“I searched her cabin to find it right after the lynching,” Fales told him. “Damn, I couldn’t find it.”
Durant knew Mr. Watson hadn’t found it among the other documents she kept at home. He thought it was strange such an important piece of paper would go missing, but this one had.
Attorney Durant had no idea Ella herself had offered the proof to her lynchers, begging them to take her to Rawlins so she could show them the bill of sale in her safe deposit box at the bank. It never occurred to him that a woman with such a paltry estate—who kept important documents in her cabin—would also have a safe deposit box. So he never went looking for one.
But there were six others in the Sweetwater Valley who well remembered her constant pleas to go get the proof. And every single one of them was convinced she hadn’t been bluffing. Every single one feared Durant had discovered the bill of sale in a safe deposit box at the bank in Rawlins.
Most convinced of all were the two men named in the suit. A.J. Bothwell and John Durbin both made frantic trips to the bank when they learned of the suit. That was the second thing they both did. The first thing was swear and pace like caged tigers.
Both inquired about a safe deposit box under the name of Ellen or Ella Watson. Although both were large depositors at this very bank, they were told that such items were confidential and couldn’t be disclosed.
“Maybe there isn’t a safe deposit box at all,” Durbin offered, as a helpful suggestion to the bank president he’d known for years. “I have one, but I also have more than $50,000 in deposits here. It makes sense for me. It didn’t much sense for a woman like her, who had so little.”
“Nobody would ever know if there was a box or not, being as how these things are confidential,” Bothwell offered as his own solution. “And I appreciate how careful you are about that. I know my $60,000 in deposits are safe in a bank with integrity like yours.”
The banker—how many steaks had he eaten at Bothwell’s? How much of Durbin’s whiskey had he swilled?—thanked his wealthy depositors and told them not to worry themselves.
But worry they did. The stock growers gave them the best attorneys in the territory to fight the suit, and John W. Lacey proved himself a pit bull. His firm was already gearing up for the upcoming grand jury hearing on the lynching charges, but now he had to deal with this outrageous suit. What did that Durant guy think he was doing? Well, he’d show him.
It took months before he even got around to replying that the suit was too ridiculous to even answer. He simply refused a response.
The court said, no, you need to respond.
He took his own sweet time again. Then again said, no, this was stupid and he wouldn’t dignify it with an answer.
Courts didn’t work with any speed in those days—never would. It wasn’t until March of 1891—seventeen months after the suit was filed—that the court gave Lacey a deadline, demanding an answer.
He now filed a flat denial of everything, claiming the suit was nothing but a “false clamor.”
By then, George Durant was gone. After waiting a year to get a reply to his suit, an “opportunity in Salt Lake City” prompted him to move. He left town in January, 1891. Most knew his days in Rawlins were numbered anyway. Durant left the case in the hands of his associate, George Smith. He gave Smith twenty-five dollars to cover his legal fees to see the suit through.
“Good luck with this,” he told his partner. They both knew this was a real long shot. But Smith agreed it was worth the effort to at least get some stab at justice.
On May 13, 1891, the court made its first decision in the case of Ella Watson vs. A.J. Bothwell and John Durbin. It granted Lacey’s request to continue the case until the next term.
On October 12, 1891, the court again continued the case, thanks to Mr. Lacey.
On May 11, 1892, Lacey needed yet another delay and the court obliged.
Lacy was making good on his promise to his clients that they would never have to worry about a thing, because he could delay this suit forever.
On May 15, 1893, it was George Smith requesting a continuance.
Finally, on October 24, 1893, Smith gave up. He asked the court to dismiss the case.
It was dismissed without prejudice, meaning it could be refiled again later.
The court charged George Smith $12.80 to cover court costs.
Ella had already been in her grave fifty-one months by then.
And the wheels of justice had long ago fallen off.
***
The writing was on the wall hours after Ella died.
