With the Pride a Monarch Might View His Kingdom: Martha Waln, Bighorn Basin Homesteader

Adapted from Michael Cassity’s Wyoming Will Be Your New Home . . . Ranching, Farming and Homesteading in Wyoming, 1860-1960. (Cheyenne, Wyoming: Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office, 2011.)

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In the 1930s Martha Waln, or Martha Bull, as she was known during the years of her marriage, sat down with Paul Frison and told him the story of her life. By then she was in her seventies; Frison transcribed and published her story first in the Wyoming News in Worland, Wyoming, and in a revised form three decades later as a book, First White Woman in the Big Horn Basin.

Aside from the particulars of her life, what is especially valuable about Martha Waln’s story is her uncanny ability to perceive subtle developments and to articulate them. This is not to suggest her story is in any way typical of women in Wyoming, or typical of women in the Big Horn Basin. No one was typical and each lived a different life, but her account does illuminate circumstances shared by other women, and that can help us understand the contours of change in ranching and homesteading in Wyoming at the time.

Martha Waln traveled far in her life, but the biggest journey came early when she left Wales in 1882, as twenty-one-year-old Martha James, to accompany “the Right Honorable William Cairus Armstrong and his bride, the daughter of General Lushington,” on a trip to America. Martha James was the lady’s maid. The destination of the honeymooners, and their maid, was first Cheyenne and then the 76 Ranch of Moreton and Richard Frewen on Powder River.

The Frewens entertained at this ranch both more frequently and on a scale vastly different from the other ranchers, cowboys, and farmers; their large log house was known locally as Frewen Castle. Guests came frequently from England and stayed for long periods. The Armstrongs and Martha spent the summer in Cheyenne and then continued on the Union Pacific to Rock Creek. From there they took the stagecoach north as far as they could, and then boarded a private coach sent by the Frewen ranch for the remainder of the trip. They arrived at Frewen Castle in October and spent the winter on the ranch; presumably there were other guests there at the same time.

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A husband, and a ranching life

In the spring Martha left her position and married a cowboy on the ranch, Frank Bull. Their first homesteading effort at the junction of Clear Creek and the Powder River was thwarted by troubles with Crow Indians seeking revenge for a wrong done to them. Then they moved to Buffalo, 70 miles away, “the toughest place I had ever been in,”. Her husband was soon hired by an English rancher to manage the Home Ranch of the Bar X Cattle Company at Big Trails, 20 miles south of what’s now Tensleep, west of the Bighorn Mountains near the far southeastern edge of the Bighorn Basin.

The response of the young wife to this opportunity was probably shared by others in similar situations: “I was thrilled and enthusiastic, never dreaming of the loneliness that was to fall to my lot in this remote region.”  When they arrived at their new home, the house she was planning to move into was not complete and the rooms that had been started were only four or five logs high; this was the first of a series of disappointments. Soon afterwards, she “took sick and we didn’t have any kind of medicine.” Her husband left her alone when he went to find some medicine, and she spent a terrified night in her house. There was not yet chinking, and she had rats running “back and forth over the bed and all in all I put in a terrible night.”

About nine months after moving to their new home, her first child was born, a daughter, which she calculated to the be the first white child born in the basin. At this point she began a different journey in her life, one for which she was not entirely prepared: “I never had a nurse, a doctor, or even another woman attending me when any of my children were born. I washed them and took good care of them in bed, and in five days I was on my feet again doing my work.”

In the early 1880s in the upper Nowood area of the Big Horn Basin, Martha Waln recalled, “Mrs. Ellis and I were the only women in the Basin at that time.” By “only women” she meant “only white women.” Other accounts place the Andrew B. Wilson family on Meeteetse Creek in the basin in 1881—even earlier. The point is not that there were competing claims to being first; the point is, rather, that the isolation of these women was sufficient that each one may as well have been the only woman in the entire basin. If the men lived lonely lives in remote areas, the women with them were surely all the lonelier for the lack of female companionship.

And Martha’s background may have made the transition to motherhood in this remote area especially challenging:

"As a girl back in England I had not been taught to do any house-work, but had always enjoyed the comforts of a modern home, and the shift from England to the Big Horn Basin was one that stands out as I review my life. I was neither a house-keeper, a cook, nor was I trained in the things of life that a mother should know, so you can perhaps imagine my plight as I assumed the responsibilities of wife, house-keeper and mother. My husband and I were very close. We loved each other, but to say the least, I was completely lost, and to make it worse I had grown as a child to love flowers, finery such as dainty curtains, pretty dishes, pictures, etc., as well as pretty clothes for myself. A woman’s life at that time in the Basin was a substantial one, but not full and pleasant. I might say I was 'happily dissatisfied' until my first baby was born; then I was busy with her, and had little time to think of the less important things that I longed to have.”

This birth was followed by the birth of a son in October 1885; that son fell sick suddenly the following July. “I did not know what was the matter with him, and there was no one to go to for help.” He died the following day.

