them out and enlarged their own holdings of valuable pasture land along the river bottoms.
All this was completely legal, exactly what other well-to-do ranchers were doing all over Wyoming, but the neighbors resented the Hoys bitterly. Ann called Valentine Hoy a “land grabber.” Josie described his scheme in her taped memoirs, using a quaint colloquialism, “swift,” the exact meaning of which seems to have been lost:
The Hoys came first . . . and tried to make a monopoly of everything . . . V. S. Hoy wasn’t a good man. . . . You see, when the survey was made, V. S. Hoy was a smart man [as] all the Hoys were. . . . V. S. Hoy was cook with the survey party. He had a nice business, he was there for a purpose. . . . Now he knew the numbers of places and put swift on them, bought the land, and what he didn’t buy with swift he had people coming here from Fremont, Nebraska and Leavenworth, Kansas . . . to take up homesteads. Then he met them at Glenwood Springs, where they’d take up proof, paid them each a thousand dollars and they were gone. He had their homes and that’s how the Hoys got all of the Hoy bottoms . . . .
He tried to swift my father’s place, but my father’s filing on the homestead had gone in just before his swift got there, so that didn’t work. My father never liked the Hoys, that made a bad spot. My dad was a very forgiving man but he never forgave that, no sir! He said, “I’ve been a friend to V. S. Hoy and thought he was a friend to me, and to have him do that—I’ll have nothing to do with him.” And he never did.
Valentine was more active in acquiring land than his brother Jesse, but Jesse was still deeply enough involved to earn his neighbors’ anger. Furthermore, they resented Jesse’s readiness, over the years, to write letters to the newspapers denouncing lawless conditions in Brown’s Park, and his equal readiness to file suit upon even a suspicion that someone was tampering with Hoy property. Most of the ranchers were too busy or too unlettered to take court action, and they preferred to handle their own problems, either firing a dishonest cowhand and running him out of the Park or quietly retaliating later. Glade Ross’s files contain a comment by an early rancher: “Horses weren’t worth anything. So when someone branded a horse belonging to another, no fuss was made because it wasn’t worth anything then. If they came up in price, then we’d brand one of his.”
Jesse S. Hoy is one of the more interesting and controversial of the many controversial personalities of Brown’s Park. He had had certain successes in Wyoming before he settled in the Park permanently and persuaded his brothers Adea, Henry and Valentine, and his uncle Frank to join him. While still in Wyoming he had served one term in an early legislature, and after moving to Brown’s Park he represented Wyoming as justice of the peace.
Hoy was an educated man, passionately fond of all animal life. In his old age, when his judgment was slipping, he managed to burn his barn to the ground by lighting smudge pots in it to protect his horses from flies. Almost without question he was a eunuch. There is one romantic tale that he was castrated by a jealous medical student during a stay in Paris; a more mundane but plausible version is that he had suffered a severe and permanently damaging case of mumps in his childhood. Whatever the cause, the fact remains that some of his more disrespectful and unsympathetic neighbors called him “the old steer.”
Perhaps because of his physical handicap, he was an embittered and unsociable man who quarreled violently with his own family; he was never on speaking terms with all his brothers at any one time. As he grew older, he became suspicious of his neighbors almost to the point of paranoia; if a man had business to transact with Hoy he turned it over to his womenfolk to handle. Hoy took self-righteous pride in the fact that he had never in his life butchered so much as one cow belonging to someone else. The Brown’s Parkers, however, never quite forgot the way he had acquired some of his lands.
In his old age, Jesse retired to Denver and wrote his memoirs describing his early life on the plains and his years in Brown’s Park. These memoirs, known as “The J. S. Hoy Manuscript,” were unearthed from the files of a publisher in Denver. They had been mercilessly edited, probably by a Hoy relative who either feared libel suits from the people in Brown’s Park or who believed that the old man had unjustly blackened his neighbors’ names. The manuscript contains only the barest information on his Brown’s Park days, and no particularly specific accusations have survived the censor’s scissors. Even in its expurgated form, however, it clearly shows that J. S. Hoy felt that most of his neighbors were thieves and rustlers and that the worst ones were the Herrera brothers and Elizabeth Bassett.
While the manuscript contains mentions of “the Bassett gang,” Elizabeth herself is mentioned only once. After a censorship of several pages, one sentence remains which condemns as it excuses: “In fairness to Elizabeth Bassett it must be said that . . . “ There follows a moving paragraph on the hardships women endured in pioneer life.
Whatever the Hoys’ opinions of Elizabeth, tradition says that her fellow ranchers admired her spunk, her ability, and her leadership. Among the ranchers, Elizabeth’s voice was respected. As for Herb, they thought enough of him to elect him their representative on the county commission of Routt County in 1882. County records show his $5000 bond was made by Pablo Herrera, Anton Prestopitz, and Griff Edwards. He evidently served only one term, for in those days it was impractical for Brown’s Park to be represented at regular county meetings held three days’ journey away at Hahn’s Peak. However, from 1884 until his resignation in 1892, Herb still represented authority in the Colorado part of the Park, for he was appointed justice of the peace, with Griff Edwards and Solomon Rouff as his bondsmen.
Indeed, Herb was a leader in many community affairs. His education was broad enough that he could give good advice on subjects affecting the ranchers’ welfare. While they might think him a poor sort with cattle, they never questioned the integrity of this man who, on many a Sunday morning after an all-night Brown’s Park party, would lead the hymns and conduct a simple religious service for this churchless community.
Even after the early days of building, Herb Bassett took no active part in running the cattle and bossing the cowboys; that was Elizabeth’s bailiwick. Even though Herb’s health returned and he lived to be very old, it is hard to picture this quiet little man, who had always been a clerical worker, directing six-foot cowboys at roundup time.
Equally incongruous might be the picture of a woman in a sidesaddle bossing six-foot cowboys. Elizabeth was a successful manager, however, using that famous “Bassett charm” the old-timers speak of. She did not issue orders; she made requests, and she accompanied them with a warm, very feminine smile. Skeptical cowboys soon found that they had an efficient boss who would work right along with them. She had put in her apprenticeship before they had arrived and had learned her lessons well. One woman who knew her said, “She was as good a cowhand as any man.”
In Where the Old West Stayed Young, John Rolfe Burroughs writes:
It is impossible to overemphasize the loyalty that Mrs. Bassett inspired in the breasts of the homeless and oftentimes outlawed young men, any one of whom it is said “willingly would have died and gone to hell for her.” If high strung, she was a strong-willed, self-controlled woman not at all motivated by romantic considerations. But such was her vitality, her personal magnetism, and her sympathetic understanding of the essential loneliness of her footloose constituency that men willingly flocked to her standard.
Elizabeth was too practical to rely on only that “personal magnetism,” which was, after all, instinctive and not contrived. More important, she gave her men the privilege of building their own herds so that a man could work for himself as well as for the Bassetts. This attracted the ambitious, for many outfits had halted the practice, believing that it tempted the poorly paid cowhands to change a few brands for their own benefit.
Equally important from a human standpoint, she welcomed her ranch hands almost as guests within her family circle. Her bunkhouse was comfortable and her food was good. If a man liked to read, Herb’s library was available. If he enjoyed children, the Bassetts could supply him with five, of assorted ages. Ann Bassett has described bucking contests where each small child had for a bronco a cowboy who would do his best to throw his rider into the clean hay strewn in a makeshift arena.
Aside from the fact that Elizabeth was a good cowhand and a good range boss and