| Notes |
- ARKANSAS TRAVERLERS (SOURCE UNKNOWN)
A highly unlikely partnership began in Hot Springs, Arkansas, on
September 21, 1871, when Amos Herbert Bassett took Mary Eliza Chamberlin
Miller to be his bride. The incongruity of their marriage is equalled only by
the incongruity of their later migration to a Western wilderness where Herbert
was to endure manfully his distaste for pioneer life, and his wife, joyfully
accepting that life, was to become known as "head of the Bassett gang
Herb was born on July 31, 1834, in Brownsville, Jefferson County, New
York, where his forebears had lived for generations. At some time in his
younger years the family moved to Sweetwater, Menard County, Illinois. In 1862
he was twenty-nine years old, living on the family farm and teaching school in
the winter, when he responded to President Lincoln's call for thirty thousand
volunteers from the President's home state. Private Herbert Bassett served in
Company K of the 106th Regiment of "Lincoln's Brigade." Since he was a
musician, he was assigned to the company band with the official title of
Drummer.
While in the Army, Herb was beset by the ill health which later caused
him to move west. In 1863, barely a year after his enlistment, he suffered
from what Army records call a "debility" and was sent home on sick furlough
for a month or so. At the end of the war Herb, still a private, was mustered
out at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and chose to stay in that part of the country,
very possibly because he had found a Southern branch of his family livi
there. The name of Bassett is found in Arkansas county records as far back as
1833. This kinship with an old pioneer family evidently smoothed his way
despite his being a Yankee, for he eventually became Clerk of the Court, a
respected and even powerful position in the communities of the last century.
Herb has been described as a "little old maid of a man". He was only
five or six inches over five feet tall, and his legs seemed too short for his
torso. Aside from that he was handsome, with thick and curly dark hair, strong
features, and well-set blue eyes. Herb's education was better than average and
he was a competent musician on both piano and violin. He was deeply religious
but not puritanical; although strongly disapproving of tobacco and alcohol, he
enjoyed dancing and playing cards, if no money changed hands. He was gentle,
kind and good-humored, and despised arguments. Unfortunately, considering the
life which lay ahead of him, he appears to have been a passive man with no
qualities of leadership.
Mary Eliza (she preferred to be called Elizabeth) had been born in Hot
Springs County on August 25, 1855. She was a spirited girl and so voluble a
conversationalist that the Utes were later to call her "the Magpie". According
to contemporary descriptions, she had the graciousness that marks a Southern
gentlewoman, and an inborn magnetism. With this magnetism, an iron will,
strong ambition, and indomitable determination to get her way, she controlled
people around her by so intriguing their imaginations that they willing
followed her. She was normally affable and serene, but when she lost her
temper she was violent.
Elizabeth and her sister were very young when their parents died, and
the girls were raised by their maternal grandfather, Judge Crawford Miller, a
breeder of thoroughbred horses. Surprisingly, they were raised with his name.
This suggests that something more than an ordinary tragedy may have caused
their parent's death. Judge Miller had come from around Newark, Virginia
(Elizabeth was always proud of being from one of Virginia's "First Families"),
and it is curious that a lineage-conscious Southerner would deprive his grand-
daughters of their father's name. Elizabeth's daughter Josie was later to tell
a grandchild that there was a suicide in each generation of the family. Josie
gave no details, but she may have been referring to old and better-forgotten
violence,. Elizabeth herself possessed qualities which, given bad fortune,
could have led her to disaster. But her fortune was good - she married Herb
Bassett, who was always to be her balance wheel, even when he could not
control her.
If there is a mystery surrounding Elizabeth's parents, there is an
equal mystery surrounding her marriage to Herb. Why would the attractive
teenage daughter of a well-to-do family marry a graying, middle-aged man?
Perhaps the orphaned girl saw in this kindly and gentle man the father
she had never known, although that answer seems rather superficial for someone
as complicated as Elizabeth.
Mary Eliza, herself better-educated than many women of the time, would
have been contemptous of a very commonly held opinion that an educated female
ran the risk of a withered uterus if uncommon strain were put on her brain.
She would have been in complete sympathy with the growing tide of feminism and
of women's demands for educational opportunity and equal treatment under the
law. At the same time, she was always a lady with strict ideas of propriety,
and would have been completely out of sympathy with Victoria Woodhull, who was
espousing "free love" on the lecture platforms in the east, and with Amelia
Bloomer, who had urged women to replace their petticoats with pant
A deeper look at Herb shows a man who was progressive and liberal for
his time. In later years, for example, he considered his daughters' education
as important as his sons'. Herb must have reflected Elizabeth's own ideas -
progressive, but conventionally so. She would have felt safe with him, knowing
he would treat her as a person of intelligence, despite her womanhood.
Moreover, she could never tolerate domination. Herb's very passivity and lack
of force may have attracted her.
When they married, Herb was thirty-seven years old; Elizabeth had just
turned sixteen. Judging by reports of their years, it was a love match on both
sides, which bore up well even under any painful stresses caused by the
differences of character.