Frank Buchanan didn’t need telling twice that he was in the rifle sights of some vicious men, and if he’d had his way, he’d have rode out with the posse to safety. But what’s a man to do, with little Gene so distraught, he wet the bed and wouldn’t stop crying. Or with John pumping himself up like he was going to single-handedly avenge Ella and Jim. Or with Ralph destroyed at the loss of his uncle and haunted by his duty—“Oh, God, how am I going to tell Mother?”
Frank thought Fales would step up, but John Fales was reduced to a weeping old lady over this—Frank had never realized how close the handyman got to the couple. How much he loved them.
So for the first day after the posse left—after they’d buried his friends, after he’d told all at the inquest held over the grave, after he’d named names—Frank Buchanan did what he always did when he had some thinking to do. He sat on the porch and he whittled.
In all the Sweetwater Valley, there was hardly a better whittler. Frank could do magic with a piece of wood and the pocketknife he always carried, and he decided today would be a proper day to do his magic and make a cross for the grave. So he let the boys grieve—what could he possibly say to ease their pain?—and he started whittling.
The events of Saturday night replayed in his mind so vividly, it was like watching one scene after another all over again. He would never know of movies or television, but if he had, he’d have recognized them from his mind’s movie of the hangings. Jim had struggled with more strength than he thought the man possessed, and Ella had refused to go easily. Did he remember it or was he imagining that her last words were a prayer? Some members of the posse had tried to console him, telling him he’d done all he could, but in his mind, if he’d done all he could, Ella and Jim would still be here, so there was no comfort.
Frank knew someday he’d forget some of the details of the lynching—the sounds and smells and how the breeze was so gentle. But he knew he’d never forget his final look at Ella as she hung from that rope. He’d never forget the taste of the vomit.
It wasn’t until he nicked his finger that Frank Buchanan realized he had not whittled the wood into a cross, but had whittled it into nothing but a heap of shavings. That was when he understood just how devastated he was. And how scared.
He had almost convinced himself to walk into the roadhouse and tell the boys they were on their own when John Fales rode up and planted himself on the porch.
“You did all you could,” Fales began in a strong voice, proving he had regained his composure. “All you could. More than most men would have done. More. I still can’t believe they hanged them. Just can’t believe it.” There was a long silence as the men shared their grief and disbelief.
Then John Fales voiced the final verdict: “You know, it’s your eyewitness account that’s gonna convict those men. And they’ll call the boys to back you up on who was there. Your lives ain’t worth a plugged nickel in these parts. You gotta get out of here.”
Buchanan left within the hour. Gene and John weren’t far behind.
***
There are many stories about what happened to Frank Buchanan in the three months before the grand jury convened to hear the case against the six lynchers. Some say he went to Cheyenne, but most think that would have been foolhardy—into the lion’s den! Some say he took a train out of to
wn, although he probably couldn’t afford the fare. Some say he was paid off by the cattlemen and took his money to someplace more conducive to his health.
But most think he was murdered. Most think it was George Henderson who put a bullet in his back. Most think it was Bothwell’s cowboys who buried him. Of course, what most think and what happened isn’t always accurate. But this time, it probably is. That’s what everyone said several years later when bones were found. The skeleton was about the right height for Frank. A bright bandanna around the neck—especially the way it was knotted—convinced everyone that good man had long ago gone to his last reward. And not because he wanted to.
“If he’d have lived, Frank Buchanan would have been inside that grand jury hearing and he would have named names,” people in Rawlins long said.
“I can see him pointing to those men one at a time and calling out their names.”
“You can’t be so brave to try and stop a hanging and then run away.”
“No sire, that’s the move of a coward, and Frank Buchanan was no coward.”
“When he didn’t show up, I knew he was dead.”
***
The grand jury convened on October 14, 1889 in the case of Territory of Wyoming vs. A.J. Bothwell, John Durbin, Robert Galbraith, Robert Conner, Tom Sun and Ernie McLean. Judge Samuel T. Corn presided.
The prosecution was unable to produce a single witness to testify against the men.
Frank Buchanan wasn’t the only one unavailable to testify.
