I had a long and startling telephone interview with Ella’s great-nephew, Daniel Watson Brumbaugh, in October of 2008—me from my home in Phoenix, him at his home in Ohio. Since 1988, he had been traveling and searching to find the truth. He had found plenty of evidence to refute everything history said about his aunt, and plenty more to attest to who she really was. “She was a strong, Scottish woman who went West on her own because she wanted to own her own land, like her grandfather and father,” he told me.
During the summer of 2009, I read Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl—a historical novel that grabbed me from the start and took me back into the days of Henry VIII like no history book ever could. I loved how Gregory defined historical novels—“History is the skeleton; the fiction is the breath.”
I was sitting on my mother’s beautiful backyard patio in North Dakota reading that book, when I heard the words “I never thought I’d die like that.”
I remember holding the book to my chest as I looked around—I’m not kidding, it sounded like someone had said it out loud—and I told the birds feeding in the backyard, “That’s what Ella would have said.”
This is how I came to write this historical novel that lets Ella Watson largely tell her own story.
By the end, I don’t know what outraged me more—the lynching of Ella and Jim or the filthy way it was excused. My only comfort was that everyone who has come to this table has gone away with the same heartache. And the same heartburn.
Historian Hufsmith—the first to actually go back and read all the newspaper coverage of the case to get the real picture—ended his groundbreaking book like this:
“The evening shadows regularly and gradually throw a heavy, black veil across the now deserted site of Ella’s and Jim’s eager and desperate hope for the future. That hope was arrogantly and brutally smashed to pieces on the selfish, iron will of one man’s insatiable greed. That terrible immolation sadly cannot be undone, but the twisting contortions of a Cheyenne reporter’s pen, which has hoodwinked the whole world for a century, is finally exposed for what it was. May that luckless and guiltless couple find an ultimate vindication at last. Requiescat in pace!”
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Endnotes
This historical novel is a work of fiction based on the life, death, and times of Ellen “Ella” Watson. These Endnotes provide a blueprint to the real-life facts, dates, and events.
Chapter One—I Can’t Believe This is the End
On Ellen “Ella” Watson: She was a twenty-nine-year-old immigrant homesteader the morning of July 20, 1889, when six of her neighbors—among them the most powerful cattlemen in Wyoming Territory—kidnapped her and her secret husband, James Averell. He was the thirty-eight-year-old postmaster of the Sweetwater Valley and had just been named a justice of the peace. He owned a roadhouse—a general store that also sold liquor—about sixty miles north of Rawlins, on the main road to growing Casper. Ella cooked hot meals for their customers. The vigilantes were A.J. Bothwell, John Durbin, Robert Conner, Cap’n Robert Galbraith, Tom Sun, and Ernie McLean. They claimed Ella and Jim were cattle rustlers.
On homesteading: President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862 to encourage development of the western territories. It provided one hundred sixty-acre homesteads for both men, single women, and female “head of households,” provided they “proved up” the land by adding a home and improvements and lived on the property at least seven months a year for five years. Two million people sought patents on land through the Homestead Act, which ran from 1862 to 1976. Historians note the cherished Homestead Certificate was usually framed and proudly hung on the cabin wall. But the law was greatly misused. The National Archives reports that of the five hundred million acres dispersed under the Homestead Act, only eighty million went to homesteaders; the rest went to speculators, cattlemen, miners, lumbermen, and industrial interests.
Chapter Two—They First Called Me Franny
On Ellen Watson’s family history: According to Ellen Watson’s great-nephew, Daniel Watson Brumbaugh, who spent twenty years researching her life:
•Her father, Thomas Watson, was born in Stonehouse, Lanarkshire County, Scotland, on August 6, 1836, the son of John and Sarah Watson; the family immigrated to Canada around 1855; Tom established his own one hundred-acre farm and built a two-story farmhouse.
