In the thousands of words that Ed Towse would write about the lynching, he never would correct his mistaken identity. And then he’d complicate it further with yet another mistake, reporting the hanged woman was the “Ellen Watson” arrested for drunkenness and prostitution in Cheyenne in June of 1888. There were two things wrong with that: there would have been no such arrest, because prostitution wasn’t illegal in the territory. And in June of 1888, the real Ella Watson wasn’t even in Wyoming Territory—she was home visiting her family in Kansas.
Her family read the horrible stories coming out of Wyoming in the Omaha Bee. Papa Watson wasn’t sure, at first, that it was his daughter they were talking about. Sometimes there was no name. Sometimes the name was different. They said all kinds of things he knew weren’t true. He had no idea who this Kate Maxwell was. Maybe there was something going on there that he didn’t know and his girl was still safe in her cabin. He held on to that myth for a long time, until a letter finally came informing him of the truth he’d known all along. His oldest child had been lynched.
***
Out in rural Douglas, W.T.—far from the powerhouse dailies of Cheyenne—reporters and editors at the weekly papers didn’t get their information from the stock growers over crystal glasses of whiskey. They got their information the old-fashioned way—from eyewitnesses and people at the scene. And that’s how the weekly Bill Barlow’s Budget learned the truth about the lynching in the Sweetwater Valley.
Bill Barlow was thirty-two years old and a veteran of Wyoming Territory journalism. He worked in Laramie and Rawlins before he and his wife landed in Douglas and created a paper known for its progressive tone and its honest reporting.
Few realized that Bill Barlow was a pen name—the real name of this journalist was Merris C. Barrow—so even his closest friends called him Bill. He’d been a fixture in Douglas since he opened his weekly newspaper in June of 1886, just three months before the railroad came to Converse County.
By the time Bill Barlow read the first stories out of Cheyenne, he knew they all were bunk. It didn’t surprise him in the least, because he was used to the kind of fanciful fiction that was often passed off as journalism from the capital.
Ed Towse particularly irked him, and Barlow bellowed about “Ed Towse’s mythical compositions.” After blasting one Towse story, Barlow wrote: “If there is one true statement therein, I am unable to find it.” On another, he complained, “it reads like the third chapter of Pop-Eyed Sam.”
For himself, he saw what had happened and wasn’t afraid to say so: “Of course, the hanging of James Averell and Ella Watson was nothing but murder—and a murder of the coldblooded, premeditated order, also.”
***
Ed Slack was none too happy when he got a scathing telegram from his friend and fellow newspaperman, Bill Barlow. Barlow laid out the real story and took Slack to task for the lies that had filled the first Sun article.
As a booster for the cattlemen, Slack wanted to ignore it. As a newspaper man—“I’ve got printer’s ink in my blood”—he couldn’t. But he couldn’t eat crow, either. So without comment, on July 25, he printed Barlow’s entire telegram. It was the only moment in the entire annals of this story that a Cheyenne newspaper reported the truth.
THE TRUE STORY
Of the Lynching
of James Averell
and Ella Watson
Graphic Details of the Affair
Given by Eye Witnesses
The Coroner’s Verdict
Implicates Some Very
Prominent Men
A Sheriff’s Posse Arrests
Sun, Bothwell and Others
“The dime novel literature telegraphed from Cheyenne Monday night regarding the lynching of James Averell and Ella Watson Saturday last is the veriest bosh,” Barlow had telegraphed. Even readers with a limited vocabulary knew you couldn’t get any more false than “veriest bosh.”
Barlow told everything, from Buchanan riding for help to the grave that held the bodies.
“Sheriff Watson and party then proceeded to the ranch of Tom Sun, who admitted he was one of the lynchers and readily gave the name of the others.
