Dan Snow's History Hit - Outlaws, Cattle Rustling and Bootlegging: The Life of Josie Bassett

Episode Date: October 6, 2022

Josie Bassett Morris' life epitomised the Wild West. She grew up on a homestead in the late 18th century, in Northern Utah, USA. Their home was situated on the Outlaw Trail and gun-slingers like Butch Cassidy and the Sun Dance Kid would stay as they passed through. Her mother was a forbidding cattle rancher and Josie quickly learnt the trade. As an adult, she was known for her quick wit, hardy lifestyle on the land and the many husbands she got through- she was smart, self-reliant and kind; a force they struggled to reckon with. As an older woman, she set up her home in the wilderness of Cub Creek where she lived completely off the land, stealing nearby cattle when she needed meat. When the depression hit, she brewed her own corn whiskey to sell. In the mid-20th century, she became a living legend - a movie starring Doris Day was even made about her- and she remains a legend of the old west to this day.While in the USA, Dan took a visit to the Uintah Heritage Museum in Vernal, where he spoke with curator LeeAnn Denzer about life on the frontier and Josie Bassett Morris' extraordinary life.You can find out more about the museum and the history of the frontier at the UINTAH COUNTY HERITAGE MUSEUM website.It was produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.Complete the survey and you'll be entered into a prize draw to win 5 Historical Non-Fiction Books- including a signed copy of Dan Snow's 'On This Day in History'.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I am in northern Utah in the western part of the United States of America. I'm in Uinta County Heritage Museum. Wherever I go, I obviously go and visit the local history museum. And this is an absolute gem here. It's full of cattle rustlers. It's full of John Wesley Powell's trip down the Grand Canyon, which is particularly interesting to me because I once went on a reconstruction of that epic journey. John Wesley Powell, Civil War veteran with several others, took some completely inappropriate rowing boats on the newly built Transcontinental Railway

and became the first Europeans to go down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon to explore, to fill in that final blank space on the map of the continental United States of America. And they've got a replica of one of John Wesley Powell's boats here. It's making me kind of homesick for my journey. But also down here, they've got the ranching history. They've got the outlaw history.

There's a whole section here on Matt Warner, one of the bandit riders. He was friends with Butch Cassidy. And he rode with that kind of gang, stealing, smashing things up. He said, my whole bandit life proves that crime don't pay. Can you beat it? For every dollar you steal, you smash prospects, maybe of making hundreds of dollars. And when you get into that kind of life, it's almost impossible to get out again. Now, he came out of prison, and this gunslinger then served as a deputy sheriff, just the peace and detective, until he died in the mid-20th century. Also, not forgetting the

extraordinary history of the First Peoples here. We've got a civilisation stretching back a thousand years ago, some unbelievably beautiful baskets weaved here, some ceramics showing a very sophisticated agrarian society of First Peoples long before European settlers ever arrived. And as I'm walking along, we've got a lot of saddles, and I'm learning for the first time about a remarkable human being. I'd never heard of this person, but here on we feel she deserves a podcast her own she's one of the most remarkable women that I've come across the story of her life is a story of settlement in

the western half of America of a rapidly changing society as peoples and interests clashed in this land her name is Josie Bassett Morris and by the of her life, which was not until her late 80s in the mid-20th century, she was a big celebrity in the US. She'd been discovered by journalists, she was in Life magazine, they even made a Hollywood film, biographical epic, a biopic of Josie Bassett Morris, starring Doris Day. She's really one of the last survivors of the era of the Wild West, of European settlement at this part of Utah. I'm lucky enough to be joined by Leanne Denzer.

She's one of the curators here and she is an expert in the life of this legend. Enjoy. Hi there, nice to meet you. Thank you for having me in your wonderful museum. So glad to have you. It's a real treat. It's not what I was expecting, so much history. I wasn't expecting to come out here and find so many different layers of history.

Amazing Native American history, First World War, and of course what we might call the Wild West period. Yes, yes. And it's what the Europeans have always said to me, that this is so exciting for them. Okay, I'm glad I'm just another typical European. Tell me, first of all, what was this part of northern Utah like in the 1870s? So the Uinta Basin is a big bowl, essentially. It's got mountains to the north and the south, east and west, and it makes it into a big bowl. So it's not easy to get into from anywhere.

