Cattle Kate (34 page)

On Henderson:
Stock detective George Henderson—a known murderer and enforcer for the stock growers—carried the news of the hanging to Cheyenne newspapers, as the papers themselves reported. How he did this or where he did it—at a home, in an office or at the Cheyenne Club—are the author's conjecture. In her book
The War on Powder River
, Smith reports: “So swiftly was the propaganda barrage laid down, within hours after Henderson reached Cheyenne, that the marks of advance planning are unmistakable….Everything in the stories, aside from their Cheyenne origin, stamps them as coming from a common source (a handout prepared by a party or parties who were interesting in stifling any questions concerning the Sweetwater murders): the similarity of tone, which was one of ranting diatribe, the repetition of details and even of identical phrases which were used over and over, and the misspelling of the name ‘Averill,' a dead giveaway. All of this hints strongly of premeditation, involving how many individuals no one can say. It demolishes the convenient theory that a group of righteously outraged cattlemen, who had intended only to frighten the pair with threats, had somehow allowed the business to get out of hand and had hanged them by mistake, so to speak.”

On “little Wall Street”:
The name appears in the papers of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association in the Archive of the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

Chapter Sixteen
—
How to Stage a Hanging

On the spring roundup:
Hufsmith notes that Bothwell, Sun and Durbin were the commissioners for the spring roundup of 1889 that began in mid-May and ended on July 20.

On “a thief or potential thief”:
This cattlemen's view of ranchers was well-known throughout the territory and variations on this theme are found in virtually every historical account of this case.

On the cattlemen's activities:
Recounting of the morning's activities comes from multiple sources, including Hufsmith and Meschter. They note that Ernie McLean sobbed out the entire story the next morning to Charles Countryman, who owned the Bar H6 Ranch. Mrs. Countryman and her six children listened to the story, too. Hufsmith says Countryman ordered McLean off his property, saying he “didn't want to hear anything more about it.”

On the ages of the lynchers:
One of the mysteries of this story is how the youngest man in the mob was calling the shots, for indeed, Bothwell was far younger than the others. He was thirty-five, while Durbin was forty-seven, Sun was forty-five, Galbraith was forty-four, and Conner was forty. There is no biographical information on McLean. The day he died, Jim Averell was thirty-eight years old.

On Tom Sun:
The Carbon County Museum in Rawlins includes recollections of pioneer families, including one attributed to the Harry L. Hays family. It says that at the time of the lynching, the oldest sons—Rob and Will—were riding for Bothwell. “They heard the cattlemen discussing the plans and knew that Tom Sun and one other rancher opposed the plans with vigor.”

On Sam Johnson:
He was the Durbin Precinct voting judge and foreman of the Bar II Ranch on Pete Creek. Historian Ruth Beebe shared with Hufsmith the story of him turning back when he found they were after Ella.

On the newspaper men knowing of the lynching:
On November 2, 1889, the
Carbon County Journal
reported that Speer told the coroner that he and Fetz watched the entire thing. Furthermore, he admitted he told cowboys that afternoon that Jim and Ella had been lynched—because that's what he was told by the vigilantes before they left the newspaper office. “When pressed to tell where he got his information, [Speer] replied that there were some things connected with the case which he did not care to talk about,” the paper reported. This information didn't emerge until it was too late—nobody realized these two men also were eyewitnesses to the abduction and well knew what the outcome would be.

Another eyewitness, although he never came forward at the time, Dan Fitger admitted to his family years later that he saw the abduction and lynching. Fitger, then a working cowboy, said he was plowing a hay meadow when he saw Tom Sun's white-topped tandem-seated buggy and watched all afternoon as the lynching party moved down the river bottom. He also watched Frank Buchanan skulking behind the caravan. This story came from his daughter, Helen, who shared it first with historian Ruth Beebe. Dan Fitger later became Natrone County assessor. “If this story is true, he could have changed history,” Hufsmith notes.

