Cattle Kate (26 page)

And then he saw that Jim and Ella weren't being mute during all this, but offered their own two cents. Jim was talking with his hands, gesturing like this was the biggest mistake ever made in W.T. “Shut up,” Bothwell screamed, “or we'll drown you right here in the river.”

Then the most remarkable thing happened. Frank heard Ella Watson laugh. It wasn't a giggle, like something was funny, but a full-throated laugh like somebody was stupid. “There's not enough water in this river to give a land hog a decent bath,” she spat at them, and then Jim laughed, too.

Frank immediately had mixed emotions. If they were laughing, maybe things weren't as serious as they seemed. Maybe everybody knew this was a game, and it was almost over and they'd laugh about it over supper. But if the laughter was a taunt, that was another kettle of worms altogether. Frank had seen too many men maimed or killed because they laughed at an armed man.

His fears were ratified when the group started moving, traveling up the streambed that would leave no tracks. He jumped back on his horse and followed along best he could, keeping undercover. He skulked after them all afternoon, watching their slow progress.

Frank shook his head at the futility of this. So much time had passed, he now clearly believed this was all a stall, and nobody was really going to hurt anybody. He figured Jimmy and Ella were thinking the same thing and he hoped with all his might that it would cool their attitude so they didn't provoke anything. “Shut up for once,” he thought out loud.

About four o'clock, everything changed. Frank saw the group abruptly shift direction, leaving the river and heading for a rocky canyon. He was far enough off that he couldn't hear much, but he could see Ella trying to stand up in the wagon and gesturing wildly, and he heard enough to know she was a mad hen.

“Oh shit,” he sadly said out loud. Frank Buchanan went to his grave wondering if things turned so bad because Ella had gotten too mouthy and pushed the men over the edge.

He jumped on his horse and followed almost in their exact path. When he reached the canyon, he slid off his horse and climbed a rock, dropping to his belly when he saw the group below.

He prayed his eyes were deceiving him because Jim and Ella were standing next to a flat rock under a tree whose limb was decorated with two lariats. One noose was already around Jim's neck. Bothwell was tying the loose end to a tree.

“We never rustled any cattle,” Jim was screaming in a voice that already was hoarse. But nobody was listening.

McLean was trying to get his noose around Ella's head, but she was bobbing and weaving so much, he kept missing his mark. Her bonnet was in the way and she was like a wild woman trying to get free.

Bothwell was the man in charge. Only McLean was helping him. The rest of the men were standing back, some already turned away from the scene, others studying the ground.

Frank took aim with his six-shooter and started shooting, hitting Durbin in the hip. The men grabbed their Winchesters and shot back. Frank emptied his gun, quickly reloaded, and kept shooting. He was well aware he was outgunned. He didn't expect his shots to rule the day. He did hope that discovering an eyewitness would be the shot of reality these folks needed.

Instead, he heard Ella scream. He instantly poked his head up and saw Bothwell and McLean force his friends onto a boulder. Bothwell rushed forward and pushed Jim off. Frank watched in horror as Jim kicked wildly, trying to pull himself up on the rope.

Ella screamed again as McLean pushed her off the rock and her writhing and jerking began. She tried to get a toehold, but kept slipping off. Frank could see his friends were being strangled, and in their dance of death, they banged up against each other, spinning and grabbing and flailing unmercifully, trying everything they could to free themselves. Ella was kicking so frantically, she kicked off one moccasin, then another. Frank wondered why she was wearing moccasins in the first place, but it was a fleeting thought. Bothwell was laughing over something Buchanan couldn't make out.

Frank saw that his friends were both suspended from the same limb, and he yelled out loud, “God, please make it break!”

But God wasn't listening.

It seemed like it took forever for them to stop kicking. They were stronger than Frank ever dreamed, and for a second, he thought Jimmy might just make it. He saw that Ella was losing strength quickly, but Jimmy kept grabbing the rope above his head, trying to hoist himself up enough to give him another breath. Ella wasn't strong enough for that, and Frank started crying when he heard her gurgling sounds.

Frank kept ducking down behind the rock, not afraid of bullets now, since they'd stopped when he finally ran out of ammunition, but because he couldn't bear to watch what was happening. But even when he wasn't watching, he could hear the awful sounds of his friends in their last seconds and it made him vomit.