Little Gene Crowder couldn’t tell what he knew, either. He had disappeared, too, and except for the rumors about Bothwell’s wolves, nobody had any idea what happened to him.
Everybody knew what had happened to Ralph Cole. Jim’s nephew had mysteriously died under the care of the news-
papermen in Bothwell’s fake town. He was now buried in one of Bothwell’s pastures. Suspicions that he’d been poisoned ran so high, his stomach was sent for testing. Nobody ever named the laboratory it supposedly went to. Everyone was told there was no sign of poison and that was the end of it.
John DeCovey ran all the way to Colorado, where he wrote back a long and passionate letter detailing what he knew about the hanging. But there was no sense calling him back for the grand jury hearing because he hadn’t seen the lynching itself, only the abduction.
The judge had no choice. He set the six men free for lack of evidence.
In Rawlins and throughout rural W.T., the outrage that justice had been cheated was overwhelming.
In Cheyenne, the boys thought the outcome was just fine.
Chapter Twenty—And in the End
Everyone knew what happened to Ella Watson and Jim Averell. Everyone knew how Ralph Cole ended up. Everyone suspected the end of Frank Buchanan and the horrifying rumors of how little Gene’s life was devoured.
But the years passed and people moved away or moved on, and the final stories of the lynchers got lost. Until now.
**Ernie McLean caught the last train out of Rawlins the night after the lynching. By then, his conscience had gotten the better of him and he’d blabbed the whole lynching story to a neighbor. John Durbin bought him the twenty-nine-dollar train ticket and ranch records show Durbin paid Ernie two hundred forty dollars in “wages.” The man who pushed Ella off the rock was never heard from again.
**Robert Galbraith was re-elected to the Wyoming Territorial Legislature in November of 1889—less than four months after the lynching. He went from the lower house to the upper house that is now called the Senate. But he received so many threats about the lynching, he eventually left Wyoming and settled in Arkansas, where he became a prominent banker. He died in 1939 at the age of ninety-five.
**Robert Conner left Wyoming soon after the lynching, making millions on the sale of his ranch, and moved back to Pennsylvania. He died in 1921 at the age of seventy-two.
**John Durbin faced “relentless public humiliation” after the lynching and sold his holdings two years later, moving to Denver. He died in 1907 at the age of sixty-four.
**A.J. Bothwell continued ranching in the Sweetwater Valley for the next twenty-seven years, taking over Ella’s and Jim’s land claims, buildings, and frontage on Horse Creek. He remained on the executive committee of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association until 1902. He finally sold his holdings in 1916 and moved to Los Angeles, where he died in 1928 at the age of seventy-three. Those who knew him in his later years say he never voiced a bit of remorse over the hanging of Ella Watson and Jim Averell.
**Tom Sun’s family still ranches in the Sweetwater Valley. A public mural in Rawlins exonerates Sun for his part in the lynching, saying “Tom Sun was against the affair.” He died in 1909 in Denver at the age of sixty-five.
**Thirty-three months after the lynching of Ella Watson and James Averell, on April 9, 1892, fifty Wyoming cattlemen and Texas hired guns invaded Johnson County to free it of “rustlers,” in one of the most outrageous events of the West—The Johnson County War. Some believe the cattlemen were emboldened because everyone got away with the murders of Ella and Jim.
**The legend of Cattle Kate as a rustler and a whore lives on to this day in dozens of magazine articles, books, movies, and websites. Zane Grey’s version was titled Maverick Queen.
**On July 20, 1989, on the hundredth anniversary of the lynching, a group of Ellen Watson’s nieces and nephews gathered in the Sweetwater Valley. She and Jim’s grave now lay under the new Pathfinder Reservoir. A marker was erected in the vicinity. It reads: “These innocent homesteaders were hanged by cattle ranchers for their land and water rights.”
Part Three: The Facts of the Matter
Author’s Note
I’m afraid I was snookered about “Cattle Kate” just like everybody else. My ignorance lasted a few years. It took nearly a century for history to get wise.
