed a homestead claim on August 10, 1880.
On Beadle's Dime Novels:
These popular novels, printed originally on orange wrapper paper, told fanciful stories about the settling of the Old West.
On the Civil War:
The North had a cavalier attitude as the Civil War began in April, 1861, with many thinking it would so quickly overpower the South that the war would be over by Christmas. That was just one of the delusions in the War Between the States, or the Civil War, or the War of Northern Aggression, or the Lost Cause. History tells us that in Washington, women in silk dresses and men in fancy shirts rode out in buggies with picnic baskets to watch the battles. On both sides, it wasn't so much an army as a gathering of young boysâalways dirty, certainly exhausted, usually hungry, forever scared. It wasn't so much a war as a slaughter. The casualties became grotesque. Six hundred thousand dead. Over ten thousand battles. It remains, all these years later, America's deadliest war. The Watson family claims Tom Watson joined his Canadian neighbors and signed up with Company 1, 96th New York State Volunteers, but records to confirm that have never been found.
On Lincoln's assassination:
President Abraham Lincoln was shot while attending a play at the Ford Theater the night of April 14, 1865. He died the next day. His assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was a Confederate sympathizer, angry that the South had lost the war. Among those punished for his murder was board house owner Mary Surrat, who was hanged on July 7, 1865âthe first woman executed by the U.S. government. Modern historians question her guilt.
On “Bleeding Kansas”:
According to
www.history.com
, “Bleeding Kansas is the term used to describe the period of violence during the settling of the Kansas territory. In 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act overturned the Missouri Compromise's use of latitude as the boundary between slave and free territory, and instead, using the principle of popular sovereignty, decreed that the residents would determine whether the area became a free state or a slave state. Proslavery and free-state settlers flooded into Kansas to influence the decision. Violence soon erupted as both factions fought for control.â¦During the Civil War, Kansas suffered the highest rate of fatal casualties of any Union state, largely because of its great internal divisions over the issue of slavery.”
On the Sioux Uprising:
Calling it “Minnesota's Other Civil War,” Kenneth Carley writes a definitive account in
The Dakota War of 1862
. He notes the annual allotment of gold due through treaties to the Dakota Indians of Minnesota was delayed that August, while the annual ration of food was stored in a warehouse. The Indian agent didn't want to call the people into the agency headquarters twice, so he refused to release the food until the gold came, even though the Sioux were starving. His famous words were “Let them eat grass.” The horrific, bloody uprising that followed saw “at least 450âand perhaps as many as 800âwhite settlers and soldiers killed, and considerable property was destroyed in southern Minnesota,” Carley notes. Minnesota officialsâit was then the newest state in the nationârounded up and wanted to hang some 300 Indians, most of whom had not participated in the war. President Lincoln interceded. Still, thirty-eight Dakota hanged in Mankato on December 26, 1862, in the largest mass execution in U.S. history.
On Doc Holliday:
In her excellent historical novel,
Doc
, Mary Doria Russell details Doc Holliday's days in Dodge City and his growing friendship with Wyatt Earp. He arrived in Dodge in 1878, a twenty-six-year-old dentist “who wanted nothing grander than to practice his profession in a prosperous Kansas cow town,” she writes.
Chapter Four
â
We Found a New Life
On snakes:
It is almost impossible to read any personal account of western settlement without reading about the plentiful snakes that made life miserable. Although later discredited, early thoughts were that the only remedy for snakebites was cutting the wound and sucking out the poison.
On the family's route west:
Ella's great-nephew, Brumbaugh, spelled out the route of their immigration from family records.
On Lebanon, Kansas:
Founded in 1873, this small town was about as far west as most wanted to go in those daysâwith nothing but the wild territories beyond until you got all the way to the Pacific Ocean and California. But in 1898, it was determined that Lebanon was the mid-point between America's boundaries on the Pacific and the Atlantic. For years, it called itself the “center” of the countryâuntil the later annexation of Alaska and Hawaii. On June 29, 1941, civic leaders erected a stone marker that declared it the Historical Geographical Center of the original forty-eight states.
On soddies:
According to S
od Houses on the Great Plains,
written and illustrated by Glen Rounds, early pioneers cut two-feet thick “bricks of earth” from the prairie sod, then stacked them on one another to form walls for a small shelterâusually sixteen by twenty feet. They left a space for a door and a small window holeâbefore they had glass, homemakers rubbed bacon grease on paper to fill in the windows. The roof was made by spanning ridge poles from one sod wall to the other, then covered with four to six inches of dirt. It is said that after a rain, the roofs leaked for days. Field mice burrowed into the walls and snakes hunting mice overhead sometimes fell through the ceiling. Most soddies had dirt floors. They were meant to last a few years until lumber could be hauled in to build a cabin.
Chapter Five
â
My First Big Mistake
On Ellen's marriage:
On November 24, 1879, eighteen-year-old Ellen Watson married twenty-one year-old William A. Pickell. A wedding portrait of the couple, printed in several books inspired the description of her wedding dress. The couple had no children and Ella's father would later tell the press that Pickell's “infidelity” caused a breakup, while family history uncovered by Brumbaugh says Pickell was also abusive and once beat Ellen with a horsewhip. Ellen left Pickell in 1883, lived with her family for a short time and filed for divorce, Brumbaugh reports. Records show Pickell ignored three notices of divorce.
On Kansas going Dry:
Governor John St. John, with the backing of the national Woman's Christian Temperance Union, forced the legislature to pass a constitutional amendment for Prohibition. Kansas voters then approved it in 1880, leading the nation toward a ban on all manufacturing and sale of intoxicating liquors.
On President James Garfield:
After only a few months in office, he was shot twice on July 2, 1881, by Charles Guiteau, who'd been turned down for a federal job. The wounds were not fatal, but poor and unsanitary medical practices were. Garfield died on September 19, 1881. Guiteau hanged, declaring: “Yes, I shot him, but his doctors killed him.”
On Thanksgiving:
It had been celebrated in America from the earliest days, but became an official national holiday in 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, by proclamation of President Abraham Lincoln. He finally responded to a forty-year campaign for a national, annual holiday led by Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of
Godey's Lady's Book
and author of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” It became tradition for each subsequent president to issue an annual proclamation naming the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day. The 1879 proclamation, quoted verbatim, was issued by President Rutherford B. Hayes. In 1939, at the urging of merchants who wanted a longer Christmas shopping season, President Franklin D. Roosevelt changed the date to the second to last Thursday in November.
On the family's New Year's celebration:
Hogmanay is a major holiday in Scottish tradition. The original words in “Auld Lang Syne” are from a website on the famous Scottish poem.
On Ella's divorce:
Brumbaugh notes the ironic date of February 14, 1884, as her move to divorce Pickell. Divorce was extremely unusualâand highly objectionableâin those days, so it was a defining moment for Ella to demand a divorce, and then to demand her maiden name be restored.