Authors: Jana Bommersbach
On newspaper coverage in general:
The Wyoming Newspaper Project is a computerized replication of newspapers in the territory, and is available online, so anyone can read all these stories as they were originally published.
On perpetrating the myth:
For many years, the “authority” on the lynching was considered to be Alfred Mokler's 1923 book,
History of Natrona County Wyoming, 1888-1922
. But later texts found Mokler's version to parrot the Cheyenne newspaper view of things, and some historians took him on directly. Daniel Meschter is particularly perturbed by Mokler's “unreliable” reporting on this case, and takes several potshots at him in
Sweetwater Sunset
.
Chapter Eighteen
â
Pa Wept at Her Grave
On Pa Watson's activities:
He had someone help him write a long letter about his trip to Wyoming, which was published in the
Lebanon, Kansas Criterion
on September 20, 1889. Part of his letter is quoted verbatim. He also told of going to Ella's home and the hanging site.
On the grave scene:
Joe Sharp told his daughter, historian Ruth Beebe, that Ella's father cried at her gravesite, saying “I wish my little girl had listened to her mother. She told her not to leave home. If she had listened to her mother, she wouldn't be buried here today.” Beebe shared the story with Hufsmith for his book on the lynching.
On Gene being fed to wolves:
Hufsmith reports this horrible rumor comes from the journals of W.R. Hunt, a former reporter for the
Chicago Inter Ocean
who quit his job over this lynching. Hunt said he fought his editor over publishing the unsubstantiated stories from Ed Towse, believing Towse was “acting as the official writerâin pay of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association.” Hunt came to Wyoming Territory on his own, finding “the people are reluctant to talk, seemed frightened.” He found Buchanan, who was hiding out, discovering the man was waiting to testify and “whittles nearly all the time.” His journal notes that on August 12, 1889, Hunt was in Rawlins. “This town, mostly favorable to Jim Averell and Ella Watson, abounds with bitterness about their fateâ¦.both are remembered fondly, even idealized, they have become martyrs of a sort to a cause of conflict brewing in the territory between big-time stockmen and homesteadersâ¦.”
On Ella's estate:
Handwritten court records show the editors of the
Sweetwater Chief
went on a spending spree at her estate sale and their purchases are accurately reflected in the book.
On Jim's estate:
Court records show the sale of Jim's estate included $18.50 for twelve chickens, nine ducks, three sacks of dried fruit, two saws, and one shovel plow.
On the Watson family being threatened:
This was the conclusion of Ella's great-nephew Daniel Brumbaugh. He told the author that when he discovered his tie to “Cattle Kate,” his cousins told him the family was ashamed that Ella Watson had become a bad woman. But as he researched, he found this conclusion impossible to believe, since the evidence kept growing that she wasn't any of the things the Cheyenne papers claimed. Considering how viciously the cattlemen slandered Ella, Brumbaugh believed they had threatened Tom Watson, and that accounted for his instructions to never speak of Ella.
Chapter Nineteen
â
A Man with Guts
On Durant's lawsuit:
The records of this suit are contained in large, leather embossed books at the Carbon County Courthouse. Most writers have said the suit just disappeared, but this author found the entire record during a research trip to Wyoming in August, 2009. Durant was the coroner of Carbon County and his legal activitiesâfrom settling Ella and Jim's estates to the lawsuitâare recounted from the public record.
On John Lacey:
The defense attorney for Bothwell and Durbin had been a justice of the territorial supreme court. His law partners included W.W. Corlett of Cheyenne, who had been a territorial delegate to Congress, and John A. Riner, a United States judge for Wyoming, according to “In Old Wyoming,” a popular column by John C. Thompson, in the
Laramie State Journal
in the 1950s.
On the safe deposit box:
There is no evidence that Ella Watson ever owned a safe deposit box, and her plea that she did could have been a ploy to get her kidnappers to take her to town, where she could get help. But the sale of the cows was witnessed by at least two people, so what became of the bill of sale is a mystery. If she had a safe deposit box in the Rawlins bank, nobody ever came forward to reveal that information.
On the men going free:
Judge Samuel T. Corn presided over the grand jury hearings on October 14, 1889. Lacking any eyewitness testimony, and with the accused now claiming they were innocent, the grand jury could not issue a “true bill” that would have sent the men to trial. All five in attendanceâErnie McLean had long ago disappearedâwalked out of the courtroom as free men.