A terrible winter

Her third child, another daughter, was born in December 1886, and during that “terrible winter of 1886 and 1887, while the cattle were starving and freezing to death by the hundreds in our door yard, I was trying to keep my babies warm and well.”

Decades later Martha recalled “there were hundreds of the Texas steers around the house and corrals both day and night” that winter. “They would go out in the hills in the daytime and follow the trails that the men made on foot so the horses could get down near the ground and eat sagebrush and what little grass they could find.” During the blizzard, she said, the cattle “were banked up around the house where they had already broken every window.”

Waln made a pair of horse blankets out of quilts for their stallion and saddle mare that they kept in the barn at night in the winter. But when she and her husband went to the barn, she discovered “the cattle had gotten into the barn and had eaten every bit of the horse blankets from those two horses except two little patches where the quilts had been riveted to the two straps that held them in place. The willow pegs that had been driven into the logs to hold saddles and harnesses were green and they were chewed until they looked like frazzled-out paint brushes. The trees and brush along the creek banks were not only eaten, but gnawed until only hideous stumps remained on all of the trees that were around two and three inches thick.”

The youngest baby grew ill and as the family traveled over the Bighorn Mountains through a blizzard to get to Buffalo and medical hope, that child died too, just on the outskirts of their destination. Martha Bull’s own experience shaped her thoughts when she said, “The life of every woman in the Big Horn Basin at that time was one of sacrifice. Overwhelming odds were to be expected at every turn. The solemn pledges that we had taken, ‘for better or for worse’ kept us fighting at our husbands’ sides. Day by day we struggled, as we looked forward to a better day, trying to believe in a hoped for and promised future.”

A homestead

After the winter of 1886-87, the English company that had employed her husband began to liquidate its property and close its operation. Frank and Martha Bull joined many others who were no longer employed. With the demise of the Bar X and some of the other landmark ranches, unemployment spread like wildfire.

At the same time, the ranches that managed to survive learned a sobering lesson from the winter and also saw that the range was in worse shape than ever. Therefore, they cut back on the size of their herds. “The so-called ‘nesters,’” Waln remembered later, “were most all men who were employed or had been employed by the larger companies. With their passing the men were thrown out of employment. Many of them drifted to other parts of the country seeking a new and remote region. Many stayed. I doubt if any section of the country ever had a more diversified population than did we have. There were murderers, crooks, fugitives from justice, honest, fearless, and intelligent men all together. It was a melting pot where there had been poured, a sample of all humankind.”

Some of these ‘nesters,’ she remembered, helped in the process of cleaning up remnants of the herds, and also helped themselves. The practice of rustling became commonplace. “I do not imagine,” she said, “that many men in the Basin at that time felt it wrong or beneath them to partake of the spoils.” Tensions between holders of small ranches and large, in turn, led to the 1892 conflict over on the east side of the Bighorns that came to be called the Johnson County War.

Frank and Martha, meanwhile, homesteaded south of the house that had been provided them: “I helped my husband cut logs up on the mountain side and haul them down to Canyon Creek where we built a cabin, about ten miles below the Home Ranch. It was crude, with dirt floor and dirt roof, but it was sure and we looked upon it with the same pride that a monarch might look upon his kingdom.”

The Big Horn Basin was vast, much of it eminently arable, with a more forgiving climate than other Wyoming valleys and basins. It beckoned the settler: Martha was struck by the migration of settlers into the basin at a growing pace and increasing volume: “Few were the summer months from 1887 to 1890 when prairie schooners were not to be seen lumbering slowly down the winding, dusty road on their way into the Big Horn Basin. Men, women and children were to be seen now where only men were seen a few years before, and they all invariably asked the same questions.” And more were on the way.

Also by this time, some of the pioneers were building surprisingly sound houses. These buildings, while not exactly taking on a life of their own, did evolve and reflect the changing circumstances of the families that built and used them and also the environment in which they provided shelter, hearth, and operational headquarters.

As the Big Horn Basin became more settled, Martha Waln noted some of the subtler changes, observing, “Gradually the country took on a new atmosphere. . .  The worst streams were bridged and in the settlers’ cabins that were being built there appeared windows with panes of real glass. Door knobs were replacing the buckskin stringed latch. Some few of the women had dainty curtains and sewing machines; and wooden floors in the cabin became a common necessity and custom. The children grew accustomed to seeing other children instead of running away to hide like wild animals. A rapid transformation had engulfed the Basin.” She herself had started with a dirt floor cabin too.

Family troubles

Martha Bull knew whereof she spoke when she talked about how a monarch might view his kingdom. Possibly the Jeffersonian vision has been seldom this deeply appreciated. This move could have been a new beginning for the family, and to some degree it was, but her husband, an alcoholic, proved less and less reliable and “from a position of security we had slowly been reduced to penury and want, and I could stand it no longer; so we parted. . .  I now found myself confronted with the proposition of making a living for myself and five children.” She loved him still, and she spoke highly of his other qualities, but she had to break free of his destructive power.

