Description
High Plains Press, Published 1993. Hardcover, vi, 367 pp.; 23 cm; illustrated with black-and-white photographs and facsimile documents; map frontispiece of the Sweetwater Country (ca. 1880s).
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
112
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Catalog notes
Condition & notes
In Very Good condition with a Very Good dust jacket. Plum cloth-covered boards, gilt lettering on spine; minor shelf and edge wear to covers. Binding tight. Previous owner's illustrated bookplate with name in ink on front pastedown; family gift inscription in ink, dated 21 May 1995, on front free endpaper, sent from Lander, Wyoming, "75 miles from Spring Creek Gulch." Faint bumping and creasing to fore-edge of pp. 223-242. Otherwise pages clean and unmarked. Magenta pictorial dust jacket with oval portrait of Ellen Watson; mild shelf and edge wear. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover. Full account of the July 20, 1889 hanging of homesteaders Ellen Watson and James Averell by six cattlemen in Spring Creek Gulch on the Sweetwater River, and of the newspaper campaign that branded Watson "Cattle Kate," a rustler and prostitute. Hufsmith, a Wyoming-born composer who wrote the 1976 bicentennial opera The Sweetwater Lynching on the subject, spent nearly twenty years in court records, homestead files and interviews with descendants, and argues the killings arose from a dispute over land and water rights with rancher Albert Bothwell. Includes period photographs from the Wyoming State Museum, Casper College and Carbon County archives (among them one of only three known photographs of Ellen Watson), the coroner's inquest, and the hanging tree then and now. Contents: Part One, The Setting: The Myth; The Cattle Barons' Dilemma; The Weather. Part Two, The Cast: Ellen Watson; James Averell; Homesteading; The Lynchers. Part Three, The Action: The Beginning of the End; The Business of Rustling; The Maverick Law; More Difficulties; The Final Hours; The Aftermath; The Coroner's Posse; The Lie; A Father's Agony; The Lost Cause; Postlude; Epilogue; Index.