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CHAPTER TWO

BROWN'S HOLE

There would ultimately be three main hideouts, and they would be connected by what came to be known as the Outlaw Trail. It extended from Canada to Mexico, and unlike other such trails elsewhere in the U.S., this one, according to Charles Kelly, "was provided with better hideouts, was used by more outlaws, and continued in use for a longer time than any other. Men who used it operated on a large scale; their banditry was bold and spectacular, and their hideouts

were practically impregnable."

The first of its kind on the Outlaw Trail was initially known to most as Brown's Hole. It would come to be called Brown's Park, but to the old fur trappers, a "hole" was a valley enclosed by mountains. One of the distinctions the valley on the Green River in the Uintah Mountains had was it included territory from three states: the eastern boundary of Utah, the southern boundary of Wyoming, and the western boundary of Colorado. This could come in handy for bandits evading lawmen in one jurisdiction by escaping into another.

The "hole" or bottom of the valley could be reached only by descending a narrow, rock-filled trail. The entire valley was thirty miles long, east to west, and five miles wide. In June and sometimes into early July, the Green River, which runs along the southern wall of Brown's Hole at the foot of Diamond Mountain, flows with some violence thanks to the melting snow above. When trappers first came to Brown's Hole, they found it filled with game because of all the grazing land the valley provided to antelope, deer, and sheep. Once settlers arrived, some of the land was farmed or sprouted orchards.

Who was the man for whom the "hole" was named? He was Baptiste Brown, a French Canadian trapper working for the Hudson's Bay Company, which had been founded in London in 1670. Men like Brown trapped as much beaver as they could find and, though not especially well compensated personally, by doing so helped to make the company by the early 1800s a powerful rival to the emerging American outfits led by Manuel Lisa, William Ashley, Andrew Henry, and Jedediah Smith.

After an argument with Hudson's Bay Company representatives, Baptiste Brown decided to strike out on his own—well, not completely on his own; in 1827, as he made his way down the Green River, probably in a dugout canoe, he was accompanied by an Indian woman. In the valley, they built a rough shelter as a base for hunting. Over the years, sensibly, given its dimensions and his presence, it became known as Brown's Hole.

He lived there into the 1840s, at times venturing out, such as when he was recorded having attended a fur trappers rendezvous hosted by the celebrated mountain man and scout Jim Bridger on Henry's Fork in 1842. Brown's last appearance in a written record was five years later when he was in Santa Fe, serving as a juror in the trial of Pueblo Indians accused of murdering Charles Bent, the first civilian governor of New Mexico Territory.3

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3 In January 1847, Bent and several others were killed during the Taos Revolt, an uprising by Hispanic residents and Pueblos against their treatment by U.S. soldiers. His wife survived the attack on their home in Taos. Her sister later married the renowned frontiersman Kit Carson.

What helped hunters and trappers—and, later, bandits—was that Brown's Hole provided some refuge from the worst that a winter in the mountains could offer. The peaks themselves surrounding the valley were a barrier against the strongest of icy winds. And instead of having to brave fierce blasts of snow to find food, the animals came to them, down from the mountains to forage for what they could find on the valley floor.

Other men took up residence in Brown's Hole. In 1837, a year after being killed at the Alamo, Davy Crockett had a "fort" named for him there. It was really only a trading post, a hollow square of one-story log cabins, constructed on the bottoms of the Green River in northeast Colorado near the border with Utah. The increasing number of white men and their Indigenous neighbors lived peacefully until Philip Thompson, one of the men who had built Fort Davy Crockett, built another structure, this one at the mouth of the Uintah River. Included in the effort of stocking it that December 1837 was stealing horses from the Snake Indians.

Wisely, the Snakes did not take up weapons. A delegation trekked to Fort Davy Crockett to plead their case as victims. One of the occupants of the fort was Kit Carson, whose job was to hunt enough game to feed the fort's inhabitants. Grasping that in such an isolated area, peace was preferable to war with a tribe that far outnumbered the whites, Carson recruited fellow frontiersmen William Craig, Joe Meek, and Joe Walker.

This posse proceeded down the Green River to Thompson's outpost, stole the horses that had been stolen from the Snakes, and presented them to the delegation. After the satisfied Snakes left, the residents of Fort Davy Crockett celebrated Christmas in mountain man style, cracking open a keg of whiskey.4

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4 In the spring, Kit Carson left the fort to go on an expedition with fellow trailblazer Jim Bridger. Joe Meek would push on to Oregon and would later be appointed the territory's marshal by President James Polk, whose wife, Sarah, was Meek's cousin. Joseph Walker would, like Carson, log a lot of miles in various expeditions, including establishing a segment of the California Trail that would be used by gold seekers after the discovery of the precious metal on Johann Sutter's farm in California in January 1848.