Chapter Twenty
â
And in the End
On the lynchers:
The summary of their lives comes from several sources, including Hufsmith and Mescher.
On Ernie McLean:
Meschter found a pay ledger from the Durbin Land and Cattle Company showing John Durbin bought Ernie McLean a twenty-nine-dollar railroad ticket on July 21, 1889, and paid him two hundred forty dollars in advanced wagesâ“obviously a kind of severance pay to tide McLean over to his next job and to keep him out of Wyoming,” says Meschter.
On Bothwell's lack of remorse:
In a 1943 article for
Annals of Wyoming
magazine, A.C. Campbell wrote: “I knew all the lynchers. I was quite intimate with the leader during the later years of his life. If he had any regret for that atrocious deed or any remorse, he successful concealed the same.”
On the Rawlins mural:
The Rawlins Main Street Mural Project is a downtown educational walking tour of twelve murals highlighting the history and natural beauty of south central Wyoming. A brochure on the exhibit identifies Mural No. 8 as Cattle Kate. The brochure notes: “This surreal representation of the controversial Cattle Kate was painted by Dianne Johansson. Ella Watson, also known as Cattle Kate, and her husband, Jim Averell, were lynched on July 20, 1889. The left panel of the mural shows a map with significant places and events in their lives marked. Look carefully at the tree on the seam of the left panel to read more information about their story. The right panel portrays four of the men involved. In the center, Cattle Kate looks down from the rocks viewing the place of her death.”
The mural itself, as viewed by the author, says Ella and Jim were “hanged by greedy land barons.” It focuses its wrath on McLean, Durbin, Bothwell, and Conner, while exonerating Tom Sun, saying he “was against the affair.” The handwritten story on the mural says “Ellen and Jim were married to each other, and their friends and neighbors mourned the tragic murder. Ellen and Jim fed the hungry, clothed the naked and took anyone in.”
On the Johnson County War:
It is almost impossible today to believe what cattlemen did in 1892 in the new State of Wyoming. Claiming widespread rustling, they imported hired Texas gunmen to kill homesteaders and wipe out the town of Buffalo. Worse yet, they were supported by the governor, their congressmen, and President Benjamin Harrison, to the horror of both citizens and history.
The War on Powder River
by Helena Huntington Smith, is just one of the dozens of excellent books that spell out this historical atrocity.
On the continuing legend of “Cattle Kate”:
“A devil in the saddle, she was handy with a gun.
An expert with a branding iron, to the cowpoke she was fun!
Jim set her up in business, he built a big corral. Where the cowpokes drove the mavericks, in pay for their low morale.
Ella's place was called the hog ranch, by the cowmen of the State;
But the folks of ole Sweetwater had dubbed her Cattle Kate!”
On uncovering the truth:
Not until Dorothy Gray's 1976
Women of the West
, was there a real attempt to correct the legend. Gray quotes an unnamed source (which was Wyoming Historian and State Librarian Agnes Wright Spring) calling Ella's hanging “the most revolting crime in the entire annals of the West.” Gray went on: “No sooner was Ella Watson dead than the stockmen started a press campaign in which she was transformed into âCattle Kate,' characterized as having not only rustled more cattle than any man in the West but as having been a prostitute, husband-poisoner, and hold-up artist.” But she goes on, recounting the hanging three years earlier of a woman named Elizabeth Taylor in Nebraskaâshe and her brother were hanged for supposedly killing a neighbor. Gray notes: “Like Ella Watson, without substantiation Elizabeth Taylor was subsequently accused of having poisoned her deceased husband and also of having paid off her ranch hands by âentertaining' them. The technique of painting a woman as husband-killer and whore seemed to be a necessary ingredient in salving the image if not the conscience of men who committed the crime of lynching a woman.”
On the memorial erected on the hundredth anniversary:
Ella's descendants honored her, according to news reports in the
Casper Journal,
published July 15 and October 7, 1989. The July 15 article by Jamie Ring noted the marker was made by Tim Monroe of the Bureau of Land Management, and the grave dedication was to be done by Reverend Ralph Nelson. The story concluded: “On this day, 100 years after the cold-blooded act of murder, it is fitting that the records will be corrected to reflect the truth.”