Josie Bassett Morris: Fifty Years Alone at Cub Creek

One Life, the Whole Distance

DOCUMENTED

Start with the arithmetic, because it does more work than any adjective.

Josie Bassett was born in 1874. She was two years old when Custer’s command was destroyed at the Little Bighorn. She was a child in Browns Park when it was a genuine refuge for wanted men, a young woman there while the Wild Bunch was still riding, and middle-aged when she started over alone in a canyon at Cub Creek. She died in 1964 — the year of the Civil Rights Act, two years before the region’s roads and reservoirs took their modern shape.

One woman. Ninety years. From the frontier to the space age, most of it lived in a canyon without electricity.

That span is the thing to hold onto, and it is why she belongs at the center of this section rather than off to one side. The outlaws are the famous names, but they are a brief flash: a decade of robberies, then Bolivia, then silence. Josie is the person who was there for all of it and kept going for sixty years after the story everyone remembers had ended.

Growing Up in the Outlaw Valley

ASSOCIATED

Her parents, Herb and Elizabeth Bassett, settled in Browns Park in the late 1870s and raised their children there. The ranch became known as a place where passing riders were fed — including, by consistent account, members of the Wild Bunch. Herb Bassett kept a library and an organ in a valley with neither town nor church.

So picture the childhood accurately, because it is not what the phrase “outlaw’s associate” suggests. Josie grew up in a house with books and music, at the far edge of settlement, in a valley where hospitality to a stranger was normal and asking about his business was not. Men whose names would end up in films sat at her family’s table. To a girl of ten, they were guests.

We label this associated rather than documented because the hospitality is attested widely in memoir and local history while individual visits are rarely fixed to a date. But the shape of it is not seriously disputed.

The Butch Cassidy romance

LEGEND

You will read everywhere that Josie and Butch Cassidy were sweethearts. It is repeated in guidebooks, on signs, and in a great many articles, usually without qualification.

It rests on later recollection rather than record, and we mark it legend. It might be true. She knew him, or knew of him, and the two were in the same small valley in the same years — that much is reasonable. But “they were in the same valley” and “they were sweethearts” are different claims, and only one of them has support.

We are not being pedantic for its own sake. This is exactly the kind of claim that has been repeated so often it has hardened into fact, and once you accept it uncritically you have no basis for rejecting the next fifty stories that arrive in the same shape. Her sister Ann gets the same treatment on this site: the persistent claim that Ann Bassett was secretly Etta Place is also legend, however much one wants it to be true.

Cub Creek

DOCUMENTED

In her forties, Josie left Browns Park and homesteaded at Cub Creek — a cottonwood flat below sandstone cliffs, with a reliable spring and two box canyons behind it. She stayed for roughly fifty years.

She had been married several times, and those marriages had ended. She arrived essentially on her own, and that is how she lived: no electricity, no running water, no telephone, for the entire half century.

What she built was not a hermitage. It was a working outfit:

• Cattle, chickens, and pigs, raised and slaughtered and preserved on site.
• A substantial garden and orchard — enough to matter, in a place where anything you did not grow you had to haul.
• The canyon-mouth pastures. This is the detail that tells you everything. Behind the cabin, two box canyons — Box Canyon and Hog Canyon — narrow to a gap at the entrance and open out inside. Josie fenced the gaps. A hundred yards of fence, and she had enclosed an entire pasture whose other walls were a thousand feet of sandstone. It is the single most economical piece of ranching you will see in this country, and you can walk into both canyons today.

That is not eccentricity or stubbornness. That is somebody reading the landscape correctly and making it do the work.

The rustling trial

ASSOCIATED It is widely reported that in the 1930s Josie was tried on cattle-rustling charges and acquitted — making her the second Bassett sister to be accused of exactly that and walk out free. We mark it associated because we have not examined the court record, and the National Park Service’s interpretation at the site is the authority. VERIFY WITH OFFICIAL SOURCE before repeating the date, the charge, or the outcome as settled fact.

Prohibition

ASSOCIATED The story that she made and sold fruit brandy during Prohibition is repeated often and fits both the orchard and the isolation. It is plausible and widely told; it is not something we can point to a record for. Take it as a good story with a reasonable foundation.

The End

DOCUMENTED

She was still living at Cub Creek, still working, into her late eighties. An injury in her final winter ended it — a fall, a broken hip, and the kind of hospital stay that a person who has spent ninety years outdoors does not come back from. She died in 1964.

She had outlived Butch Cassidy by more than fifty years, her sister Ann by eight, and the entire era she was born into by most of a century.

Visiting the Homestead

Her cabin, outbuildings, corrals, and the two box canyons are preserved by the National Park Service at the end of the Cub Creek road — the self-guided auto tour the monument signs as the Tour of the Tilted Rocks.

What to actually do when you get there

1. Stand still first. Look at the cliffs, the cottonwoods, the spring, the flat. Ask why she chose this spot and not somewhere else. The answer is all around you: water, shade, shelter, and two ready-made pastures.
2. Walk to a canyon mouth. Go and look at where the gap narrows. That is where the fence went. Once you see it, the whole homestead makes sense as a piece of engineering.
3. Walk into Box Canyon or Hog Canyon. Short, shady, and among the gentlest walks in the monument — ideal for young children and hot afternoons.
4. Do the arithmetic on the spot. Fifty years. No electricity, no running water, no telephone. Winter here. Alone.

Families

This is the best family stop in this whole section, and one of the best in the monument. The drive is short and broken up by petroglyph stops, the site is flat and shaded, and the canyon walks are brief and genuinely interesting. Most importantly, it gives children a person to hold onto in a park otherwise dominated by animals that died a hundred and fifty million years ago. A real woman lived right here, with pigs and chickens and a garden, and you can walk into her pasture.

Accessibility

Far more accessible than anything else in this section. Cub Creek Road is mostly paved and much of the interest is viewable from the vehicle or a short walk on flat ground. The homestead site itself is a level cottonwood flat. Surfaces are historic and unpaved in places, and the canyon trails are natural surface. Confirm current conditions and accommodations with the National Park Service (VERIFY WITH OFFICIAL SOURCE).

Seasonal timing and photography

Spring through fall is the window; the dirt section near the end can turn to slick mud after rain or snow. Early fall is best — cottonwoods turning, low light, thinner crowds.

• Late afternoon is the frame. Low sun through the cottonwoods onto weathered wood, with the cliffs behind, is what this site is for.
• Shoot the canyon mouth. Almost nobody does, and it is the photograph that explains her.
• Include the cliffs for scale. A cabin alone reads as quaint; a cabin under a thousand feet of sandstone reads as the truth.
• Detail work rewards you — hinges, hand-cut wood, fence joins. Never touch, lean on, or climb.
• Leave everything. Protected site. Take nothing, move nothing.

Where This Fits

Read Browns Park: The Valley Where Outlaws Disappeared for the valley she came from, and the John Jarvie Historic Ranch for the store her family shopped at. The Outlaw Country hub holds the corridor and the evidence system.

For the drive itself, see Cub Creek Road (Tour of the Tilted Rocks); for the wider park, Visiting Dinosaur National Monument; for the walks behind her homestead, Best Hikes in Dinosaur National Monument.

The Country She Chose

Josie Bassett Morris had seen a great deal of the West and could have gone anywhere. She picked a canyon in this country and stayed for fifty years. Spend a few hours out in it and the choice stops seeming strange.

Our guided UTV tours run five trail systems out of Vernal through the same landscape — three hours, $349 per machine, up to two riders. One is called the Outlaw Trail, named for the character of the country rather than the historic corridor. Dave and Trudy will tell you which stories out here are documented and which are just good.