Frontierado is Friday, August 5th!
BETH BASSETT – Elizabeth Bassett, her husband Herb and their children were traveling by wagon toward California in 1877 when Beth was 22. They stopped off in Wyoming to visit Herb’s brother, who lived in a cabin along the Green River. Beth and her husband fell in love with the area and abandoned their plans to continue on to California.
The Bassetts established their home in a nearby valley originally called Brown’s Hole but renamed Brown’s Park by Beth. Unconventionally for the time period Beth oversaw the building and enlarging of the family’s ranch while Herb taught the children inside.
In September of 1879 the Ute Indians went on the warpath and the Bassetts, like all the other families in the region, temporarily relocated to Rock Springs while the U.S. Army and the Utes fought it out. By 1881 Beth and her family were back in Brown’s Park to pick up where they left off. Their ranch was becoming renowned for breeding some of the best horses in the West while also raising cattle, growing crops and establishing an orchard.
The 1880s saw the crooked cattle barons of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association (of Johnson County War fame) move into the area, driving many of the families out through violence, money and political maneuvering. The Bassetts and others stayed, only to see the WSGA use even dirtier tactics. Continue reading
When he was age 16 Charles’ well-to-do parents gave up trying to force him to continue his schooling and let him move to Montana, where, clad in a brand-new buckskin outfit, he worked on a friend’s sheep ranch north of Helena. It took skill with a gun and a true survival instinct to live through encounters with rustlers, hostile cattlemen and their hired gunmen but Charles, already being called Kid Russell, thrived and felt more at home in this rough and tumble lifestyle than among his family’s hoity-toity friends in St Louis high society. 
