My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys- An Archive of the Life of Ann Bassett (2020)
A Short Biography on Ann Bassett
Ann Bassett was born in 1878 in Brown’s Hole (Later Brown’s Park), a remote and rugged corner of Colorado. Despite her upbringing on a ranch, Ann grew into a young woman with a reputation befit a lady. As comfortable as Bassett could be in a parlor, she was just as well suited to the realities of running a ranch. She was raised amongst cowhands and cattle, and cattle would become her lifelong passion. Though she could be quite the gentlewoman, those who knew Ann remarked that her anger was fiery. Perhaps the most frequent recipient of this anger was Josie Bassett, Ann’s older sister. The two had a fraught, but loving and caring, relationship.
Brown’s Park had a reputation of ruggedness. This was, in part, due to the presence of outlaws and an intentional campaign by cattle barons to go after the Park’s access to water and natural fences. Outlaws maintained a presence in Brown’s Park, as it was a convenient place to lay low after particularly daring crimes. The people of Brown’s Park appear to have struck an agreement with the outlaws who frequented the area—what they did on their own time to “the man” was their own business, so long as they behaved respectably while in the close knit community of Brown’s Park. In fact, Ann knew and welcomed Butch Cassidy into the family ranch. Though Bassett is rarely mentioned in the history of the American West, she is often mentioned in reference to The Sundance Kid or put forth as an alter ego to his partner Etta Place. This insults Bassett’s name for two reasons. One, her history and story is interesting in its own right, and two, there is no historical indication that the two were romantically involved, as any such interaction would have had to have taken place when she was quite young. Any interest she had in The Sundance Kid was little more than a childhood crush.
As she grew up, Ann found herself in the middle of a changing valley and mounting pressure from cattle barons. As cattle barons shored up their empires, they began to lust after Brown’s Park due to its strategic natural attributes. They began attempts to drive out the small scale ranchers that called Brown’s Park home. The first of these attempts was conducted by the Middlesex Cattle Company, which was successfully driven out by a group headed by Ann’s mother, Elizabeth. But other cattle barons were on the rise and after Brown’s Park, namely Ora Haley of the Two Bar Cattle Company.
When Ann was nineteen, she began a relationship with a ranch hand she knew from her childhood, Matt Rash. Soon after, they were engaged to be married. Rash was well regarded in Brown’s Park and became president of an organization of small ranchers that was able to negotiate with Ora Haley’s top man, Hi Bernard, to determine a dividing line between Brown’s Park citizen’s herds and Two Bar Cattle herds. For a time, there was peace, until Ora Haley and his Two Bar company joined up with other cattle barons to plan a full takeover of Brown’s Park. In a secret meeting, they decided to hire a private inspector to find evidence of cattle rustling in Brown’s Park. They also hired Tom Horn, a paid killer. Shortly thereafter, Tom Horn came to Brown’s Park and caused escalating mischief. To the citizens of Brown’s Park, it was clear that he was an agent of the cattle barons.
In anger about incursions from the barons, Ann entered the range war, and committed her first intentional and large scale act of vengeance. Ann and Joe Davenport drowned around twenty stray cattle that wandered into Brown’s Park , that Ann believed had been planted to prove cattle thievery. Later on, Ann would ride the border of the Park, and shoot any Two Bar cattle that she saw. Throughout this time, Tom Horn was still in the Park fomenting disarray. Then, in 1900, Tom Horn murdered Ann’s fiancé Matt Rash. The killing was done to intimidate the citizens of Brown’s Park, and personally devastated Ann. A few months later, Isom Dart, another cowhand and close friend to Ann, was also murdered by Horn. After these murders, Ann was out for blood, and escalated her tactics against Two Bar.
Eventually, Ann requested a meeting with Hi Bernard, Ora Haley’s top man. Throughout the meeting, Hi Bernard was quite taken by Ann’s beauty and personality. By 1904, Ann had married Hi Bernard, the right hand man of her enemy who knew of the hiring of the killer who murdered her fiancé. Ora Haley swiftly fired Hi Bernard, who in turn began ranching with Ann. For a while, their marriage worked well, with both of them sharing the duties and labors of running a ranch. In time though, the couple faced trouble and began to live apart. They would divorce in 1913.
All the while, Ann worked against the cattle barons. In summer of 1905, President Roosevelt signed into being the Park Range Forest Reserve. This action forced cattle barons to pay a fee to use the newly created forest land where they had previously been grazing for free. Two Bar languished under these new restrictions, going so far as to force a stampede into the reserve.