•Her mother, Frances Close, was born in Dromore, County Down, Ireland, on August 17, 1841. Her parents’ names are unknown. The family immigrated to Canada around 1858. Their farm was two farms down from Tom Watson’s.
•Their families immigrated to Canada when Queen Victoria opened up the country for homesteaders, giving these families their first opportunity to own land in their own right. In the old country, all land was owned by royalty, and people like the Watson and Close families could only rent land to farm.
•Tom and Frances (called “Franny”) were forbidden to wed because his Scottish parents couldn’t stand the thought of an Irish daughter-in-law, and her Irish parents couldn’t stand the thought of a Scottish son-in-law.
•The couple got pregnant and Ellen Liddy Watson (who inherited the nickname “Franny”) was born out of wedlock on July 2, 1860 in Bruce County, Ontario, Canada. Most biographers put her birth a year later, but Brumbaugh says his information comes from her family’s Bible notations. Franny and her mother lived with her mother’s brother Andrew Close until, on May 15, 1861, her parents married, defying their families.
•Because of pressure and resentment of his family, Thomas Watson moved away from his farm and found another farm on which to raise his growing family. Seventeen children were born to this couple: John in November 1861; James in October 1864; twins who both died in 1865; Andrew in January 1868; Frances in October 1869; Annie in September 1872; twins that did not live in 1873; Mary in May 1874; triplets in 1875—two died in Canada, the other, Elizabeth, died in Kansas in 1878. Three more children were later born in Kansas: Jane in 1880; Thomas Lewis in 1882, and Bertha in 1884. The author assigned specific days to these birth months and years.
•Thomas Watson’s father held true to his promise to disinherit him.
On washday: In Westering Women, Sandra Myres notes there was no more detested day on the frontier than washing day. First, women had to make the lye soap; then they had to haul water, usually from some distance; and then began the eleven-step “receet” for washing clothes that she quotes with all its original spellings:
“1. bild fire in back yard to het kettle of rain water.
2. set tubs so smoke won’t blow in eyes if wind is peart. 3. shave 1 hole cake lie sope in bilin water. 4. sort things. Make 3 piles. I pile white, I pile cullord, I pile work britches and rags. 5. stur flour in cold water to smooth then thin down with bilin water [for starch]. 6. Rub dirty spots on board, scrub hard, then bile. Rub cullord but don’t bile just rench and starch. 7. take white things out of kettle with broom stick handel then rench, blew and starch. 8. pore rench water in flower bed. 9. scrub porch with hot sopy water. 10. turn tubs upside down. 11. go put on a cleen dress, smooth hair with side combs, brew cup of tee, set and rest and rock a spell and count blessings.”
Chapter Three—I Agree with Pa
On the letter from Kansas: Although the precise wording no longer exists, Brumbaugh notes it was a letter from an old friend who had immigrated to Kansas that led Thomas Watson to move his family there. He established residency on one hundred sixty acres near Lebanon, Kansas, on November 18, 1877, and filed a homestead claim on August 10, 1880.
On Beadle’s Dime Novels: These popular novels, printed originally on orange wrapper paper, told fanciful stories about the settling of the Old West.
On the Civil War: The North had a cavalier attitude as the Civil War began in April, 1861, with many thinking it would so quickly overpower the South that the war would be over by Christmas. That was just one of the
delusions in the War Between the States, or the Civil War, or the War of Northern Aggression, or the Lost Cause. History tells us that in Washington, women in silk dresses and men in fancy shirts rode out in buggies with picnic baskets to watch the battles. On both sides, it wasn’t so much an army as a gathering of young boys—always dirty, certainly exhausted, usually hungry, forever scared. It wasn’t so much a war as a slaughter. The casualties became grotesque. Six hundred thousand dead. Over ten thousand battles. It remains, all these years later, America’s deadliest war. The Watson family claims Tom Watson joined his Canadian neighbors and signed up with Company 1, 96th New York State Volunteers, but records to confirm that have never been found.
