them to an intruder on one’s own grass was too much to bear. In retaliation, the ranchers were not too careful of an outsider’s ownership rights, and they often carried newborn calves home on their saddlehorns, to be fed in their own home corrals.
Taking home an unweaned calf was, of course, illegal—far removed from the perfectly legal practice of putting one’s own brand on a maverick. Originally a maverick had been defined as a yearling which had not been branded, but common practice was to assume that any calf which had left its mother’s teats was a maverick, and this was often stretched to include a calf almost weaned to grass.
There is no legitimate doubt that small ranchers all over the Basin took as many mavericks as they could lay their hands on, and that the beef on their tables was from cows with an outsider’s brand. The common saying was, “Only a tenderfoot eats his own beef.” Considering the conditions under which they were struggling to survive, these illegal brandings and butcherings are as understandable as a slum kid’s snitching an apple from a grocer’s pile of fruit.
The large cattlemen of Wyoming had formed themselves into the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, which almost completely controlled every aspect of the area’s cattle business with the cooperation of state and national legislation. On the basis that members owned eighty percent of the cattle in Wyoming, the Association was authorized to conduct the spring and fall roundups and to exclude unacceptable small homesteaders from participation. All mavericks at these roundups were divided among the Association members. Eventually even cattle branded with “unregistered” brands (those not registered by the Association) were confiscated. The ostensible reason was to control rustling, but the real effect was to badly cripple a new settler from the east or a cowboy who had managed to save some money and acquire a few cows of his own.
To these small, persecuted individuals, owners of perhaps one hundred cattle or a few hundred at the most, self-preservation required that they recoup their losses in any way possible. Because the Association itself was composed of rich and greedy men, Wyoming’s small ranchers retaliated in the only ways open to them.
The Brown’s Park ranchers shared these problems. As the Basin filled up with cattle and the cattle drives from Texas became a rarity rather than a common annual occurrence, the outsiders who had been using the Park for winter graze faded away, only to be replaced by neighbors who presented even more serious problems. The most sinister was an outfit called Middlesex Land and Cattle Company—known from its brand as the Flying VD—which had its headquarters only about twenty-five miles northwest of the Park’s boundaries. The owners of Middlesex were big-money men from Boston who had bought up several small ranches, put a ruthless man named Fred Fisher in charge of operations, brought in several thousand head of cattle, and prepared to dominate their own portion of the public domain. Fisher openly announced his intention of driving out all small ranchers in his territory.
Middlesex wanted to establish a base of operations in Brown’s Park from which it could spread out and take over the whole valley. Using the techniques of a Chicago blockbuster, Fisher approached several ranchers in the west end of the Park and offered to buy them out at attractive prices. The Park ranchers held a meeting and decided to hold firm; no one sold and the “blockbusting” failed.
Actually, the Brown’s Parkers were in a much better position than small ranchers in more open sections of the country. It is easy to visualize this thirty-five mile valley as one huge corral. If Middlesex cattle managed to wander down through the steep mountains that surrounded it on three sides, the ranchers could delightedly appropriate these strays. If Middlesex made a deliberate effort to bring its herds in through the eastern access, the ranchers would be well aware of that fact and could either drive the herd back or cause enough damage that Middlesex would think twice before trying it another year. The ranchers in the Park may have considered themselves a beleaguered group of “little guys,” but by banding together and capitalizing on their geographical advantage, they managed to protect their home range with considerable success.
After the Meeker Massacre the Park acquired another large new neighbor not too far from its eastern entrance. Up in Laramie, Wyoming, a highly successful self-made man named Ora Haley was quick to realize that the banishment of the Ute Indians to the Uintah Reservation over in east central Utah had opened up an important new range not yet appropriated by anyone.
In 1881 Haley bought a spread on Lay Creek, about thirty miles as the crow flies from the site on which the Bassetts were then establishing their new homestead. Bringing down cattle from his extensive holdings in Wyoming and buying others in Utah, Haley put twelve to fifteen thousand cattle on his new range. According to John Rolfe Burroughs, this was by far the largest herd ever assembled in northwestern Colorado under one ownership up to that time. Haley’s brand of two slanting bars gave the outfit its common name, the Two-Bar.
In the early years, Two-Bar caused Brown’s Park ranchers little trouble and made no real effort to appropriate their range. Still, cattle wander. They drift in small groups, paying no attention to whose range is being invaded or whose water is being used. There was little, if any, supervision of these herds except at the semiannual roundups when the Middlesex and Two-Bar cowboys moved the herds—in the spring to the mountain plateaus for summer grazing and in the fall to the more temperate lowlands. Two-Bar’s cowboys would come into the Park and search for their cattle at these times.
During these roundups the new calves were branded and cattle ready for market were cut out of the herd. Usually a large operator expected a ten percent “leakage” each year from death, rustling, and casual butchering on the range by persons unknown. This leakage factor also took into account the utter impossibility of finding all the thousands of cows in hundreds of square miles of gullies, washes and canyons. However, because of the magnitude of his operation, the large cattleman still made a profit—if not too many cattle had winter-killed and if the bottom did not drop out of the price of beef.
Both Middlesex and Two-Bar knew that their leakage factor would be doubled if their cattle strayed into Brown’s Park, and if they classed all Park inhabitants as no better than the rustlers who were reputed to hang out there, those inhabitants only smiled grimly and hoped their bad reputation would protect their range from deliberate invasions. They were fighting for their own protection, and thought themselves no less honest for gathering mavericks or even unweaned calves, and eating Two-Bar’s beef.
There were actually not very many badmen and professional rustlers in the Park once the homesteaders arrived. Back in the 1860s and early ’70s, the truly vicious Tip Gault gang had often used Brown’s Park as a hideout between its raids on the wagon trains of west-bound pioneers, but that gang had been broken up before the Bassetts and other homesteaders had arrived. For the most part, the badmen who came through the Park in the Bassett days were small-fry criminals running from the charge of stealing a horse or shooting a man in a saloon brawl. Their principal rendezvous was at Powder Springs, twenty-five miles northeast of the Park, and any lawbreaker who came into the Park proper usually behaved himself. If the ranchers themselves had been asked to describe the lawlessness in their valley, they most probably would have talked about their own respectable neighbors, Jesse S. and Valentine Hoy, who were perpetrating legal thefts far more serious, in Brown’s Park eyes, than the occasional theft of a horse.
Everyone in the Park started as a squatter because the land had never been surveyed, and it was even unclear exactly where the state of Colorado ended and Utah began. Not until the summer of 1884 was a survey completed, allowing the homesteaders to establish clear title to their acreage. As the survey party brought its chains and transits into the valley, some of the local people were hired to help them, including Valentine Hoy as the party’s cook. Herb Bassett may also have been hired; it is certain that the party camped temporarily near his ranch.
When the survey was completed, Major Oates, the leader of the party, gave Herb the metes and bounds of the Bassett property, and the legally knowledgeable Herb went immediately to the county seat at Hahn’s Peak and recorded his claim, as shown by the county records of September 22, 1884.
Not all the ranchers were as prompt. Valentine Hoy, having gained early knowledge of the legal descriptions of the ground, was able to claim certain parcels whose occupants did not move quickly to record their land. With his brother Jesse, he hired