She moved to nearby Spring Creek where she obtained appointment as postmaster and also started a retail operation, selling her two milk cows to purchase an inventory of goods to sell to local cowboys. This came to an end when she took her husband back and moved to Lovell, Wyoming, farther north in the Big Horn Basin, only to be let down again by his drinking, and so returned to the Ten Sleep area and began her retail store all over. Serving also as a midwife for the area, she remained active around Ten Sleep and near Buffalo where she sold Watkins medicines from a wagon. After many more years she sold her retail business and purchased a small ranch on Tensleep Creek.

Legacy

As Martha Waln reflected on her life, she found a number of lessons to pass on to others. One was the importance of staying out of debt: “[I]n all the years that I was forced to make a living for myself and children, never did I at any time go in debt. I was on a cash basis. And to this day I believe that ‘for cash’ is the only way for people to live. If the wars that were fought and that are in contemplation today were fought on a cash basis, they would be of short duration. I am an avid enemy of the credit system for the average struggling family.”

The second lesson was more gender oriented: “This country has always been death on women. The little tragedies of the home during the pioneer days are the same tragedies as of today. They used to occur under a mud roof and today they occur under shingles. A home, the mother, the father, and the children, are all there is in life that is worthwhile. Humankind are much the same. I have lots to be thankful for now, and as the evening hours of my life draw closer and closer, I am extremely happy to feel that I have accomplished about all that any woman can be expected to do if she does it well and that is to raise a family of children to a self-supporting age in life, realizing that they are respectable men and women and worthy of the efforts to make of them good citizens. I had a deep hatred for the state of Wyoming for many years, and perhaps I now look back at times in my life with a twinge of bitterness, but I must frankly confess that I now love the good state of Wyoming and all its people.” She had such an affection for Wyoming and the United States in the 1930s that she hoped the people of Wyoming and the U.S. would not involve themselves in the problems of Europe—the place from where she had started her journey in 1882.

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Martha Waln’s autobiographical statement speaks to her own life in the Big Horn Basin, to the circumstances of women in the new state’s ranches and homesteads, and to the human condition. It is a story of personal tragedy and triumph, a story of sacrifice and perseverance, and a story of love and betrayal. It is a story that, in its details, is unique, but in its broad strokes is probably a story familiar to many women in Wyoming at the turn of the century. It is also a story that demonstrates the business of homesteading and ranching was vastly more than the business of filing a claim and building a cabin; it was a story of the complexities and tragedies of life. Perhaps these elements actually give more meaning to that precious moment when a homesteader could build a humble cabin and look at it “with the same pride that a monarch might look upon his kingdom.”

[Editor’s Note: Special thanks to the author and to the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office for making this article available and to the Wyoming Cultural Trust Fund for its ongoing support for this project. Michael Cassity’s historical monograph, Wyoming Will Be Your New Home, from which this article is adapted and excerpted, is one of many historic contexts published by the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. These documents are meant to offer a broad background against which historic developments can be better understood as the agency works to preserve properties and places important to an understanding of Wyoming’s past. The contexts also, however, are based on sound research and are full of well-told, vivid stories like Martha Waln’s. With this in mind, WyoHistory.org and the Wyoming Historical Society have begun a collaboration with the SHPO office to bring more of this history to a wider readership. The Cultural Trust has provided the funds to make this collaboration possible. We offer our thanks to all.]

Sources

• Cassity, Michael. Wyoming Will Be Your New Home . . . Ranching, Farming and Homesteading in Wyoming, 1860-1960. (Cheyenne, Wyoming: Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office, 2011.) Pp. 56, 59-60, 83, 100-101, 106, 132, 75-76, 136, 138-140, accessed February 21, 2024, via https://wyoshpo.wyo.gov/homestead/historic_context.html.
• Frison, Paul. First White Woman in the Big Horn Basin. (Basin, Wyoming: Saddlebag Books, 1985.) This is a second edition. It also contains a second Frison title, Charles Wells: Pioneer Scout Apache Slave.
• “Life of Martha Waln, Pioneer of Tensleep,” typescript in WPA Collections, subject file 856, 31. This document was written by Paul Frison as told to him by Martha Waln and was originally published in a series of articles in the Wyoming News in 1935. Frison much later published this as a small book in 1969: First White Woman in the Big Horn Basin: A Documented Story of a Pioneer Woman that Portrays Life in the Big Horn Basin of Wyoming 86 Years Ago. (Worland, Wyoming: Worland Press, 1969.) I have used the typescript version.

Illustrations

• The photo of Martha Waln is from the 1985 edition of Frison’s First White Woman in the Big Horn Basin. Used with thanks.
• The photo of Martha Waln’s grave in the Tensleep cemetery is by Nancy Tabb. Used with permission and thanks.
• The photo of Frewen’s Castle is number ah003410 at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. Used with permission and thanks.