On Lincoln’s assassination: President Abraham Lincoln was shot while attending a play at the Ford Theater the night of April 14, 1865. He died the next day. His assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was a Confederate sympathizer, angry that the South had lost the war. Among those punished for his murder was board house owner Mary Surrat, who was hanged on July 7, 1865—the first woman executed by the U.S. government. Modern historians question her guilt.
On “Bleeding Kansas”: According to www.history.com, “Bleeding Kansas is the term used to describe the period of violence during the settling of the Kansas territory. In 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act overturned the Missouri Compromise’s use of latitude as the boundary between slave and free territory, and instead, using the principle of popular sovereignty, decreed that the residents would determine whether the area became a free state or a slave state. Proslavery and free-state settlers flooded into Kansas to influence the decision. Violence soon erupted as both factions fought for control.…During the Civil War, Kansas suffered the highest rate of fatal casualties of any Union state, largely because of its great internal divisions over the issue of slavery.”
On the Sioux Uprising: Calling it “Minnesota’s Other Civil War,” Kenneth Carley writes a definitive account in The Dakota War of 1862. He notes the annual allotment of gold due through treaties to the Dakota Indians of Minnesota was delayed that August, while the annual ration of food was stored in a warehouse. The Indian agent didn’t want to call the people into the agency headquarters twice, so he refused to release the food until the gold came, even though the Sioux were starving. His famous words were “Let them eat grass.” The horrific, bloody uprising that followed saw “at least 450—and perhaps as many as 800—white settlers and soldiers killed, and considerable property was destroyed in southern Minnesota,” Carley notes. Minnesota officials—it was then the newest state in the nation—rounded up and wanted to hang some 300 Indians, most of whom had not participated in the war. President Lincoln interceded. Still, thirty-eight Dakota hanged in Mankato on December 26, 1862, in the largest mass execution in U.S. history.
On Doc Holliday: In her excellent historical novel, Doc, Mary Doria Russell details Doc Holliday’s days in Dodge City and his growing friendship with Wyatt Earp. He arrived in Dodge in 1878, a twenty-six-year-old dentist “who wanted nothing grander than to practice his profession in a prosperous Kansas cow town,” she writes.
Chapter Four—We Found a New Life
On snakes: It is almost impossible to read any personal account of western settlement without reading about the plentiful snakes that made life miserable. Although later discredited, early thoughts were that the only remedy for snakebites was cutting the wound and sucking out the poison.
On the family’s route west: Ella’s great-nephew, Brumbaugh, spelled out the route of their immigration from family records.
On Lebanon, Kansas: Founded in 1873, this small town was about as far west as most wanted to go in those days—with nothing but the wild territories beyond until you got all the way to the Pacific Ocean and California. But in 1898, it was determined that Lebanon was the mid-point between America’s boundaries on the Pacific and the Atlantic. For years, it called itself the “center” of the country—until the later annexation of Alaska and Hawaii. On June 29, 1941, civic leaders erected a stone marker that declared it the Historical Geographical Center of the original forty-eight states.
On soddies: According to Sod Houses on the Great Plains, written and illustrated by Glen Rounds, early pioneers cut two-feet thick “bricks of earth” from the prairie sod, then stacked them on one another to form walls for a small shelter—usually sixteen by twenty feet. They left a space for a door and a small window hole—before they had glass, homemakers rubbed bacon grease on paper to fill in the windows. The roof was made by spanning ridge poles from one sod wall to the other, then covered with four to six inches of dirt. It is said that after a rain, the roofs leaked for days. Field mice burrowed into the walls and snakes hunting mice overhead sometimes fell through the ceiling. Most soddies had dirt floors. They were meant to last a few years until lumber could be hauled in to build a cabin.