The last time he dared look, blood was coming from Ella's nose and mouth and her eyes were bulging out. Jim looked like he was trying to reach for her, but his arms were now too heavy. They were no longer kicking. Just twitching, their arms limp at their sides. Frank would forever be sorry he took that last look.

And then everything went silent.

No sound of thrashing as they lost the fight. No death rattle as the air in their lungs was spent. No creaking as the limb no longer held two struggling people. No scratching as the rope wasn't snapped by the twisting couple. They just hung there in empty silence.

Frank's efforts to save his friends had failed. They had left this Earth for, he hoped, a better place. He rushed down the hill and jammed his spurs into his horse to head back to the roadhouse with the gruesome news. He knew he would stop only a moment before he galloped to Casper to get the sheriff.

The men in the canyon made no move to follow him, but they weren't languishing. They had more important places to go—to homes and ranches and wives and children and, frankly, anywhere but here. Without a word, they mounted their horses while Tom Sun turned around his wagon. Nobody looked back at the two bodies hanging from the limb, their tongues swelling and dangling from their mouths.

The only sound in the canyon was horse hooves and wagon wheels on rock. The sound of leaving.

Nobody noticed, but not even the birds were singing.

***

Frank Buchanan never made it all the way to Casper to alert the sheriff.

He collapsed from exhaustion by the time he reached “Tex” Healy's log cabin about three o'clock Sunday morning. He was still twenty-five miles from Casper, but it was clear he was in no shape to continue. Healy quickly dressed and saddled his own horse to carry the horrifying news to Deputy Sheriff Philip Watson.

“We've had a lynchin' out in the Sweetwater, and I'm lookin' for able-bodied men to form a posse,” Sheriff Watson announced in the saloon, which was the only business open. “Have to have your own gear. Town will buy you dinner. Payin' $10 for any takers.” There were several takers.

Sherriff Watson told the barkeep to get them some grub and put it on the town's tab, and went looking for the coroner. But Dr. A.P. Haynes wasn't to be found. It took several hours to get everybody gathered up, and still the coroner wasn't around. Sheriff Watson deputized Casper attorney B.F. Emery as the acting coroner.

“Can't wait all day,” he said, as he led the posse out of town. It was almost three o'clock on Sunday afternoon. They rode all night and arrived in the dark, first hours of Monday. They were greeted by a dark roadhouse and two newly made caskets on the front porch. Sheriff Watson yelled out his identity as he knocked on the door. A sleepy Ralph Cole answered it, but not far behind, their eyes wild in fear, were the boys, John DeCovey and Gene Crowder.

It took only a second for Frank Buchanan to come out from the room off the kitchen.

“So glad to see you, Sheriff.” He held out his hand. “Thanks Tex,” he said to his friend, who'd carried on for him.

Buchanan had gotten back to Averell's place about four o'clock, in time to help the boys with the final preparations on the caskets.

“I'll take you out to the hanging at first light,” Buchanan told the sheriff. “Hey, take the bed back there,” he offered, and the sheriff didn't argue. Most of the posse had already stretched out their bedrolls wherever they found a space and it didn't take long before sleep visited. You sleep fast and good after more than a half-day in the saddle.

Buchanan led the caravan the next morning to the hanging site. It was a gut-wrenching scene.

Death, decomposition, and the sun had taken its toll. After two-and-a-half days of hanging there, neither one was recognizable. The only way you could tell a man from a woman was that the woman was wearing a dress. Their faces were so swollen, there was no evidence of a nose. Their exposed skin was black. Their tongues hung from their mouths, as hard as beef jerky. Their eyes bulged, smothered with flies. One of the posse threw up. Everyone else pulled their handkerchief over their mouth and nose, trying to keep out the stench.

Men in the posse cut the couple down, wrapped them in saddle blankets and took them back to the roadhouse. Over their bodies, acting coroner Emery conducted an official inquest, taking testimony from all the eyewitnesses: Frank Buchanan, Gene Crowder, John DeCorey, and Ralph Cole.

He charged that the couple had been hanged by Albert Bothwell, Robert Conner, Tom Sun, Earnest McLean, Robert Galbraith, and John Durbin.

Jimmy and Ella were each placed in a newly made casket and buried in a single grave.