There is a little bit of an easier way through Colorado, but nobody came that way. Interestingly, most of the people who came to this valley came down from Wyoming up near the railroads, or they went down to Price, Utah, which is south of us, and came up over the mountains. So the famous transcontinental railway started being built in the 1860s. That's the north of us, right? That's north of us. And that's when, so all of that happened about 20 years later than anything else in Utah. So when Brigham Young brought the Mormons to this area, he sent out an expedition of people, and they said it wasn't worth anything but holding the Earth together.

And so they didn't try to colonize it or use it, improve it. And so in 1862, President Lincoln signed this area into becoming an Indian reservation. There are three tribes represented in our area. There's the Uinta Utes, the White River Utes, and the Ancampagre Utes. And the Uinta Utes came from near Salt Lake, Provo area, where all the established white settlement was. Then the Meeker Massacre happened in Colorado in 1879. The Indians rebelled against the reign of Meeker, who was trying to make them into farmers. And he broke down the racetrack and they rebelled and they massacred him and several other people. And so then the government pushed the Uncompahgre and the White River Utes

into the Yunda Basin on the reservation. But there were also European settlers here, I guess, as well. Eventually. So what happened was then the people that were sent out here to police the reservation liked it and decided to stay and then there were some settlers that started coming. And I have been exploring this area it's there is some vegetation not too much it's not too much water around. No. A lot of exposed sandstone, that kind of classic Utah, beautiful eroded Utah rock and hillsides that people might be familiar with. What would those settlers be doing? Was it cattle ranching? How would they survive? In the beginning, it was more just subsistence living. They came out and they could have a cow or two and then they'd start a ranching. 1879 was

when the big group came for the first time they almost starved that winter and then as time went on it just grew and grew and by the early 1900s it was a fairly thriving little area. So bits of farming, bit of ranching. Okay now tell me about one of the most famous settlers here. We're standing in front of her display at the moment. You've got some great pictures. The one at our display, her name is Josie Bassett Morris. She was a young girl when they brought the train from Arkansas. They came on the train from Arkansas and her family settled in a place up near Flaming Gorge. Which is an hour north of here.

It's about an hour north. And they all had to come in wagons. So all the pioneering years were pretty much over for people except for in the Uinta Basin. It was almost like starting all over. They had to have the oxen and they had to have the wagons. So it was a bit of a throwback. It was a real big throwback.

She was born in 1874 and and then they got to Browns Park in about 1878. So she comes as a child. She came as a child. She was four years old. And then they get off the train, and suddenly you're back to a more old-fashioned way of exploring the West. Exactly. And her mother had been from a famous horse breeding farm in Arkansas. And her father was a gentleman. He had served in the Civil War and been ill. He had asthma and they needed to get away from the humid weather.

And so they told him to go to California. He had a half-brother who lived in Browns Park. They called it Brown's Hole back then. And he stopped to see him, and they decided to stay. And how did she grow up? So her father didn't take to ranching. That wasn't his thing. But her mother was willing to be a rancher.

So he kind of took the gentlemanly side. Cattleling didn't sound good to him. So Elizabeth, his wife, decided she wanted to be the rancher and she did it really well. And the girls were raised to be very independent. She was very feisty woman, but also genteel. And that's kind of how her girls grew up too. And what kind of world were they growing up in?

Was there tensions with other settlers? Was there famous outlaw stuff in the West? And what about with the indigenous people? So all of that. Okay, all of it. So they arrived in the valley and two months later, her mother had a baby. Her name was Anne and she couldn't thrive very well.

So they found a Ute mother who had just given birth and she nursed at her for six months. So they actually built a secondary cabin up where the settlement was so that she could come and nurse her as needed. And so the Utes were there. And if you understand the Ute system of living, they were hunter-gatherers,

so they would go to the valleys in the winter and up onto the mountains during the summer. This was pre-being put on the reservation, so they kind of all had their own little groups that they would live in all over. They actually started in Colorado and about at the foothills of Denver and had all of Utah. So that would be their annual...

