all the unpeopled miles through which the Union Pacific Railroad passed, two separate towns were built only fifteen miles apart—Rock Springs and Green River City, Wyoming.
The first transcontinental railroad had been completed in 1869 when the Central Pacific, building from the west, and the Union Pacific, building from the east, had joined their rails with a golden spike at Promontory Point, Utah. As part of its contract to build the railroad, the Union Pacific had been given alternate sections of land along its right of way. As the construction crews moved across the country, the railroad established towns and sold the land for as little as seventy-five cents an acre, advertising for new settlers who would become customers for its freight and passenger cars.
When the construction crews reached the “dry country,” where the typical homesteader could not rely on crops of wheat and corn and barley, the Union Pacific continued to sell land and “choice lots” in its newly established towns; but the land could not sustain enough people to give the towns permanency and, when the construction crews moved on, they became ghost towns. The hopeful investors in “choice lots” moved away, damning the railroad for chicanery and perhaps themselves for gullibility.
Green River City, Wyoming, was spared this fate when the Union Pacific established its yards there permanently. Then the railroad established Rock Springs, where there was coal to be mined for its own use and for shipment to outside markets. Rock Springs was a profitable investment; by giving itself favorable rates on hauling coal, the Union Pacific could undercut its competitors.
Both Green River City and Rock Springs had the unrelieved drabness of any new town established in treeless country, but Rock Springs suffered the additional ugliness of the mine dumps which showered dust on the shoddy clapboard shacks thrown up hastily to house the miners. Green River City, on the other hand, was the county seat, very proud of itself and of its future. It was very nearly a “company town,” and its merchants almost “company merchants.” Because new businesses were discouraged, being considered dangerous to the financial well-being of the established concerns, ambitious newcomers necessarily turned to Rock Springs to set up their shops.
Keenly aware of the general unfavorable opinion of their town and anxious naturally to get on in the world, these merchants showed all the initiative that Americans are supposed to have, and proceeded to outsell and outsmart Green River City in every way. As time passed, they even used municipal funds to cut a good road through territory belonging to their neighboring state of Utah to entice Brown’s Parkers to buy their supplies in Rock Springs, instead of either Green River City or the new town of Craig, east of the Park in Colorado.
Although still ugly, Rock Springs today seems more alive and prosperous than the much more pleasant Green River (as it is now called), which is small, sleepy, and a little down-at-the-heels—the final blow to its importance having come as the Union Pacific’s role dwindled. However, at the time the Bassetts fled Brown’s Park it was indeed unfortunate that Herb’s quest for work landed them in dirty, dingy little Rock Springs. When they arrived in 1879, Rock Springs had a population of around three thousand, a disproportionate share of whom were “foreign labor,” brought in by the railroad to work in the mines while being squalidly housed, poorly treated, and abominably underpaid. The good housing for the “whites” was almost as squalid and at a premium, and opportunities for work were limited.
The Bassetts stayed in Rock Springs for over a year and a half before returning to Brown’s Park. There seems little question that Herb preferred town life, even in Rock Springs, to chopping brush on a homestead, and perhaps only a lack of funds prevented him from finally taking his family to California. Their eventual return to Brown’s Park must have been at Elizabeth’s insistence.
Elizabeth may have regretted their flight almost immediately, but it would have been impossible to return in the middle of that first winter, even after the threat from the Utes had subsided. Prudent people do not attempt to pull wagons through the snows of the Wyoming Basin if they can avoid it. Even if she took the winter’s delay philosophically, however, she could not have received the news of another pregnancy with joy, for it meant more wasted time. By the time Elbert, always called Eb, was born in June, the short summer season was too far advanced to reestablish themselves. Waiting through another winter must have been nearly unbearable to her, as she sat in a makeshift house in the primitive little mining town, watching cattlemen coming in for supplies.
Elizabeth had contracted a very severe case of “cattle fever,” the same fervid enthusiasm that was then infecting investors in Boston, in New York, and even in Scotland and England. In that vast, unsettled western territory belonging only to the United States government there were thousands of square miles of grassland that in previous ages had supported huge herds of buffalo. Since the buffalo had been all but exterminated, all those thousands of square miles were available for the raising of cattle.
Corporations had been formed and the value of their stocks was booming, for small and large investors alike were rushing to participate in what seemed an absolutely sure-fire method of making a fortune. It was so simple! One bought young cattle, turned them loose on the public domain where the food was free, then sat back and waited for only two or three years to sell them for ten times what they had cost. And all the while one waited, those same original cows were producing new cows each spring!
A naive investor often ignored the stumbling blocks on this pathway to fortune: the fluctuating prices paid for beef at the markets; “killer winters” when the plains were covered with the frozen bodies of cattle who had starved to death—winters in which whole herds could be wiped out; or, most serious of all, the difficulty of providing water for the cattle to drink in a country where water was scarce. Since cattle can rarely be maintained on land that is more than two and a half miles from water, many of those thousands of miles of grassland were unusable because of a lack of waterholes, and there was savage competition for land which did have water.
The Wyoming Basin had been carved by nature into ranges that followed the streams and the rivers, the springs and the water holes. Early settlers in the years immediately after the Civil War had claimed some of these natural ranges and had built up large herds to fill them. The rest were quickly occupied by the cattle corporations.
These cattle barons, stalemated by their nearly equal strength, lived in peace with surprisingly little dissension as to who “owned” what range, apparently ignoring the fact that the ranges were in the public domain. When their “ownership” was threatened by the later arrivals, the “little men” brought by the advertising of the railroads and the generosity of the Homestead Act, they formed powerful coalitions among themselves to stop the invasion. Each homesteader who filed a claim on a water source was a threat far out of proportion to the one hundred and sixty acres he was claiming, and the cattle barons stood united in fighting him.
The cattlemen fought legally and illegally. Each could legally exercise his own homestead rights to one hundred and sixty acres; moreover, through the inept and often corrupt administration of the Homestead Act, he could use relatives, his own cowboys, or even hired drifters or prostitutes to homestead on adjoining ground. Some cattlemen thereby gained control of twenty or more miles of riverbank.
Any homesteader who “proved up” and gained title to land near a cattleman’s domain always knew that his powerful neighbor would gladly buy him out. He also knew that if he stubbornly persisted in holding on to his homestead, his crops could be burned, his cabin wrecked, or his cattle absorbed into the larger herd at roundup time. If the homesteader attempted to fight back, or if his land was in a particularly strategic location, he knew he could even be lynched as a rustler or shot in the back as he rode home from town, and that he could expect no support from the legal authorities. The only real authority in Wyoming, both on the state and local levels, rested in the cattle barons themselves.
During the period Elizabeth Bassett lived in Rock Springs, the war between the large cattlemen and the small ranchers had already begun. That war would continue for twenty-five more years, increasing in violence into the 1900s, when the cattlemen were finally vanquished. Elizabeth was clearheaded enough to realize the difficulties that would face her, but she had a secret advantage over the average incoming homesteader—she knew that Brown’s Park was almost pristine territory. Although cattle being