On Buchanan:
Frank Buchanan gave detailed interviews with the sheriff and newspapers on what happened that day. The death scene portrayed here follows his recollections. He reported Ella Watson laughing at her killers, “There's not enough water in this river to give a land hog a decent bath.”

On Bothwell being sweet on Ella:
Meschter notes an “elderly gentleman from the upper Platt River country” advanced this as a theory on the lynching. He says the man told him that Bothwell had proposed marriage to Ella and believed, “the hanging, then, was Bothwell's infantile reaction to destroy what he couldn't have and to erase the humiliation of rejection by someone clearly his inferior.”

On Ralph Cole:
At an inquest, Ralph Cole recounted how the boys ran in with news of the abduction and he ran to retrieve the horses left behind when Jim was kidnapped.

On the posse:
All historical accounts note Deputy Sheriff Philip Watson deputized an acting coroner and brought the posse to the Sweetwater Valley. Historians differ if he took them out to the hanging site in the middle of the night, or if he waited for first light, but common sense says that after an exhausting day in the saddle, they waited.

On the inquest:
A coroner's inquest was held after the burial, with eyewitness testimony given by Frank Buchanan, Gene Crowder, John DeCorey, and Ralph Cole. The coroner ruled that Ella and Jim had been hanged by the six men.

Chapter Seventeen
—
The Man with the Pen

On Ed Towse:
Historians are united in their disgust at the stories written by this journalist, who had worked in Rawlins before he joined the
Leader
in Cheyenne. Some suggest he was on the payroll of the stock growers. His only real claim to fame is that he is the reporter who told the most fanciful lies about Ella Watson and James Averell.

On Ed Slack's article:
This is quoted verbatim from the article printed in the
Cheyenne Daily Sun
of Tuesday, July 23, 1889.

On Ed Towse's original article:
This is quoted verbatim from the article printed in the
Cheyenne Daily Leader
, July 23, 1889. In addition, the editor and part-owner of the
Leader
, John Carroll, offered an editorial the same day titled “Protecting Themselves.” It read:

“The lynching of a man and woman on the Sweetwater is but a natural outgrowth of the extraordinary conditions of affairs which have existed there and elsewhere in the territory for several years past. Notwithstanding that the large cattle companies contribute greatly to the taxable wealth of the various counties, that they add to the business of the counties by purchasing supplies and to its wealth by the sale of their cattle, things have come to such a pass that they cannot secure protection for their property.

“In Rawlins recently several trials resulted in the most shameful travesty of justice. In Fremont County, out of sixteen cases, there was not a single conviction. In Johnson County there were no convictions in forty cases and even in this county it has been up to the present almost impossible to secure the conviction of a single cattle thief. In many of those cases the evidence was overwhelming.

“The logical result of all this is that the cattlemen have been forced to organize for self protection. The rustlers and maverickers are carrying things with a high hand. Honest men are constantly in fear of their lives and are blind to much crookedness that is going on around them. Rewards aggregating $22,000 are offered by twenty-two different cattle companies for the arrest and conviction of anyone found altering the brands or killing their cattle. Nothing short of heroic treatment, however, seems to have any effect.

“Meanwhile everybody in the sections under the domination of the rustlers is going around armed to the teeth and red hot times may be expected at any moment.”

On “The True Story”:
This is printed verbatim from the
Sun
on July 25, 1889, and comes from a telegram by rural newspaperman Bill Barlow, who is best remembered as the “sagebrush philosopher.”

On Ella being a whore and Jim a pimp:
Hufsmith says, “Not one shred of substantive evidence exists to show that those two settlers were anything but hard-working homesteaders, trying to eke out a living from a primitive and difficult environment. In fact, according to their neighbors and contemporaries, they were universally liked by nearly everyone who knew them, even including most of the valley cowmen, except Al Bothwell, of course, and his close friends whose free and legal use of rangeland Jim openly challenged.”