“You boys need somethin' to eat,” Buchanan told the posse, and those were very welcome words. Inside they found Frank, Gene, and Ralph trying to copy one of Ella's dinners, but everyone could tell right off that they didn't know what they were doing. A couple of the posse men took over and fried up bacon and ham and scrambled some eggs.

Everyone was eyeing the pies Ella had left—intended for cowboys, but served instead to the men who buried her. The sheriff got the first piece, of course, and the acting coroner the second, and it seemed only right that Buchanan should get one, and the posse drew straws for the rest.

Somebody said it was the best pie he'd ever eaten in his whole life and Gene started crying. That touched off John, who'd held his grief in all this time, and Ralph swore as tears filled his eyes.

Frank Buchanan put on his bravest face. “Miss Ella was known for her pies, boys, and for her good cookin' and for her kindness, and to think her hands made this pie and she's now out in that grave…” He wept like a woman.

Sheriff Watson and his posse set off for the Hub and Spoke Ranch to arrest Tom Sun. He was expecting them, and owned up to what had happened. He went peacefully with the sheriff.

Their second stop was the Broken Box Ranch to arrest A.J. Bothwell.

Chapter Seventeen—The Man with the Pen

The minute he got word that he was urgently wanted at the Cheyenne Club, Ed Towse grabbed a reporter's notebook and ran—not walked, ran—to the ritzy club that held all the power in Wyoming Territory.

The young city editor of the
Cheyenne Daily Leader
had only been summoned there once before, and that time he was told to come in the service entrance—a slight he found demeaning. But then, his paper wasn't always a handmaiden to the interests of this club like his horrible competitor, the
Sun.
This time, he was told to come up the front steps to the front door. He'd never walked in the front door of “little Wall Street” before.

He had no idea why he was wanted.

He didn't know this was about the Sweetwater Valley, which he knew well from his days as a reporter in Rawlins.

He didn't know this was about prominent ranchers from that area, some of whom he'd interviewed over the years.

He didn't know two people were still hanging from a limb in a lonely canyon in the Sweetwater Valley.

But he did know this—you aren't summoned to the Cheyenne Club at noon on a Sunday and told to come in the front door unless this is the story of your life.

Although he was slight and in good health, he was out of breath when he reached the door and had to stop a second before he rang. A black butler in full regalia answered the door.

“Mr. Towse,” the man said in a deep, southern voice, “they're waiting for you.”

Ed Towse straightened himself up and put on his most professional face as he was led to a reading room off the main lobby. “Keep your eyes straight,” he said to himself, but he couldn't help but gawk at the rich oak paneling and the chandelier that had to have a hundred bulbs. This was the first place in the city to get electric lights and at night, they turned so many on, the reflection lit up this entire section of Seventeenth Street. “Showin' off,” some townspeople had said about the amazing amount of light that came out of this private club. Cattlemen laughed and countered, “Just showin' you the light, boys, just showin' you the light.”

“Mr. Towse,” the butler announced as they walked into the reading room, and Ed Towse straightened up even more, because never in his life had he been announced before.

Three men stood up, introduced themselves and shook the young editor's hand. The butler produced a silver tray with a crystal glass full of whiskey, and Ed Towse thought he'd died and gone to heaven.

“I think you know our stock detective, George Henderson,” one of the cattlemen said, as he motioned to a man sitting outside the main circle.

“Oh yes, hi George,” Towse said, and then wondered if this time he should have called him Mr. Henderson. But Towse had already interviewed George so many times, he let their familiarity slip.

It was Henderson who kept the editor informed about the awful—simply awful—situation with cattle rustling throughout W.T. Towse had already written several articles decrying the rampant lawlessness that had come as settlers moved in on the cattlemen. It wasn't a stretch for him to parrot the thoughts of the men in this room because he shared their disdain for the silly laws coming out of Washington.

Those idiots back East kept divvying up land these men needed for their vast herds—their laws had brought a whole new breed of poor settlers into the territory. Towse couldn't understand why anyone thought it was a good idea to displace men of wealth and power with people who'd never bring any real riches to the territory. If this were a ball game, he would root for the home team over the visitors, and the home team in W.T. was the cattlemen.

“Eddie, there's a story coming out of the Sweetwater Valley and we want to be sure you get it straight from the horse's mouth,” the main man said, and Towse liked the fatherly tone.