Chapter Five—My First Big Mistake
On Ellen’s marriage: On November 24, 1879, eighteen-year-old Ellen Watson married twenty-one year-old William A. Pickell. A wedding portrait of the couple, printed in several books inspired the description of her wedding dress. The couple had no children and Ella’s father would later tell the press that Pickell’s “infidelity” caused a breakup, while family history uncovered by Brumbaugh says Pickell was also abusive and once beat Ellen with a horsewhip. Ellen left Pickell in 1883, lived with her family for a short time and filed for divorce, Brumbaugh reports. Records show Pickell ignored three notices of divorce.
On Kansas going Dry: Governor John St. John, with the backing of the national Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, forced the legislature to pass a constitutional amendment for Prohibition. Kansas voters then approved it in 1880, leading the nation toward a ban on all manufacturing and sale of intoxicating liquors.
On President James Garfield: After only a few months in office, he was shot twice on July 2, 1881, by Charles Guiteau, who’d been turned down for a federal job. The wounds were not fatal, but poor and unsanitary medical practices were. Garfield died on September 19, 1881. Guiteau hanged, declaring: “Yes, I shot him, but his doctors killed him.”
On Thanksgiving: It had been celebrated in America from the earliest days, but became an official national holiday in 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, by proclamation of President Abraham Lincoln. He finally responded to a forty-year campaign for a national, annual holiday led by Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book and author of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” It became tradition for each subsequent president to issue an annual proclamation naming the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day. The 1879 proclamation, quoted verbatim, was issued by President Rutherford B. Hayes. In 1939, at the urging of merchants who wanted a longer Christmas shopping season, President Franklin D. Roosevelt changed the date to the second to last Thursday in November.
On the family’s New Year’s celebration: Hogmanay is a major holiday in Scottish tradition. The original words in “Auld Lang Syne” are from a website on the famous Scottish poem.
On Ella’s divorce: Brumbaugh notes the ironic date of February 14, 1884, as her move to divorce Pickell. Divorce was extremely unusual—and highly objectionable—in those days, so it was a defining moment for Ella to demand a divorce, and then to demand her maiden name be restored.
On her family’s history: Court records show Thomas Watson became a citizen of the United States on December 17, 1884, and his homestead was proved up on May 23, 1885. Printed obituaries say Thomas Watson died on May 29, 1921, and is buried in the Odessa Cemetery near Lebanon. Frances Close Watson died on April 3, 1924.
Chapter Six—My Train to a New Life
On Jacob Stone: Brumbaugh says the family history notes Ella went to work for Jacob Stone after filing for divorce.
On enticements to immigrate: Railroads issued brochures with titles like “Wonderful Opportunities for Homesteader or Investor” and one included a poem entitled “Mary Had a Little Farm.” (The author has rewritten the
ditty for Ella. The original portrayed it as an investment opportunity and Ella never intended it for anything but her own farm.)
•Brumbaugh told the author in a 2009 interview that Ella wanted to go west so she could own land like her father and grandfather.
On Jesse James: Jesse James was a notorious train robber—he and his gang held up seven trains in a sixteen-year crime spree. He was shot in the back of the head and killed by Bob Ford on April 3, 1882.
On women voting: On December 10, 1869, fifty-one years before national suffrage, Wyoming became the first government in the nation to give women full voting rights. One reason historians give for this momentous move is that men in the territory hoped it would attract unmarried women to move to Wyoming. But when it came to statehood, Congress demanded Wyoming rescind its woman suffrage. History gives us two versions of the strongly worded telegram that told Washington that wouldn’t do: “We may stay out of the Union for 100 years but we will come in with our women,” or “We will remain out of the Union a hundred years rather than come in without the women.” Wyoming, known as the “Equality State,” entered the union in 1890 with full suffrage for women. Wyoming again made history in 1924 when its voters elected Nellie Tayloe Ross, the nation’s first female governor.
On poodles: According to Anne Seagraves’ Soiled Doves, poodles were the preferred pet of western prostitutes. “These soft, cuddly little dogs were a favorite of the parlor ladies, so no ‘decent’ woman dared to own one,” she wrote.
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