might expect to find when they reached California.
Since Sam had tried California and had not liked it, it is most probable that he discouraged them from going any farther west. Mountain man that he was, he would have told them that California was too crowded, that the good land was all gone, and that, along the coast at least, the air was too foggy for an asthmatic. With the enthusiasm that any man has for a spot he himself has chosen, he would have expounded on the beauty of his own Brown’s Hole, its comparative emptiness, its available ground, its mild winters and clean pure air.
Whatever their reasons, Herb and Elizabeth decided not to go on to California but to stay in Wyoming. Herb turned down Sam’s offer of hospitality in Brown’s Hole, however; he intended to live in town and look for a job compatible with his experience and education. Although he had grown up on a farm in Illinois and had the necessary knowledge to homestead, he lacked the physical stamina required. More importantly, he lacked the desire. Although he had described himself as “farmer” on his enlistment papers, he had actually been a schoolteacher in his youth, and his descendants remember him as a one-time teacher who was a “complete misfit” in Brown’s Park.
An undocumented source states that Herb worked a short while in Evanston, Wyoming, as a bookkeeper for a mercantile firm. His grandson, Crawford MacKnight, says he taught school for a term in Green River City. Neither job, however, would have been worthy of his capacities, and he must finally have decided that success in this new land could be found only in homesteading. So word was sent to Sam, and Sam came to guide their wagons on the journey to Brown’s Hole.
BROWN’S HOLE
Sạm Bassett must have shaken his head in disbelief when he saw the belongings that Herb and Elizabeth were bringing to a wilderness. There were spooled bedsteads and the feather mattresses to go on them; there were walnut bureaus from Elizabeth’s girlhood home. These were practical enough; for that matter, so was the huge iron cookstove, even though nothing like it had yet been seen in Brown’s Hole, where people still cooked over fireplaces. There were, however, box upon boxes of books, and more boxes of china, silver and dainty glassware. Most wondrous of all, there was an organ! To these had to be added the barrels of flour and sacks of coffee and sugar and beans, the kettles, the skillets, the axes, the hammers, the rifles and shot, the barrel of nails. Any supplies they did not take with them in those two wagons would have to wait until they returned to town in late autumn to buy their winter’s supplies.
They made their move at the earliest signs of spring, as soon as the mountain passes were clear of snow. There was an urgent reason for this—in less than two months Elizabeth was due to deliver their third child. Elizabeth’s own enthusiasm for this new endeavor can be judged by the fact that she was willing to take the risks of the trip and the hardships of homesteading in her late months of pregnancy.
The wagons swayed and bumped southward over rocks and through sagebrush, following the faint tracks made by those who had gone before. For long stretches they were on comparatively level ground, but for equally long stretches the track took them over formidable hills. Then, like those before them in the trek west, Elizabeth and the children would get down from the wagons, to lighten the load for the straining oxen on the inclines and to save themselves from a turnover on the downgrades if the brakes should fail. One can imagine her walking with a child by each hand, picking the easiest path, mindful of the cumbersome burden she carried within her and matter-of-factly adjusting herself to it.
Josie remembered that first trip:
I don’t know how many days we were coming—I just barely can remember it. I was four years old. And one reason I remember it so well, they had a team of oxen, and wasn’t I afraid of those oxen! Oh! But I rode with them—I rode with Uncle Sam Bassett and his oxen all the way. But when I was on the ground I wasn’t with them, I was someplace else. And that’s how I come to remember our trip so well.
There must have been almost a holiday feeling to their journey. Elizabeth was not a woman to be transformed into a semi-invalid by pregnancy. Strong and resilient, she could take discomfort in stride. When they made camp for the night and the men had the fire burning well, she would have helped cook the dinner and put the children to bed with a song. If the two men lingered at the campfire, she would have entered into the conversation as eagerly and as gracefully as if she were sitting safe and secure in her old Arkansas parlor. And it may have been at one of these campfires that Elizabeth started her campaign, often mentioned by old-timers, to change the name of Brown’s Hole.
Back in 1869 and 1871, a one-armed Union Army veteran named Major John Wesley Powell had made two voyages of scientific exploration down the hitherto uncharted Green River. In Brown’s Hole itself, the Bassetts were to know the Green as a strong but serene ribbon of water pursuing a snakelike course through the valley that the river itself had created. However, to the north and south of Brown’s Hole the Green was a treacherous man-eater. It charged through high-walled red-rock canyons so narrow that for miles there would be no place for a boat to land, and poured over rocky beds of boulders that created giant whirlpools. Before Powell’s expeditions, the river had been considered nearly unnavigable; it was, in fact, never completely mastered until the construction of Flaming Gorge Dam in the early 1960s.
Major Powell’s journals of his voyages had been widely published, and if the Bassetts had not read them back in Arkansas they surely must have read them in the days when they were planning to make their home on the banks of the very river of which Powell wrote. Elizabeth would have read the names that the poetically inclined Powell had given to the landmarks he passed, and would have learned that he had called her future home Brown’s Park rather than Brown’s Hole.
“Oh Josie, dear,” one can almost hear her saying, “did you hear Uncle Sam say hole? I thought we were going to live in a park! To live in a park would be so much nicer, wouldn’t it?”
Elizabeth mounted an unremitting campaign, and she won it. At her insistence, neighbors began to use Major Powell’s name for their valley, and in doing so they forgot the major completely, giving Elizabeth sole credit for the more euphonious name.
On the fourth or fifth day the wagons entered the eastern end of Brown’s Park (as it shall be called from now on) through Irish Canyon. Then they turned west to reach Uncle Sam’s cabin, located eighteen or so miles up the valley. As they traveled they surely must have stopped at any cabins along the way, despite Elizabeth’s advanced pregnancy. In Arkansas she might have followed the custom that required pregnant women to retire from public view, but in isolated Brown’s Park that custom would have seemed rather silly. The shared experiences of the handful of people living there were to create an intimacy in which old customs, old backgrounds, and disparities of education and personality became insignificant. Their lives were to be so intertwined that the Bassetts’ neighbors are essential to the Bassett story.
The first homestead on their way belonged to José (“Joe”) and Pablo Herrera, two brothers who had fled New Mexico as political refugees.* After a period of time in which they had lived by their wits and their success in the gambling halls in Wyoming, they had come to Brown’s Park and established themselves with the help of fellow Mexicans who worked for not much more than their board and room. They carried on a brisk trade with the Utes for their exquisitely tanned buckskin, did a great deal of drinking and gambling, and offered an open house to anyone who happened to drift into the Park. A photograph still in existence shows José Herrera to be a burly, handsome Castilian, well-dressed to the point of foppishness, with an air of strength and breeding. It is difficult to reconcile the sophisticated man of this picture with the one who, J.S. Hoy said, would start sharpening a long knife while talking to someone who disagreed with him.
One of the Herreras’ drinking companions and full-time lodgers was A. B. Conway, a practicing lawyer in Iowa before personal problems sent him west. Conway eventually abandoned an aimless and alcohol-dominated existence in Brown’s Park and went on to become “Judge Conway,” Chief Justice of the Wyoming Supreme Court. When he died, the eulogies of his admiring fellow citizens rang across his grave. This brilliant man’s fondness for the Herrera brothers