Over the next hour, Ed Towse heard the most incredible story he'd ever heard. It had an impressive cast of characters who had been so pushed to the brink, they even hanged a thieving woman! A telegram had brought the news to Henderson, who said he'd been watching these maverickers for months, and someone had finally caught them red-handed.

“You know the law out there is on the side of the settlers, and a cattleman can't get a fair shake, no matter how obvious the crime,” Henderson noted, and Towse nodded, because he well knew that story.

Henderson talked and talked. Towse scribbled notes. Other men in the room smoked their cigars and drank their whiskey, chiming in only when they murmured agreement to what was being said.

He guessed at the spelling of Averell's name—guessing wrong—and thought at one point of asking what the woman's name was, but that didn't seem very important, so he didn't ask.

Finally, Towse spoke, simply saying, “This sounds like self-defense to me—I mean, what were those men supposed to do? Lose all their cattle to rustlers?” At that, all the men in the room spoke at once to encourage this bottom-line thought.

As he rushed back to the
Cheyenne Daily Leader,
Ed Towse was already composing a headline and mentally writing sentences that would sing out a story he knew would go national.

Back at the newspaper office, he was alone except for the boy who came in on Sundays to clean the type. He had all the time he'd need to compose his story for the next edition on Tuesday. This was the story he wanted time to polish.

***

Two stories were telegrammed out of Wyoming Territory on Monday night, July 22, 1889. They alerted papers throughout the land to the most explosive story to come out of these parts in a long time. These were the only versions of what happened in the Sweetwater Valley that most people would ever read.

Archy Slack and Eddie Towse did their jobs well.

Their mistakes, their fantasies, and their lies spread over the country like dirty dishwater thrown from the porch.

Slack's front-page story said it all:

DOUBLE LYNCHING

Two Notorious Characters Hanged
For Cattle Stealing.

James Averell and His Partner Ella Watson

Meet Their Fate at the Hands
of Outraged Stock Growers.

The story carried a “Special to the Sun” tag.

Slack made sure readers knew that hanging cattle thieves wasn't so unusual—even if in this case, they'd hanged a woman. He ran another Saturday night lynching story on Page One: “SUMMARY PUNISHMENT; Three Stock Thieves Disposed of in New Mexico; One Shot and Two are Taken from Jail and Hung.”

For their five cents that day, readers of the
Cheyenne Sun
learned it had been a very deadly Saturday night in America for “cattle rustlers.”

Ed Slack introduced the world to the late James Averell like this—“Averell kept a ‘hog' ranch at a point where the Rawlins and Lander stage road crosses the Sweetwater.”

He introduced the world to the late Ella Watson like this—“Ella Watson was a prostitute who lived with him and is the person who recently figured in dispatches as Cattle Kate, who held up a faro dealer at Bessemer and robbed him of the bankroll. Both, it is claimed, have born the reputation of being cattle rustlers….”

If Ella had been able to rebut that story, she would have given one of her belly laughs and told everyone: “I have never been to Bessemer in my life. I don't know how to deal faro. I've never robbed anyone of their bankroll, and nobody has ever called me ‘Cattle Kate.' Other than that, he spelled my name right.”

Her given name was indeed the only item in that sentence that was accurate. Ed Slack had mistaken Ella for someone else, but it was a mistake that would stand. He created “Cattle Kate” to explain away the lynching, and it sounded so good—so Wild West-like—that the legend of Cattle Kate lived on forever.

He wasn't any kinder, or accurate, about Jimmy—“Jim Averell has been keeping a low dive for several years and between the receipts of his bar and his women, and stealing stock, he has accumulated some property. While on one of his drunks not long ago he so abused one of the women that she tried to escape. Averell caught and tore her clothes from her body but she got away and ran from the place. Unable to catch her otherwise he got in a wagon and drove in pursuit. Upon capturing the woman he tied her up in the wagon and left her outside during the whole night. Averell evinced his right and title to be called a dangerous citizen by using his gun on several occasions and in one instance he killed his man.

“Jim Averell was not always thus. Few men in the West had better opportunities. He comes from an excellent family and received instructions in one of the best educational institutions of the east….

“The story of the man's descent into the vile avocation which he pursued when justice overtook him is not a marvelous one. It is the old tale. A few words will suffice. A passion for gambling, for liquor, and for lewd women carried him on to destruction.”