That would be where the U tribe lived. Oh, exactly. And the groups would be separated, but then they were all pushed onto the Yantah Reservation eventually. So they were there. And then there was the conflict between the homesteaders. So in 1862, the Homestead Act was made in the United States. About 10% of the United States was given away free to settlers,

which is uncanny. Amazing, isn't it? Their job was to prove up the land. They got about 160 acres and they had five years to prove it. They had to live on it and improve it in those years. But for years and years, the cattle baron from Texas had been moving up their cattle from Texas to the railroad and then sending it back to the east and they were used to being able to put their cattle wherever they wanted to. Right so these big rich guys with big herds would just graze their cattle all the way up from Texas. Right. Slaughter them put them on the train

to the east and sell them for a good price. Okay. And so there was a huge problem because the settlers started building fences or taking land that they liked. And so the settlers were having a hard time versus the cattle baron at the time. And then it changed and they just lived up there and they made these huge associations and they were all around Browns Park where her family lived. Browns Park is a 35-mile valley, and it's very narrow. And part of it's in Colorado, part of it's in Utah, and it's just south of Wyoming. So it was a really diverse area.

And the cattle baron were trying to squash them out. Right. The classic Western, the script for a Western, like 310 to Yuma. We've all seen that. And they literally did kill settlers. They sent men. So a maverick is a cow that's between birth and branding. So like in that first year of life, when they're up on the mountains and they have the calves and then they come down, it's not till they come down that they brand them. So a maverick is one of those that aren't branded and the settlers were grabbing as many mavericks as they could. Sometimes they would take them right from the moms which was illegal but they

would do it but then the barons would come through and take all their cows. So the Bassetts had only been there for a year when the Meeker massacre happened. And they were worried, so they took the kids up to Rock Springs for a year. They had about 20 head of cow. When they came back, their brand was UP. The man came through and he put a seven UP on it and stole all their cows.

Oh, wow. So they're worried about Native Americans massacring them them but in fact it's a settler it's a cattle baron who stole all their cows right and so then elizabeth wouldn't take it and she knew her cows so she went and took them back wait she stole them all back yeah how old is she at this point so she's about 30 she died when she was 36 so this is the mother this is the mother she's got 30. She died when she was 36. And this is the mother? This is the mother. She's got loads of kids and pregnancies. She had five children, two daughters and three sons.

And she was just a cattle woman. They said she could ride with the best of them. She rode side saddle. So she went and stole back her herd. She got back her herd. In the meantime, the outlaws used that area as a hideout. So this is almost another group of people that are outlaws. Right.

Okay. And they were good to the settlers. They needed a place where they could be safe. Most of them were young kids who had run away from home and didn't start out as outlaws, but then they ended up as outlaws, such as Cassidy, Sundance Kid, Matt Warner. And so Josie wouldn't have known Butch Cassidy? She knew all of them.

In fact, most of them worked for her family at a period of time. So she's growing up. Her mom dies in her late 30s, so is she... So at this time, I didn't realize this when I was first studying her, but it wasn't unusual for the ranchers to send their daughters and sons to a school, boarding school, to give them some better things. But her parents wanted her to have refinement, plus that gutsy Western stuff. Good combine. So they sent her to Salt Lake City to a Catholic school, and she loved it. She was there for a year when her mother died. And she was the oldest, so she went back home. Her father wanted her to leave again, but she felt she needed to take that role.

And so she stayed in the Valley. take that role. And so she stayed in the valley. However, she also had had an intimate relation with one of the cowboys. His name was McKnight and he came from Scotland and he worked for their family. Her mother was really nice because her mother let them work for her, but also build their own herds. And so McKnight was one of those cowboys that did that and she got pregnant. And so McKnight was one of those cowboys that did that. And she got pregnant. And so two months after her mother died, she married Jim McKnight. You listen to Dan Snow's history. Don't go anywhere.

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I don't know how many exact years. She had two sons, Crawford and Edward, I believe, was the second boy's name, but they always called him Chick. And then they started having struggles, she and her husband, Jim. They were really strong-willed, weren't willing to give. Jim wanted to leave Browns Park, and she said, no, I'm not leaving Browns Park and she said no I'm not leaving Browns Park. He wanted to come down here there's a place in between Roosevelt and Vernal called the Strip. It wasn't part of the reservation

it was taken off and it didn't have any law. Roosevelt had law keepers and Vernal had law keepers but the Strip free. And so they had a lot of saloons and all kinds of things going on over there. And he wanted to open a saloon down there and she didn't want to do it. And so they got mad and more mad at each other. Eventually he took all the cows and he took her two boys and took them out to Salt Lake area where he had family and left them.

So there was a big row about that. And there was a lot of papers about their divorce. It was a big thing. Scandalous. It was pretty scandalous. And it was kind of funny because she pretended to be sick or she was sick. Nobody knows for sure, but they tricked Jim into coming over to Colorado to serve papers. And he refused them.

