well-mannered poise and serenity. She had Elizabeth’s quickness and drive, her ability and need to control, her indomitability, her strong will, and her well-controlled but volcanic temper. But where Elizabeth was admired and respected, Josie was to be loved, for her strengths were tempered by the warmth and affability she gained from her father.
Young Sam was more like Herb, an easy child to care for when Josie became his surrogate mother. Since Sam was over four years old when the Bassetts returned to Brown’s Park, he too would have soon become a working member of the family. Like all the Bassett children, he learned to ride as soon as he could straddle a horse, but even before he was trusted on horseback he must have gathered eggs, hauled water from the spring and brought wood for the cookstove.
Ann was altogether different. If Josie was the picture of her mother, Ann was Elizabeth’s caricature. Like Josie, she had fair, freckled skin, and although her hair lacked the brightness of Josie’s, it still had auburn highlights. Ann could be as winsome as her mother and behave as sweetly and politely as her older sister Josie when she wanted to, but she lacked the self-control and self-assurance that her mother and Josie both possessed. Whereas Josie’s temper was slow to rouse and responded only to strong provocation, Ann’s temper was her primary weapon in her determination to have her own way. She had been a demanding child from the first time she found no milk in her mother’s breasts, and as she grew older her temper tantrums became part of her standard repertoire.
In those beginning years a relationship between Josie and Ann was formed that was to continue throughout their lives. It was a close and loving one, for family ties were important in the Bassett family, but it was never peaceful. Josie chided and scolded her younger sister when she was naughty, and exercised her delegated authority with complete assurance. Josie had an honest conviction that what she was saying should be listened to by any well-brought-up girl, especially a Bassett girl. She infuriated Ann, who usually refused to obey. Ann was impudent, and she soon learned to bait Josie into losing her temper. Elizabeth and Herb would, of course, scold Ann for being naughty, but the brunt of their displeasure must have fallen on Josie, who, after all, was older and supposed to know better. Ann, looking angelic with tears in innocent eyes, would thoroughly enjoy the uproar she had caused.
Their next brother, Eb, was another Ann, although he lacked Ann’s steel-willed violence. When George came along in 1884 he was “Herbert’s child,” and this must have been a decided relief to Josie. As the years passed, each boy in turn was introduced to the outside work and was gradually absorbed into tasks in the fields and on the range. Ann, however, was expected to follow in her sister’s footsteps, become a little lady, and turn into what the neighbors were later to call Josie—a “homebody.”
Ann had other ideas. She looked at Josie, who actually liked to work around the house, and at her mother, who spent much time in the saddle, and decided that her mother and her brothers were having all the fun. From the time she could climb on a horse she was out following her brother Sam. If Sam sent her home, she went outside with Eb, playing rough and getting grimy—something allowed little boys but not nice little girls. Although her parents attempted to keep her in the house with Josie, Ann either ran away or did her housework so ineptly that Josie would do the work herself.
In The Colorado Magazine Ann tells of her pride in an Indian costume she was given and of bursting into a roomful of visitors from the east “all done up in war paint and eagle feathers.” She contrasted this to her sister Josie, “all perked up in starched gingham and ruffles to announce dinner.” It was tiresome to Ann to be constantly compared to Josie, but it would have been more tiresome to have copied her. She continued to be a wild, unbroken colt of a girl, slipping away to the bunkhouse to listen to the cowboys’ talk and picking up incidentally a vocabulary that she sometimes used even when she had turned into an elegant young woman. When she was just a little thing, it is said, she would use those words as she threw stones when one of the unpopular Hoy brothers happened to ride past the schoolhouse yard.
There was a cruel streak in Ann. She herself told how she could not keep from laughing when a “slow” little boy named Felix Myer would try to recite. Although the teacher remonstrated and her mother whipped her, Ann still laughed. The teacher could only send her out to sit on the steps whenever poor Felix had to recite.
Dick Dunham tells a story in Flaming Gorge Country involving a bride of one of the Rife brothers, who bragged excessively at a community supper about a cut-glass bowl she had brought from the east. At this time Ann was old enough to be helping the women wash the dishes. No one could ever be sure that it was intentional, but Ann picked up the bowl to polish it, juggled it for a moment, then watched it go crashing to the floor.
Yet there was kindness and loyalty and a demand for justice in her that balanced the cruelties of her nature. She was never hesitant to speak up in defense of the weak or the oppressed. In her childhood the Utes were still slipping back into Brown’s Park to hunt and to dry their jerky. They camped at the mouth of Vermillion Creek, not too far from the Bassett ranch, and Ann would go down to play with the Indian children, just as Sam and Josie had. Because the Indians were her friends, she was always to defend them and espouse their cause, even in the face of the distrust and contempt that many whites felt for an “Indian-lover.” Actually, throwing stones and cursing the Hoys was a child’s way of thirsting for justice.
The children had a wonderful life. They worked hard, but they accepted this as natural. They also fell naturally into the fellowship of adults which their work earned them. Children were not segregated and given children’s activities in Brown’s Park. Instead, they were incorporated into the full life of the community and were genuine participants at the house parties, on the roundups, and at the horse races down on the old Indian track below Harry Hoy’s place.
The Bassett children had a particular possession of their own, a private retreat up in the great outcroppings of polished maroon rock behind their home. They could climb up the rocks to what they called “the cave,” although it was actually a geologic oddity more delightful than a cave. In past eons an ancient spring had poured its water on one of those huge slabs of rock until a perfect circle, almost six feet across, had been melted out of it. The water had hollowed out a large room beneath the opening and had carved a huge opening on one side. Sunlight streamed down through the roof and made patterns in the loose sand in which the children buried their treasures, and from their “picture window” they could see their whole world laid out below them. They played their games in a setting that seemed created just for the delight of children.
Even though strangers rode through the Park, and though peculiar characters sometimes camped in a secluded wash, there was no thought that the children should be sheltered from every possible harm. Once their chores were done, they could ride the hills as free as the jackrabbits that bounded away at their approach. The one incident that has come down to us in which this freedom might have been dangerous is found in Glade Ross’s files:
Sam and Josie went up Bull Canyon to get horses, Sam on a scrawny iron grey and Josie on a sorrel mare which looked good but was not as good a horse as she looked. As they were coming back down, a tall man—ugly, dirty, red stubble about an inch long, riding an old grey horse just about played out [stopped them]. He had corduoroy [sic] pants on, stuffed in his boot tops, no sign of a gun and no pack or supplies. The horse was shod. Said, “Sis, let’s trade horses.” Josie refused but he insisted, took her off her horse and changed saddles. Sam said, “Better let him do it, Jose,” but Josie was mad and really cussed him out. He said, “O.K. kids, I’ll see you around,” and left on her horse. No one knew who he was, and Mr. Bassett tried to find out but never did. Knew the country or he couldn’t have gone through the country so light and avoided everyone. The grey horse was much better than the sorrel and Josie had him several years until he died. Everyone kidded Josie about being quite a horse trader, but she didn’t like it.
The children’s most meaningful education was carried on informally in their own cabin as they listened to their father read aloud. There were readings from the Bible, of course, but also from Shakespeare, Emerson, Sir Walter Scott and all the other writers whose books filled Herb’s shelves. However, formal schooling was also provided for Brown’s Park children from the first possible moment after Herb’s arrival. He organized a public