They settled down in Hot Springs to the life typical of a well-bred
couple in comfortable circumstances. In 1874, three and a half years after
their marriage, their daughter Josephine (Josie) was born. Less than two years
later Elizabeth delivered their first son, to whom they gave the family name
of Samuel. Life could have continued in a placid routine except that Herb's
health had seriously deteriorated in Arkansas, where the summers are humid and
the winters cold but no less humid. Herb described his physical condition when
he applied for an Army pension:
"Was treated in Arkansas 20 years ago for liver and heart trouble - h
chills and fever frequently for several years after the war was over - was
treated by Dr. Henry C. Baker who stated that my liver was in very bad
condition - that the chills and fever that I had were very hard to control.
While he was treating me I had a very hard chill which threatened congestion
and he advised me to leave there at once. I sold out and came here [Brown's
Park] in April 1878. "
In addition to his "debility", which was probably malarial, Herb was
asthmatic. The doctors of those times could offer little help to tuberculous
or asthmatic patients except to prescribe a change of climate. It is said that
half the people in early Colorado had come there because of "pulmonary
afflictions" that might benefit from the dry mountain ai
As if Herb's chills, fever and attacks of asthma were not enough to
distrub the couple's tranquillity, in 1874, after six years as Clerk of the
Court, he lost his job, possibly because of a change in political clima
occurring at the end of postwar Reconstruction in Arkansas. At the time they
made their decision to migrate to the west in 1877, Herb may have realized
that his future in Arkansas could never hold more than an obscure clerical job
or, even worse, working on Judge Miller's horse farm. Elizabeth, with h
drive and ambition, may have urged the migration. At the least she would have
cooperated enthusiastically in this search for better fortun
It would seem that they had no firm plan in mind when they boarded the
train that would take them west. Family tradition says that their destination
was California (another popular haven for asthmatics) but it is very probable
that when they left Arkansas they were still not sure where their home was to
be. In any event, they broke their journey at Green River City, Wyoming, for a
reunion with Herb's younger half-brother, Sam Bassett, who lived about eighty
miles to the south over the Utah line in a place called Brown's Hol
Sam Bassett had been a teenager when he left the family home in
Illinois. He had wandered the west from California back to the Dakotas as a
miner, prospector, guide for travelers, and scout for General Miles of the
Union Army. In 1852 he had done some prospecting in Brown's Hole and had liked
it well enough that he returned in 1854 to make it his headquarters between
wanderings.
Brown's Hole had been a rendezvous in the 1830s for the fur trappers.
For a time there was small trading post there named Fort Davy Crockett
(nickname "Fort Misery"), but it vanished when the scarcity of game, as well
as the fall from fashion of beaver hats, made trapping unprofitable. When Sam
Bassett chose it as his headquarters, he became one of the first white men to
live there permanently since the days of that early trading pos
Sam Bassett kept a journal during his early days in the west, and its
disappearance is a tragedy, judging by the fragment that survived, quoted by
Ann Bassett in her memoirs:
"Browns Hol, Novermber, the month of Thanksgiving, 1852. Louis
[Simmons] and I "down in." Packs off. Mules in lush cured meadow. Spani
Joe's trail for travel could not be likened to an up-state high lane for
coach-and four. Mountains to the right of us, mountains to the left of us, not
in formation but highly mineralized. To the South, a range in incontest
beauty of contour, its great stone mouth drinking a river."
Herbert was first admitted to the Soldiers and Sailors Home in Quincy, Illinois on 24 Nov 1913 (Home # 10215).
He was a soldier from Menard County, Illinois. Herbert was a musician, resident of Sweetwater, mustered into Company K, 106th Illinois Infantry on 18 Sep 1862, mustered out on 12 Jul 1865 as a private.
1870 Federal Census of Rock Park, Hot Springs County, Arkansas (13 Jul 1870)
Amos H. Bassett 34 M New York County Clerk 150 1200
1880 Federal Census of Green River, Sweetwater County, Wyoming
A.H. Bassett 47 M NY NY NY Head Laborer
Eliza 23 F AR VA AR Wife Keeping House
Josie 6 F AR VA?AR Daughter At Home
Samuel 4 M AR VA?AR Son
Annie 2 M UT VA?AR Daughter
1900 Federal Census of Elk River Precinct, Routt County, CO (1/2 Jun 1900)
Amos H. Bassett 66 M Jul 1834 NY NY NY Head
Anna M. 22 F May 1878 UT NY AR Daughter
Living next door
Jessie Knight 26 F Jan 1874 AR NY AR Head
George C. 7 M Jul 1892 CO UT AR Son
Herbert 6 M Apr 1894 CO UT AR Son
(Married 8 years, 2 children, 2 living)
1910 Federal Census of Brown's Park, Routt County, CO (15 Apr 1910)
A.H. Bassett (Wd) 75 M NY NY NY Head Own income
Saml C. 73 M NY NY NY Brother
Crawford McKnight 17 M CO UT AR Grandson Laborer General Farm
Herbert 15 M CO UT AR Grandson Laborer Stock Farm
Emerson Wells 38 M IN IA IN SonL Farmer - General Fa
Josie 35 F AR NY AR Daughter
(Emerson 1st marriage, Josie 3rd marriage, married 0 years, 2 childre
living)
Living next door
Elbert H. Bassett 27 M NY NY AR Head Herder Stock Range
Thos. Yarbury 24 M AL TN TN Partner Herder Stock Range
BROWN'S PARK CEMETERY
Bassett, Samuel C. II 1836-1910, born NY son of Samuel and brother of Herbert,
homesteaded in Brown's County.
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Bassett Family Association Database
1834 - 1918 (83 years)