Cattle Kate (36 page)

Interesting footnotes:
Owen Wister, the author of
The Virginian
, weighed in on the controversy in his diary entry for October 12, 1889: “Sat yesterday in smoking car with one of the gentlemen indicted for lynching the man and woman. He seemed a good solid citizen and I hope he'll get off. Sheriff Donell said, ‘All the good folks say it was a good job; it's only the wayward classes that complain.'” Wister referred to the cattle barons as “the better classes.” This was reported in many examinations of this case, including Hufsmith's and Smith's.

• •
  “She had to be killed for the good of the country,” was the excuse for the hangings by Dr. Charles Penrose, a surgeon who became part of the Johnson County War excursion, in his 1914 book,
  The Rustler Busines
  s. Historians say this was a prevailing attitude throughout the cattle industry in Wyoming Territory at the time.
  
• •
  Former U.S. Senator Joseph C. O'Mahoney, a Democrat from Wyoming, in private correspondence to an author researching the lynching
  in the early sixties
  , wrote:“While at Lander, in the spring of 1921, I heard several old timers recount the hanging. The consensus was that it was a ‘spite' hanging on the part of the cattlemen to gain control of more range, that the ‘cattle theft' part was later to vindicate themselves, and to rationalize the matter….I believe the Averill's [sic] could be completely vindicated if a writer could completely research this matter.” O'Mahoney also suggested the author might want to entitle his article: “The Homesteaders' Heroine, Cattle Kate, and the Land Grabbers in the West.” The correspondence is in the William R. Kelly Collection at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming in Laramie.
  
• •
  In the Wyoming Bicentennial Commission publication of 1976, author Charles “Pat” Hall writes: “The most notorious example of ‘justice' on the western frontier was the lynching of James Averell and a female companion by Wyoming cattlemen in 1889. Averell's so-called paramour—known variously as Cattle Kate, Kate Maxwell and Ella Watson—has never been fully identified.”
  

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