Ellen "Cattle Kate" Watson (2 July 1860-20 July 1889) was a Canadian-American pioneer of the Wild West. In 1889, she and her husband James Averell were lynched by the cattle baron Albert J. Bothwell after Bothwell falsely accused the two of stealing his cattle, and slandered Watson as a prostitute.
Biography[]
Ellen Watson was born in Bruce County, Ontario, Canada in 1860, the daughter of Scottish immigrants (from whom she inherited a Scottish accent), and her family moved to Lebanon, Kansas in 1877. She worked as a cook in Smith Center before marrying a farm laborer in 1879, but her husband became abusive, causing Watson to rejoin her family in Nebraska in 1883, moving to Red Cloud. She then joined her brother in Denver, Colorado that same year, and she went on to find work as a seamstress and cook in Cheyenne, Wyoming. In 1886, she followed the railroad from Cheyenne to Rawlins, Wyoming, where she worked at the local boarding house. On 24 February 1886, she met James Averell, who was in Rawlins to file a homestead claim for land along the Sweetwater River, and Averell hired Watson to work as a cook at his restaurant. In May 1886, the two married in order to take advantage of the Homestead Act, and, to earn extra money, she mended clothing for cowboys; the unusual number of male visitors to her cabin led to her being mistaken for a prostitute. She also bought cattle from emigrants on the trails, fencing 60 acres of her land with barbed wire, and allowing her cattle to graze on public land. In 1889, she bought her own brand in order to prevent her unbranded cattle from being seized by the Wyoming Stock Growers Association. Their neighbor Albert J. Bothwell, a cattle baron, repeatedly attempted to buy Watson and Averell's land, but they refused, and they instead built a new water ditch which inadvertently reduced the amount of water available to Bothwell and other neighbors. In retribution, Bothwell and his cowboys began to harass the couple, and Bothwell later accused Watson of rustling his cattle. On 20 July 1889, Bothwell and a posse of five men decided to "arrest" Watson and Averell for rustling, and the couple was taken to a nearby canyon and hanged from a tree. Bothwell went on to slander their reputations by calling "Cattle Kate" Watson a prostitute and outlaw, and he was ultimately acquitted of their murders.