He threw them on the floor and locked out the door, and the deputy said, hey, stop. And he wouldn't stop, so he shot him. What? And according to the papers, it was the deputy who shot him. And according to Jim's family, he said, that darn deputy who shot me. So even though the rumors got around that she was the one who shot him, the real history would say that, no, it was the deputy who shot him.

And she said, if I would have shot him, he would have been dead. So he did recover and they were civil after that. They did get the divorce and she got the kids back. Okay, so that was a little lesson for him. Right. Has she got any cows back now? I don't know if she had any cows.

In fact, her father said, in order to get your children back, you might need to prove that you're going to give them a better life than what Jim could give them. So she moved to Craig, Colorado and opened a boarding house. And when she was there, the boys went to a school and she ended up marrying their schoolmaster. His name was Rainey. But the boys hated him. He was very strict and had a lot of rules. They'd been living on the ranch all their lives.

They didn't like it. So they left and came back to Browns Park to be with the grandpa and stuff. And she divorced him. Okay, so that's two down. That's two down. Yeah. Then she married another guy And she divorced him. Okay. So that's two down. That's two down. Yeah. Then she married another guy and she divorced him. And then she found a man that she quite loved. His last name was Wells. He had a ranch up there. She could go back to ranching and being back in Browns Park.

So she married him. And the only thing she ever said that he had a problem with was that he was an alcoholic. And they went to a dance in Linford on the New Year's to a party and she didn't want to go because she knew he'd get drinking. But for three days he drank steady and she would end up in the hotel just kind of away from all of it. And he had a foamy mouth when he died. So one of the women started the rumor that she had poisoned him. And she was a girl from Browns Park, and they never got along. So it was this pull against.

So there's a lot of history that say that she poisoned him. According to her own history, she loved him dearly. They were doing a medical cure that you could drink and it was supposed to take it away. I did a lot of research on drugs in those days. They put the craziest things in their drugs. And what they said was strychnine was in there. Strychnine, so poison. He may have accidentally poisoned himself.

And he could have died of alcohol poisoning because he drank crazy for three days. Yeah, we're not going to blame Josie. But there was a lot of talk that it was her fault that she killed him. So husband number four. Her number four died of poisoning, whatever it was. And then she remarried a man named Morris. She decided she wanted to homestead. Homesteading was almost gone by that part, but there was one area here. And that means just having a cabin and living off-grid?

Essentially, we would call it that. You got 160 acres usually. In her Bureau claims, she got 159.99 acres. And so she went down to Jensen, started looking, because that's where they had some homesteading available. So she went toward Colorado and went over two mountains to find Cub Creek. Fell in love with it, and she claimed. Her house is still there today. Her house is still there today. Here's the interesting part though. She never proved it up. She didn't want to pay the taxes. And so what happened was she went in thinking she could start building up a herd and getting things going and they wouldn't give her a loan. Oh, by the way,

Ben Morris was only with her about a year when she kicked him out with a frying pan, told him, you've got 15 minutes to leave. Oh, the last husband. Uh-huh. You've got 15 minutes to leave if you don't leave. And she had a frying pan in her hand. He said he took five. She was a very strong-willed woman. She would have been what we'd call a feminist today, you know. She wanted to have her freedom to do what she felt was important, and men were that way. And so it just wasn't a really good mix. And so she always told people she was a good judge of men, but a terrible judge of husbands. And then we've got some amazing pictures of her here. She's described as a rude, which is true.

It's a rough-hewn room. It's got ceramics jars on some shelves. It's got some beams in the ceiling, lots of agricultural implements hanging off. I mean, she looks like a real homesteader. She's got dungarees on. She does. When she was homesteading out there, she finally took off her skirt or her split leather skirt, which we have right here, actually. And started wearing pants, but she didn't go with pants.

She went with what we call coveralls. And she wore coveralls to the day she died. She only dressed up in a dress when she was in court on the day she died. She only dressed up in a dress when she was in court on a cattle rustling charge. And she was in her 60s at that time, and they hung jury twice, and then they let her go. So she was almost done for cattle rustling in her 60s.

Yes. This woman's a hero. Yeah. And there's a picture of her poaching here or at least hunting. So it would have been considered poaching by this time. She was used to just getting meat when she needed it. She didn't waste anything. So it wasn't her desire to poach.

But if she was hungry and needed meat, she would go out and shoot. And so Life magazine came out and she gave him a really good story. And this is now 1940s? Yes. And she was a legend by this time. So she made herself look even more notorious than she really was because there was money.