“Taking Sun into custody the party next proceeded to the ranch of A.J. Bothwell, who also readily admitted that he had assisted at the hanging. He told Buchanan and Healy that both would go over the range in the same way if they did not leave the country, and on being told he was under arrest and would be taken to Rawlins, he warned the sheriff to take a good look at every tree he came to on his way back to Casper for he would be likely to find six or eight more cattle rustlers hanging by the neck. The two men who furnished these facts left the party there and returned to Casper. Watson probably had no trouble in arresting the balance of the lynchers and should have reached Rawlins with them sometime today.”
If the true version of what had happened embarrassed Ed Towse or his Cheyenne Leader, they never let on. Nor did they ever acknowledge this version of events. When Towse reported the arrests, he wrote it matter-of-factly. “A Rawlins telegraph says that all the men were arrested by Sheriff Hadsell of Carbon County and given a preliminary hearing…Bail was fixed at $5,000 each and surety promptly furnished.”
If Towse knew, he didn’t care that Wyoming law didn’t allow bail for a capital offense, and a lynching definitely qualified as a capital offense. But the lynchers were charged with the lesser crime of “manslaughter,” as though the hangings were an accident. Alarm bells should have gone off everywhere with the charge and the bail, even an astronomical $5,000, but they didn’t to the Leader or the Sun. Nor did the papers notice the absurdity of what happened next—what “surety promptly furnished” meant: Each of the accused men wrote a $5,000 check to bail out each other.
Papers in Cheyenne didn’t notice, but everyone else did. Papers in Casper and Rawlins and Douglas and Bessemer were outraged, calling it nothing but a “farce,” to let accused murderers out on bail in the first place and then allow the accused to bail each other out.
Back in Cheyenne, Ed Slack proved he hadn’t had a come-to-Jesus moment by printing the telegram. The very next day, on July 26, he editorialized. “The honest ranch men and stock growers were met only by threats and fresh depredations. Averell constantly threatened death to those who interfered with him and the wretched woman he kept was equally desperate and uncontrollable. Buchanan was known to be one of the gang. Bothwell, Sun, Durbin, and other prominent settlers had received intimations that their lives would be taken. Neither the property or the lives of these men were safe at any time. The worthless wretches who carried on these depredations completely controlled and terrorized the whole region and the conditions of life there became unbearable.”
Bill Barlow sat in Douglas shaking his head that the truth didn’t matter to Ed Slack, but he spent only a moment wondering why. It was clear the Cheyenne editor had been “shown the light” and was marching to the drummer of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association.
Slack proved it once again when he swallowed his words that the hangings were the result of a land conflict. Boy, was that the wrong message to send. So he just reversed himself: “It was not and is not a conflict between large stockmen and poor ranch men, but a question of life and death between honest men and cut-throat thieves. The heroic treatment must prevail and the gentlemen who have resorted to it are entitled to the support and sympathy of all good citizens.”
But the controlling interests of Wyoming Territory had a problem on their hands. An inquest had named some of the most prominent ranchers of the area. It couldn’t be allowed to stand. It took pulling just a few strings for someone to declare the first inquest—the one that not only named the men, but brought about their arrest and their release on the farcical bond—wasn’t valid. A second inquest was staged.
Ed Slack crowed in the Cheyenne Daily Sun on July 27, “The verdict was that the parties came to their death by violence by persons
unknown to the jury. This is more like it.”
Outside Cheyenne in the territory, one newspaper after another reported a totally different story—all praised Jim Averell as a fine and honest man. “Did I know Jim Averell?” asked Jim Casebeer of the Casper Weekly Mail. “Well, I should say I did—knowed him as a pretty decent fellow, too. They talk about Averell stealing cattle. It is all bosh and buncombe. The writer was personally acquainted with him and knows that he expected there would be serious trouble over land affairs in the valley. As to the woman, she was never accused of using rope and branding iron by anyone near her.” Casebeer surmised that a “legal hanging” seemed to be in order for those who had taken these lives.
Meanwhile, John Friend of the Carbon County Journal in Rawlins gave his testimonial: “Jim Averell was one of the biggest-hearted men in the country. No one ever went hungry from his door and his house was always open for all.”