In 1911, the ailing Two Bar set out to trap Ann. The claim was cattle theft; the evidence was a freshly butchered hide that may or may not have been branded with the Two Bar brand. The case went to court and became the popular topic to follow in the area. The first trial ended in a hung jury. Then, the second trial was postponed when an important witness was murdered by a sheriff backed by the cattle barons. When the second trial began, the public was undoubtedly on Ann’s side, and the courtroom was packed. When called to the stand, Ora Haley accidentally admitted that he had lied about how many cattle he had. After that, the jury and the remaining public’s opinion swung in favor of Ann. The jury returned a unanimous verdict: Ann was not guilty. A parade broke out down the streets of Craig. Within two years, Ora Haley’s Two Bar was no more. Ann had won.
Ann, having successfully defeated Two Bar, returned to Brown’s Park. From then on, she would divide her time between Brown’s Park and her sister’s ranch in Utah. In 1923, Ann married Frank Willis, a friend of her ex-husband, Hi Bernard. They would stay married for the remainder of their lives. Ann and Frank spent some years in Arizona and California, before returning to her family’s land in Colorado. As they aged, they spent increasingly more time in the more temperate climate of Leeds, Utah. Ann died in 1956, and her ashes were returned to the family graveyard in Brown’s Park. *
*Citations:
Bassett. (2014, August 27). The Autobiography of “Queen” Ann Bassett. https://amberandchaos.net/?p=21
McClure, G. (1985). The Bassett Women. Swallow Press/Ohio University Press.
Wommack, L. (2018). Ann bassett: Colorado’s cattle queen. Caxton Press.
My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys
Ann Bassett lived a life that would put most Western movies to shame. From occasional crime to her prowess as a horsewoman, Bassett was an extraordinary individual, especially for her time period. However, popular understanding of Ann focuses solely on her speculative romantic involvement with Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch. My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys was conducted as an effort to create a photographic archive of what remains of a little known woman and her life in a short-lived historical period.
This project took me around Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming to photograph sites and objects relevant to Bassett’s life. Although I have been a lifelong resident of Utah, the journey to photograph these places relevant to Bassett’s life allowed me to further develop a relationship to the land—both the relationship Ann would have had as a child of settlers, and my own relationship to the changing landscapes of the West. Inherent in this travel was the idea of journey. By tracking the locations and movements through Ann’s lifetime, I was confronted with the physical journey I was making, one that took me through national monuments, federal and native land, and a pandemic. Though Ann Bassett was born nearly 150 years ago, the conflicts that drove her life are still equally present in the landscape of the present American West. We’ve traded cattle barons for resource extraction, but the concepts of water use and land stewardship remain just as prevalent. Similarly, the players remain the same. Just as the Ute tribe was pushed out of Brown’s Park when Ann was young, they remain relegated to the edges of life in the Intermountain West. The vigilante justice that killed Isom Dart, Ann’s childhood friend who was born into slavery, bears little difference to the brutality that kills Black people today. Yet for all that, Ann was able to remain a steadfast and empowered woman in her time. By taking these photographs and tracing her life, I seek to honor her, and to some extent, become like her.
Though the images that make up the archive are seemingly disparate, the through line that guides them is cattle. Because for Ann, it all came down to cattle. Her marriage was a strategic move to weaken her enemy, the Two Bar Cattle empire. Her trial (of which she was acquitted) was on the charge of cattle rustling. The choices she made characterize her love of cattle ranching and a love for her home. Although the nature of cattle ranching has changed between now and Ann’s time, the cattle themselves remain the same, and allow us to reach back in history.
The time of cowboys and outlaws was a short moment in American history, but it has had an outsized role on our culture. Famous outlaws like Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch are highly romanticized and dramatized. When Ann Bassett is even recognized as a character of the drama of the early West (which is not frequently), she is usually only mentioned in relation to The Sundance Kid. Although many believe that she was romantically involved with The Sundance Kid, there is no basis for this in the historical record and she would have been only eleven or twelve when it could have happened. Thus, it is better to consider The Sundance Kid a family friend and focus on Ann’s extraordinary story in her own right, rather than her bit role in the life of infamous men.
