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 dispa
tches 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.”
Making it sound like he had visited the death scene, Towse wrote, “Yesterday morning the bodies were swayed to and fro by a gentle breeze which wafted the sweet odor of modest prairie flowers across the plain. The faces were discolored and shrunken tongues hung from between the swollen lips, while a film had gathered over the bulging eyes and the unnatural position of the limbs completed the frightful picture.”
And then the young editor exonerated the lynchers.
“An inquest may be held over the remains of the thieves, but it is doubtful if any attempt will be made to punish the lynchers. They acted in self protection, feeling that the time to resort to violent measures had arrived.”
He ended his story with the most understated sentence he’d ever write. “This is the first hanging of a woman in Wyoming.”
Ed Towse might have wanted to leave the impression that other states and territories had already hung their share of rustling women, but he knew that w
asn’t true. He knew that hundreds had been lynched or legally hung for rustling, and until now, every single one of them had been a man.
***
Ed Towse had his feet propped up on his desk and was smiling. He was rereading his story on the hanging when the newsboy finally delivered a copy of the competition. Towse handed over six cents—a nickel for the Sun and a penny for the kid—and the front page article on the hanging brought his boots hammering to the floor.
“Dammit,” he swore. Slack had the story, too, but hadn’t the cattlemen told Ed this was his scoop? That’s the way he heard it. Obviously, that’s not the way it turned out.
Towse didn’t get past the first paragraph when he began swearing like a sailor. “Goddamnit, fuck you, Slacker.” His blood pressure kept rising as he read. It incensed him that Ed Slack had out-scooped him on two big points: not only had he actually named the woman, but given her the most delicious title of “Cattle Kate.”
Towse scrambled to search through his paper’s archives, and it wasn’t until he found something breathtaking that he stopped swearing.
The following day, Towse did Ed Slack one better: He declared his inept competition had completely misidentified the woman hanged in Carbon County. Her name wasn’t Ella Watson at all. Her name was Kate Maxwell, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a more despicable woman in all of Wyoming Territory.
The July 24 edition of the Cheyenne Leader contained Ed Towse’s lasting contribution to the legend:
“Cattle Kate Maxwell, the woman lynched with Postmaster Averell, has been a prominent figure since her advent in the Sweetwater country three years ago. She had been a Chicago variety actress…fond of horses, she imported a number of racers…It is said Kate poisoned her husband…a colored boy made away with Kate’s diamonds…when the queen and Averell joined issue, Kate was but a poor tramp of the worst kind.” Later, Towse would improve upon his title, and call her “Queen of the Sweetwater.”
Cattle Kate Page 26