Most of the rural weeklies defended Ella against the rustling, but repeated the prostitution charge, not realizing that was a Cheyenne invention, too.
It didn’t take long for the battlefield to be divided. As John Friend wrote in the Carbon County Journal on August 3, “The Cheyenne papers are the only ones in the territory that condone the Sweetwater lynching!”
But none of this haggling ever got beyond the borders of the territory. As far as the rest of the nation—and papers in Europe—were concerned, two bad-ass rustlers had gotten their just rewards at the end of ropes held by honest, struggling cattlemen.
At home, nobody was paying much attention to what was being written elsewhere. They had a real murder case on their hands. And so the focus was on what the justice system would do. The next step was a grand jury hearing to issue a “true bill” that would bring the lynchers to trial.
But as the weeks passed, the writing was on the wall.
Everyone could see justice slipping away. Men who had admitted their guilt when Sheriff Watson came to arrest them, now used the guise of the “second” inquest to deny they had anything to do with it.
The only chance for justice was the eyewitness testimony of Frank Buchanan, Gene Crowder, and John DeCorey, but everyone worried about that.
“That settles it probably,” Bill Barlow wrote with sarcasm dripping from the page. “Averell and Watson committed suicide, probably! Buchanan will disappear, probably, and that will be the end of the matter—probably!”
Sadly, Bill Barlow was a good predictor.
Chapter Eighteen—Pa Wept at Her Grave
By the time Thomas Watson arrived in Wyoming Territory a month after the lynching, the roadhouse was no longer home to anyone.
Ella’s father had expected to stay there, learning face-to-face from Ralph and John and Gene every detail about her final hours.
He expected to slap Ralph on the back in gratitude.
He expected to praise John for being so brave.
He thought he might hug Gene. Mrs. Watson said that if he thought it was right, he should bring Gene home to them and they’d continue raising the boy. After all, he was the closest to a child that Ella ever had. And it was obvious she’d loved him.
He expected to shake hands with Frank Buchanan and thank him for doing all he could to save his daughter.
The Watson family learned about the boys from the letter Ella had been writing the whole month of July—the one she never got a chance to send. But thankfully, they’d finally gotten it. They almost didn’t. That letter had told them about the real life being lived out here—one you’d never recognize if you read the stories coming out of the territory.
Once they got the letter, Tom Watson knew he had to come.
He arrived in Rawlins on the Union Pacific Railroad the afternoon of August 26, 1889. He immediately went to the law office of George W. Durant.
“Mr. Watson, I’m so pleased to finally meet you,” the tall attorney said as he did a two-handed shake in greeting. “I am so sorry for your loss. How was your trip?”
“Fine,” Mr. Watson said, managing a weak smile.
George Durant was just what Tom Watson had imagined about the man who was Carbon County’s official coroner and had been named the executor for the estates of James Averell and Ella Watson. His hair was neatly trimmed, his spectacles were perched on his nose, and his suit was well tailored. Right away, he seemed a nice man, and Tom Watson would never be dissuaded of that thought.
“I’m sorry it was so hard to find you,” Durant began, as Watson settled into a leather arm chair on the client’s side of the desk. “Nobody seemed to know who to contact.”
“You’d think the sheriff would have figured that out,” Watson said, and Durant agreed that would have been the decent thing to do. But if the sheriff had tried, he’d failed miserably.
It was Tom Watson himself, with his daughter Annie’s help, who made the first contact. Annie read her family the horrifying stories from Cheyenne reprinted in the Omaha Bee. Surely, the woman described in the stories wasn’t their Ella. Surely, there was some terrible mistake. When no word came, Annie wrote a letter seeking information, sending it to: “Post Office, Sweetwater, Wyoming.”
What they didn’t know, is that the letter was sent to one of Ella’s killers. To add insult to injury, A.J. Bothwell inherited the postmaster job after Jimmy was lynched.