She was always lacking money during the Depression. She allowed people to live in her house and moved into a dugout that she made herself. She was never totally alone. You would think out there in the place where she lived that she would have been totally isolated, but right there is where all the cattlemen would always push all their cattle up onto the mountain behind her.

She would watch their cattle. She would take them up to them if they came down. And so they allowed her a few cows here or there. If she took a cow, a maverick, they didn't make a big deal of it. But during the Depression, they were paying the farmers to kill their stock. It's really sad. People were starving all over the country, but they were just paid to kill their stock. It's really sad. People were starving all over the country, but they were just paid to kill their stock. So she would take a few extra, take them to the butcher and share the meat around.

And that's when she got caught with rustling and they tried to try her because she was stealing their stock, which I guess the farmers had some valid point. Unfortunately for Josie, she never proved up her property because she didn't want to have to pay the taxes. So after the depression, she thought, I can build up a herd now. Went to the bank and tried to get a loan. She's getting older and they wouldn't loan her any money. So she thought if I deed this property to a younger man and he agrees with me that I get to keep it but he'll have it someday. She had her boys and her grandkids but I guess she thought it was worth it. She deeded it to him and six months later he sold it. Right so she found a young guy and she said, right, they've got an

unofficial agreement here and he just sold it out from under her. Yes. Wow. She had a terrible, terrible taste in her intimate male partners. She did. And so then a man from Jensen bought it and he used it for his horses. Eventually they became friends, but in the beginning it was really, really hard on her. But her son did claim that five acres were her. So in the records, there's a five acre homestead in her name. So she gets the curtilage or whatever. So she got the house. She lost the land. She lost the land. So this 1948 Life magazine article made her a legend across the US. I think so.

And they even made a movie. Doris Day played her. But it was really quite fantastical, crazy, and not real at all. But there's truth behind the legend. I mean, she was a cattle rustler, a horsewoman. She was an amazing survivor. I forgot to tell you. During Prohibition, she decided she needed a cash crop. I forgot to tell you, during Prohibition,

she decided she needed a cash crop, so she learned to make corn whiskey. And she sold corn whiskey a lot. She's a bootlegger as well. And she was really good with brandy. She made it out of apricots. Delicious. Now how old was she when she died?

She was 89, She died in 1964. She was out there. Her legs were starting to get kind of weak. And she'd gone out to feed one of her animals and it nudged her and she fell and broke her hip. So she crawled to the house. She forced herself to crawl to the house and she was there for two days before they found her and then they took her to Salt Lake and they pinned her and she lived another six months but they wouldn't let her go back to Cub Creek and then she passed away. She reminds me of my grandma so she sounds like she was a link between the modern west and its beginnings. Right, she actually was around when they were trying

to get to the moon. If you think about that, it's just crazy. And her whole life had changed so much. Everything about her just fascinates me. The people of Vernau loved her. The family thought they would just have a small little funeral when she died. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints down there in Jansen, the Mormons,

had a big, huge funeral, and the house was full of people. She must have been royalty by then, wasn't she? She was such a giving woman. She was such a contraposition. She was her gentleman father and her feisty mother combined. Very fascinating woman. So we're talking about her and celebrating and remembering her. Do you think she'd have been very unusual?

Or would there have been quite a lot of women like her? Actually, you would be surprised. I did a Gutsy Woman series during the pandemic where I just took women from the Uanda Basin and did a little FaceTime podcast about them. And it was really amazing. Here she was almost 90 years old when she died. You would think that hard life would make you die sooner, right?

There were lots of other people. The Chu family has an amazing story. There were 14 children. story. There were 14 children. Their family lived in Browns Park but then they moved down into the Monument area over in Colorado area. Her story of living in dugouts and under tents and as they tried to make their homestead and she lived to be in her 90s. The Mantle Ranch has amazing stories about the women and how the men would leave and they were there alone to keep things going. So actually there was a crop of extraordinary pioneers. They were just so gutsy. They weren't town people. Ranching is so different than

farming. It's so much different than my experience in life that I just sit in awe of what they were able to accomplish, how they made friends with the Native Americans of the area so that they even helped them. I admire them so much. Thank you so much for having me in your beautiful museum. Oh, you're welcome. And telling me about Josie. It feels like sort of a lens

which you can study this whole period of development, this whole area. Yes, and it's all interrelated, which makes it so exciting. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all work out.