Many of the photos in this archive are not from Bassett’s period (A full list of the images can be found further below). The images that feature the modern west were taken as an effort to document what physically remains (ie, the historical building where Ann stood trial no longer stands, so I substituted it with the modern Craig courthouse). But there’s more than just substitution at play. Tourism and the West are inherently tied up in a mythology of cowboys, cattle, outlaws, and the wild. Any gift shop in the West features a whole host of familiar characters: mountain men, pioneers, Native Americans. The region’s identity is grounded in this brief period of saloons and cowboy justice. We feel this identity when we see a photo of the open road in red rock wilderness and long for it. We see this when we visit our National Parks and wander the small towns. As someone who was raised in this land, this quest to find and preserve what remains of Ann Bassett was just as much a quest to find myself and preserve what remains of the Great West, flawed as it is.
It is easy to idealize the settler life in the West , but it is not without cruelty. Without Manifest Destiny, white settlers would not have been able to acquire land for such low cost. Land that was not uninhabited, but long occupied by a multitude of Native American tribes. We also see this intense struggle play out in the lives of settlers of Brown’s Park. Brown’s Park was in no way an easy place to live, and the settlers had to help each other, with permanently open doors. However caring and supportive the settlers were, they were still small scale ranchers who were under constant threat from cattle barons. For many, race could be ignored with dedication and a show of hard work, but a double standard still existed. And, of course, this story is one centered on cows. Cows are both villanized and victims, then and now. From fencing in of the plains to greenhouse gasses, cow-based agriculture has always caused great harm. However, cows are also victims in the story. Ann, for example, was known to drown cattle and drive them off cliffs, so long as they were rival Two Bar Cattle, while modern day factory farming is full of suffering.
At the end, this project comes down to an attempt to memorialize both Ann Bassett and her time through the context of our own era. A special thank you to the Museum of Northwest Colorado, and to “Farmer Gil” aka Russ Murdock at The Farm at Gardener Village. Project funded with the Gibian Rosewater Traveling Research Grant.
Image List
1. Farmer Gil with image of Ann Bassett’s Spurs. Museum of Northwest Colorado, Craig CO
2. View of Brown’s Park. Brown’s Park CO
3. Farmer Gil with image of historic Lodore School. Brown’s Park CO. Note- this school was built after Bassett graduated high school.
4. Shotgun used to arrest Ann Bassett on charge of cattle rustling. Museum of Northwest Colorado, Craig CO
5. Image on cow, Road off of US-40 East. Near Vernal UT
6. View of Josie Morris née Bassett’s (Ann’s sister) cabin. Dinosaur National Monument UT
7. Cows in Field. Peoa UT
8. Map of Moffat County by Joseph Biskup, zoomed in on Brown’s Park. Pins indicate school houses. Museum of Northwest Colorado, Craig CO
9. Farmer Gil with image of Josie Morris’ cabin. Dinosaur National Monument, UT
10. Detail of wall in Josie Morris’ cabin. Dinosaur National Monument, UT
11. Image on cow, motel in Dinosaur along US-40 E. Dinosaur CO
12. Green river campground. Dinosaur National Monument, UT
13. Farmer Gil with image of Moffat County Courthouse. Craig, CO. Note- not the actual building Ann stood trial in.
14. Wanted poster for Harry Longabaugh, The Sundance Kid. John Jarvie Ranch, Brown’s Park UT. Note- Both Longabaugh and Longbaugh are widely used spellings. John Jarvie was a family friend to the Bassett’s.
15. Cows in Field. Kamas UT
16. Display case. Museum of Northwest Colorado, Craig CO
17. Image on cow, school house display. Museum of Northwest Colorado, Craig CO
18. Cabin at Craig Kampgrounds of America. Craig, CO
19. Farmer Gil with image of ranch along the original location of the Bassett Ranch, near Basset reservoirs. Brown’s Park CO
20. Image along W 6th Street. Craig, CO
21. Image on cow, zoom in on the only known image of Isom Dart. Museum of Northwest Colorado, Craig CO
22. View of Split Mountain and Split Mountain Campground. Dinosaur National Monument UT
23. Farmer Gil with old road signs. Museum of Northwest Colorado, Craig CO
24. Cows in Field. Oakley, UT
25. Shorthand transcript from Ann’s trial in 1913. Museum of Northwest Colorado, Craig CO
26. Farmer Gil with image of view from Josie Bassett’s cabin. Dinosaur National Monument, UT
27. View down School Street. Craig, CO
28. Newspaper clipping reporting on the postponing of Ann’s court case. Museum of Northwest Colorado, Craig CO
29. View along state road 318. Between Maybell and Brown’s Park CO
30. Cows in Field. Peoa UT
31. View along Clay Basin Road. Brown’s Park WY
Exhibited: 2021, Olive Tjaden Gallery, Ithaca, NY