Sharon Leigh wrote in “Ella Watson: Rustler or Homesteader,” published in the
Annals of Wyoming
magazine: “On Wyoming's Sweetwater River in 1889, a homesteading woman and man were hanged by six cattlemen. She was reputed to be a prostitute, he supposedly her lover, and together they were considered cattle rustlers. In reality, they were merely homesteaders, legally settling on available government land which was open range claimed by one of the large cattlemen.”

On the newspaper's smear campaign:
The historical record is clear that
Sun
Editor Ed Slack mistakenly linked Ella Watson to someone called Cattle Kate. And then Ed Towse compounded the problem by giving her the mistaken identity of Kate Maxwell. Ella's father, Tom Watson, told the press that his daughter had spent June and July of 1888 in Kansas with her family, making it impossible for her to be the “Ellen Watson” who was arrested in Cheyenne for drunkenness and prostitution on June 23, 1888.

• •
  Helena Huntington Smith decries the fanciful lies in
  The War on Powder River
  . She writes, “But while in the
  Leader
  and elsewhere she ‘died with curses on her foul lips,' in the Chicago
  Interocean
  and
  Omaha Bee
  she remembered her mother and asked that her ill-gotten gains be used to found a home for wayward girls….Death itself offered no surcease for the poor wretch as the ‘very best people' held a witches' sabbath over her remains and the press tore her to pieces in such an orgy of indecency and fakery as can seldom have been equaled even in the nineteenth century.”
  
• •
  Smith also notes that “The
  Laramie Boomerang,
  always cynical about the Cheyenne ring and all its works and ways, yawned mightily over the Cattle Kate yarn. ‘Farewell, Cattle Queen Kate!' it perorated at the close of some editorial remarks, ‘Thou didst never exist, but vale anyway.
  '”
  
• •
  Smith on Averell writes, “If there is virtually no evidence to show that Averell was a thief, there is a formidable body of testimony to show that he quarreled with the biggest stockmen in the Sweetwater Valley, those accused in his lynching. Jack Flagg, who was well acquainted on the Sweetwater, wrote three years later: ‘The reason for murdering him was the direct result of trouble he had with Bothwell over some fine meadow land that Bothwell was holding illegally…'”
  
• •
  Smith on overall coverage of the story, claimed: “
  The [New York] World
  topped the record for silliness…with a remarkable editorial which proves that even as early as 1889 the myth of the pure cowboy who never kissed anybody but his horse had gained a firm foothold in the East. ‘The cowboys of Wyoming did not like Kate Maxwell's style, so they lynched her…It wasn't a very gallant thing for
  “
  the boys
  ”
  to do, but Kate's methods of getting cattle were not such as to popularize her on the plains. Her social life, too, was a trifle shady, and cowboys are particular.'”
  
• •
  And it is Smith who is credited by other historians for “destroying” the myth that cattle thieves had free reign over W.T. and the courts looked the other way. “Statements regarding the number of acquittals in cattle-stealing cases were put out by the cattlemen's propaganda machine…with the most reckless defiance of truth,” she wrote. Not only was this done with the Sweetwater lynching, but was repeated with vigor in 1892 in the most shameful and infamous moment of Wyoming history—the Johnson County War, when cattlemen imported Texan killers to wipe out homesteaders and destroy the town of Buffalo. Many believe Ella and Jim's murder planted the seed for that war, as cattlemen were emboldened by getting away with their murders. Smith notes the “machine” that claimed as many as four hundred thirty-five righteous rustler cases in Johnson County had resulted in no convictions, but she debunks that story by going to the county court record. In the ten years before the Johnson County War, “the total number of criminal cases in every category, including cattle-stealing, horse-stealing, assault, illegal cohabitation, fornication, murder and ordinary burglary, had barely passed the two hundred mark. So much for the tall tales.”
  
• •
  On August 16, 1889, the
  Casper Weekly Mail
  said on page one: “The victims of the late hanging party have not yet been proven to be thieves, but on the contrary, there is positive and convincing evidence that neither Averell or the woman ever stole or assisted in stealing any cattle.”