Although he'd eat the words later, Slack thought he was doing his pals a big favor when he wrote, “The lynching is the outgrowth of a bitter feeling between big stockmen and those charged with cattle rustling. Every attempt on the part of the stockmen to convict thieves in the courts of that county for years has failed, no matter how strong the evidence might be against them and stockmen have long threatened to take the law into their own hands. This fact, together with the further one that Averell had had more or less trouble with every stockman in that section, probably accounts for the violent death of himself and the woman Watson.”

If Jim had been able to rebut those words, he would have had plenty to say. How the reports of rustling were wildly exaggerated by an industry that was being squeezed off the land by new homesteads and barbed wire. How the powerful “stock detectives” were notorious for framing innocent ranchers as rustlers to collect the whopping two hundred fifty-dollar bounty they got for every arrest. How the courts were smart enough not to fall for the hogwash the detectives were serving. Or he could have simply used one of his favorite words, “Bullshit.”

***

Ed Towse's story in the
Cheyenne Daily Leader
carried the same message of “rangeland justice” for bad people, but he took it even farther into the realm of fantasy. Rural editors throughout the territory decried his stories as nothing but “dime novel literature”—the kind of fanciful fiction that romanticized the disappearing Old West. But those denouncements never got to the papers back East. Nobody east of the Rockies knew Towse made most of it up, so they ate up his very “polished” scenes.

A DOUBLE LYNCHING!

Postmaster Averill and His Wife
Hung for Cattle Stealing
They were Tireless Maverickers
Who Defied the Law
The Man Weakened But the Woman
Cursed to the Last

“A man and woman were lynched near historic Independence Rock on the Sweetwater River in Carbon County Sunday night,” he began, getting even the day wrong. “They were Postmaster James Averill and a virago who had been living with him as his wife for some months. Their offense was cattle stealing, and they operated on a large scale, recruiting quite a bunch of young steers from the range of that section….”

Towse didn't know Ella's name—“The female was the equal of any man on the range. Of robust physique she was a daredevil in the saddle, handy with a six-shooter and adept with the lariat and branding iron. Where she came from no one seems to know, but that she was a holy terror all agreed. She rode straddle, always had a vicious bronco for a mount and seemed never to tire of dashing across the range.”

He misspelled and slandered Jimmy's name—“Averill, always feared because he was a murderous coward, showed himself a cur. He begged and whined, and protested innocence, even saying the woman did all the stealing.”

Towse wasn't content to charge them with stealing forty-one cows, as their lynchers had done. He upped the ante considerably. “Lately it has been rumored that the woman and Averill were engaged in a regular round up of mavericks and would gather several hundred for shipping this fall. The ugly story was partially verified by the stealthy visit of a cowboy to their place Saturday. He reported that their corral held no less than fifty head of newly branded steers, mostly yearlings, with a few nearly grown.”

But where Towse got most creative was in reconstructing the scene of their capture and hanging. His version didn't have just six men, but “ten to twenty.” His version didn't have an abduction in broad daylight and hours of wandering, but this fantastic scene:

“A few hundred yards from the cabin [the ten to twenty men] dismounted and approached cautiously. This movement was well advised for Averill had murdered two men and would not hesitate to shoot, while the woman was always full of fight.

“Within the little habitation sat the thieving pair before a crude fireplace. The room was clouded with cigarette smoke. A whiskey bottle with two glasses was on the deal table, and firearms were scattered around the interior so as to be within easy reach.

“The leader of the regulators stationed a man with a Winchester at each window and led a rush into the door. The sound of ‘Hands up!' sounded above the crash of glass as the rifles were leveled at the strangely assorted pair of thieves. There was a struggle, but the lawless partners were quickly overpowered and their hands bound.”

Towse portrayed the death scene with great vigor—“The female was made of sterner stuff. She exhausted a blasphemous vocabulary upon the visitors, who essayed to stop the vile flow by gagging her, but found the task too great. After applying every imaginable opprobrious epithet to the lynchers, she cursed everything and everybody, challenging the Deity to cheat her enemies by striking her dead if he dared. When preparations for the short trip to the scaffold were made she called for her own horse and vaulted to its back from the ground.

“Ropes were hung from the limb of a big cottonwood tree on the south bank of the Sweetwater. Nooses were adjusted to the necks of Averill and his wife and their horses led from under them. The woman died with curses on her foul lips.”