•Kansas Magazine published E.B. Dykes Beachy’s article “The Saga of Cattle Kate” in 1961. It says, “She was interested only in money, clothes, and a silver-tongued cattle rustler with whom she danced an airy jig.”
•The 1965 poem “Cattle Kate” by Lillian T. Rendle, included these stanzas:
“A devil in the saddle, she was handy with a gun.
An expert with a branding iron, to the cowpoke she was fun!
Jim set her up in business, he built a big corral. Where the cowpokes drove the mavericks, in pay for their low morale.
Ella’s place was called the hog ranch, by the cowmen of the State;
But the folks of ole Sweetwater had dubbed her Cattle Kate!”
•Movies about Cattle Kate include: The Redhead from Wyoming, with Maureen O’Hara, 1955; Heaven’s Gate with Kris Kristofferson and Isabelle Huppert, 1982; and the 2001 Hallmark television movie Johnson County War with Tom Berrenger and Rachel Ward as “Queenie.”
•Stories of Century, a 1950s syndicated television series, produced a most fanciful segment on Cattle Kate. “She and her partner in crime kept one of the last western frontiers in a state of terror.” The piece claims she ordered the murder of a stock detective and controlled enormous herds. It says she was arrested and “delivered safely to jail,” but a lynch mob broke her out and hanged her by slapping her horse out from under her. The segment is available on You Tube.
On uncovering the truth: Not until Dorothy Gray’s 1976 Women of the West, was there a real attempt to correct the legend. Gray quotes an unnamed source (which was Wyoming Historian and State Librarian Agnes Wright Spring) calling Ella’s hanging “the most revolting crime in the entire annals of the West.” Gray went on: “No sooner was Ella Watson dead than the stockmen started a press campaign in which she was transformed into ‘Cattle Kate,’ characterized as having not only rustled more cattle than any man in the West but as having been a prostitute, husband-poisoner, and hold-up artist.” But she goes on, recounting the hanging three years earlier of a woman named Elizabeth Taylor in Nebraska—she and her brother were hanged for supposedly killing a neighbor. Gray notes: “Like Ella Watson, without substantiation Elizabeth Taylor was subsequently accused of having poisoned her deceased husband and also of having paid off her ranch hands by ‘entertaining’ them. The technique of painting a woman as husband-killer and whore seemed to be a necessary ingredient in salving the image if not the conscience of men who committed the crime of lynching a woman.”
•It was George W. Hufsmith who set everyone on their ear when his The Wyoming Lynching of Cattle Kate 1889 was published in 1993. Hufsmith was a composer from Jackson, who was commissioned to write a musical for the nation’s bicentennial. He chose the lynching of Cattle Kate as his subject. But as he researched, he found more and more questions. After finishing the opera, he spent the next twenty years researching the real story for his definitive book. He noted, “This story is so controversial that for over 100 years, it was a mistake to even ask what happened that hot July afternoon in 1889 when a gracious young woman and an innocent homesteader were hanged from a pine tree in the Sweetwater Valley.”
•Daniel Y. Meschter also spent a lifetime on this story for his 1966 and 2005 book Sweetwater Sunset. After twenty-five years of research, he compiled an amazing array of original documents, many of which he reprints in their entirety. Among his conclusions: “Jim’s and Ella’s homesteads were unacceptable obstacles to the Bothwell Townsite promotion, and Jim’s letter exposing it was a threat which the independent Casper Weekly Mail very well might use to warn away credulous investors.”
•“This is not a story about cattle rustling, it’s about who controls the land and water,” Wyoming historian Tom Rea said in a lecture the author attended in Casper on August 29, 2009. “It’s pretty hard not to conclude Ella and Jim were in the way—their neighbors wanted them gone and they wanted their land.” His lecture was titled “Ella Watson’s Fence: The Story behind the Lynching of Cattle Kate.”
•“The bodies hung about thirty-six hours….” writes Tom Rea as he concludes his discussion of Cattle Kate in Devil’s Gate. “But even though they were out of sight of the river and the road, even though the posse had to scramble and climb to find them, they hung long enough to make their point. And they hang there still, in the memory of the valley and the state, as a reminder of who was in charge, who owned what, and the lengths that power will go, to get its story told the way it chooses.”
On the memorial erected on the hundredth anniversary: Ella’s descendants honored her, according to news reports in the Casper Journal, published July 15 and October 7, 1989. The July 15 article by Jamie Ring noted the marker was made by Tim Monroe of the Bureau of Land Management, and the grave dedication was to be done by Reverend Ralph Nelson. The story concluded: “On this day, 100 years after the cold-blooded act of murder, it is fitting that the records will be corrected to reflect the truth.”
Interesting footnotes: Owen Wister, the author of The Virginian, weighed in on the controversy in his diary entry for October 12, 1889: “Sat yesterday in smoking car with one of the gentlemen indicted for lynching the man and woman. He seemed a good solid citizen and I hope he’ll get off. Sheriff Donell said, ‘All the good folks say it was a good job; it’s only the wayward classes that complain.’” Wister referred to the cattle barons as “the better classes.” This was reported in many examinations of this case, including Hufsmith’s and Smith’s.
•“She had to be killed for the good of the country,” was the excuse for the hangings by Dr. Charles Penrose, a surgeon who became part of the Johnson County War excursion, in his 1914 book, The Rustler Business. Historians say this was a prevailing attitude throughout the cattle industry in Wyoming Territory at the time.
•Former U.S. Senator Joseph C. O’Mahoney, a Democrat from Wyoming, in private correspondence to an author researching the lynching in the early sixties, wrote:“While at Lander, in the spring of 1921, I heard several old timers recount the hanging. The consensus was that it was a ‘spite’ hanging on the part of the cattlemen to gain control of more range, that the ‘cattle theft’ part was later to vindicate themselves, and to rationalize the matter….I believe the Averill’s [sic] could be completely vindicated if a writer could completely research this matter.” O’Mahoney also suggested the author might want to entitle his article: “The Homesteaders’ Heroine, Cattle Kate, and the Land Grabbers in the West.” The correspondence is in the William R. Kelly Collection at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming in Laramie.
•In the Wyoming Bicentennial Commission publication of 1976, author Charles “Pat” Hall writes: “The most notorious example of ‘justice’ on the western frontier was the lynching of James Averell and a female companion by Wyoming cattlemen in 1889. Averell’s so-called paramour—known variously as Cattle Kate, Kate Maxwell and Ella Watson—has never been fully identified.”
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