He’d come by the roadhouse a couple times a week to check on the mail and check on Ralph Cole, who was still living there. Ralph was scared of the man, but he felt an obligation to handle his uncle’s estate, and that took some time, and so he was forced to coexist with Jimmy’s killer.
The only moment he was glad for this arrangement was the day a letter arrived from the “Watson Family, Kansas.” Ralph grabbed the letter and stuffed it in his pocket—he knew if Bothwell saw it, it would never see the light of day. Ralph went to Jimmy’s house, shut the door, and sat down to read the words from Ella’s people. He immediately began a lengthy letter in return. He told the family not to believe the lies coming out of Cheyenne. He told how John had tried so bravely to get help. He told how Buchanan had tried with all his might to stop the hanging. He told of the burial and the arrests. He filled the family in on Bothwell and his new postmaster job. And he directed them to George Durant as the man officially in charge.
Ralph urged someone from the family to come to W.T. and said he would, of course, want to meet with them and tell them anything he could. “Of course, you’ll stay here at the roadhouse. Uncle Jimmy has a very comfortable home and you are welcome here,” he wrote.
“And I am enclosing a letter that Ella was writing to you, but never got a chance to send. I saw her many times, when she had a spare moment, writing on this letter. She often joked that she needed to make it a really good letter because she’d been so tardy in writing.” He sent the picture of Ella on Goldie and a copy of the newspaper article with Jimmy’s letter to the editor. “She wanted you to have all this, and I’m so sorry it has to come like this.”
Annie read the letter slowly because she couldn’t stop crying. Here was her real sister, with so many hopes and so many dreams. Here was the girl the whole family knew, filled with joy and a good sense of humor and so proud of her secret husband. By the time she finished the letter, everyone knew that the newspaper stories were all lies.
Ma Watson tucked the letter in the family Bible, expecting to keep it the rest of her life.
***
“I’m just glad that nice Cole boy wrote to us,” Tom Watson began, and noticed that George Durant’s color seemed to fade before his eyes. “He says we can stay at the roadhouse in Jim’s house…” and he couldn’t continue because Durant was now clearly in distress.
“I’m so sorry to have to tell you this,” Durant began. “You’ve already been through so much. But I’m afraid I have more bad news. We just got word that Ralph Cole died two days ago.”
Tom Watson sucked in his breath, fee
ling anguish for a boy he’d never met. “How much more…” he said, before he put his head in his hands.
“I know, I know,” Durant soothed. “The sheriff went out there today. There’s fear that he was poisoned because he was an eyewitness…” and then Durant thought he ought to stop because this was an awful lot of heartbreak for a man already grieving.
“They think the boy was killed?” Watson shrieked in disbelief. “Because of my Ellen?”
“We don’t know,” Durant back stepped. “There’s just rumors. The boy got sick and went to his neighbors—those editors at that newspaper in the phony town Bothwell is promoting. They took care of him for several days and he just got sicker and sicker and then he died. I’m told Bob Conner—he’s one of the lynchers—was there a few days ago. Feelings are so raw here, that I think people jumped to conclusions. So we shouldn’t do the same thing,” he ended, hoping that final message came through.
“But they wouldn’t poison him, would they?” Watson asked, incredulous at the thought.
“No, I don’t think so,” Durant lied.
“What about the other boys?” Watson anxiously asked. “Her last letter home said she was raisin’ a boy named Gene and had a John working for her.” Durant was already shaking his head before the sentence ended.
“They’ve both disappeared,” he said, and let the sentence hang there.
“They’re just boys,” Watson said in a shocked voice. “What do you mean, they disappeared?” Durant explained that nobody knew where the two younger boys had gone, but within seventy-two hours of the lynching, they were nowhere to be found.
“People here think they were just afraid and ran away. Everyone hopes they’re safe somewhere,” Durant reported. He silently prayed nobody would share with Mr. Watson the rumor that eleven-year-old Gene had been fed to Bothwell’s wolves. Durant himself didn’t believe it, but then, things were so strange these days in these parts that he could understand such a ghastly rumor.
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