I got serious about western history when I went to work for True West magazine in 2002, and two things soon became obvious. First, women helped settle the Wild West, but you could read a hundred history books and never know it. And secondly, even if you read all those books, you’d be forgiven if you concluded the only women in the West were whores or “soiled doves.”
While popular western history tells us all about the bandits and bad boys, the gunfighters and goons, we know almost nothing about the women who held it all together with grit and spit. They say history is written by the victors, and it was clear men thought they alone won the West. It doesn’t take much digging to discover they’re wrong. So I knew that women had never gotten their due.
True West Editor Bob Boze Bell—a real western man who isn’t afraid of real western women—suggested I create a new series called Women of the West. Starting in January of 2004, I spent five years writing a monthly column that profiled courageous and outrageous women.
“Cattle Kate” wasn’t on my original list of women to explore. I had the likes of Esther Hobart Morris and Sarah Winnemucca and Donaldina Cameron and Ann Eliza Young and Biddy Mason and Sharlot Hall. These are women whose names might not be familiar, but that makes my point. Each one of them has a fabulous story to tell. “Kate” just played into the stereotype of “bad, wanton women” that history had shoved down our throats, and that’s not the kind of woman I was writing about.
But then I read an award-winning story by Lori Van Pelt in 2004 that questioned the official take on Cattle Kate—it didn’t exonerate her, but raised some real questions. Then I was set on my heels by the assessment of Wyoming historian and State Librarian Agnes Wright Spring that the lynching of Cattle Kate was “the most revolting crime in the entire annals of the West.”
So Kate wasn’t a worthless footnote in history, but the victim of a “revolting crime”—so revolting that in some minds, it takes first place in a century of revolting crimes. The 2005 story I wrote for True West was headlined: “So-called Cattle Kate Rises from Rubbish: Evidence points toward Ella
Watson’s innocence.”
I soon found I was only the latest to come to this horrifying story.
George W. Hufsmith spent twenty years digging into the truth for his 1993 book, The Wyoming Lynching of Cattle Kate 1889. Hufsmith wrote, “When I first began probing into the so-called ‘Cattle Kate’ affair, I had no idea that the whole story was pure fabrication….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.”
The same assessment came from Daniel Y. Meschter, who spent twenty-five years pouring over legal documents to give an exhaustive history of the lynching he self-published in 1996 called Sweetwater Sunset. As he notes, “The fact is that Ella Watson was never called Cattle Kate or Kate Maxwell or even plain Kate in her own lifetime.”
Then there were the words of John Fales, the neighbor and handyman who knew Ella and Jim well. “Neither of them ever stole a cow,” he told the Wyoming Historical Society years later. “And those who say that Ella Watson slept with the cowpunchers, are slandering a good woman’s name.”
Suspicions leapt when I realized Jim Averell had credentials that couldn’t belong to a “pimp.” Appointed postmaster for the Sweetwater Post Office by President Grover Cleveland; named a notary public by Wyoming Governor Thomas Moonlight; named a justice of the peace by the Carbon County Board of Commissioners. And only twelve days before he was strung up with Ella, he was an election judge when voters came to his roadhouse to chose delegates to the Wyoming Constitutional Convention—the same roadhouse the Cheyenne press would later brand a “hog ranch” full of prostitutes led by “Cattle Kate.”
As Meschter discovered, “Whatever else anybody might have said about Jim Averell later that summer of 1889, he certainly was not the low scoundrel, murderous coward, mavericker, and cur the Cheyenne press chose to call him in defense of his lynchers.”
I’m no stranger to knowing history can be dead wrong—my first book was about the infamous “Trunk Murderess” Winnie Ruth Judd and the 1930s murder in Phoenix that shocked the nation. By the time I finished researching that award-winning non-fiction book—and found the living Winnie Ruth Judd for extensive interviews—I knew history had told a false story about her. So when these doubts about Kate started rising, they didn’t feel strange to me. They felt very familiar.
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