Breaking your arm while cranking a delivery truck after being born 6,000 miles away, just a few months after the first shots were fired at Ft. Sumter, opening the American Civil War, doesn’t seem like a likely occurrence. For the 56-year-old Charles Hett, it was just another day in his extraordinary life.
Thermopolis Independent, February 16, 1917
Charles Hett Breaks Arm
“Charles Hett, who has been employed in the Herbage grocery for several months, broke his right arm last Friday while cranking one of the cars used for delivery purposes. On account of his age, it is quite likely the injury will be some time in healing and the bones thoroughly knit.”
Hett was born in Munich, then a city in Bavaria. Germany would not unify for another nine years. At 13, he enrolled in the newly created German Forestry College, where he studied for three years to become “Forstgehilfe,” a German term for a man who worked with border guards to stop smugglers and acted as a game warden, tracking down poachers.
These skills would serve him well later in life in Fremont County, Wyoming.
At 23, Hett resigned his state position, boarded a passenger ship, and headed to the United States with four friends. He landed in New York City, caught a train to St. Louis, Missouri, and opened a florist shop, working as a gardener for well-to-do customers.
In 1886, he met Emma Doering of Cape Girardeau, Missouri; they were married the following year. They had two daughters and a son.
President Grover Cleveland’s economic policies led to the Panic of 1893, America’s first true depression. It affected Hett’s business. No one had money for flowers or gardens anymore.
One of his four friends joined the U.S. Army, Private Schmolkes, and was stationed with the 9th U.S. Cavalry at Ft. Washakie. The other three friends had taken Schmolke’s advice earlier and were already working in nearby Lander.
Charles Hett packed up his family, loaded the train to Rawlins, and took the stage to Lander, arriving on March 18, 1892. At first, he worked operating the Lander Hotel, but there wasn’t much business.
He took a homestead on the Popo Agie and began raising oats and hay. The market for both was steady and lucrative in supplying the cavalry horses at Ft. Washakie.
The easy market only lasted two years. In September 1894, the War Department replaced two cavalry companies with an infantry unit of just 14 men. They didn’t eat much hay or oats.
“This ruined our market for hay and grain, and as a result, the only way we could dispose of our products was to trade them to the flour mill at Lander for things we had to have. No one had any money and barter was the only method of trade. I handled, in two years, only fourteen dollars in cash,” Hett said in a 1921 interview.
Hett soon changed from a farmer to a man who frequented some of the worst characters to ever ride the Wyoming Range.
Wind River Mountaineer – August 8, 1896
“On the 8th instant, last Saturday, the Governor pardoned Tom Osborne, who, in 1893, in Lanigan’s saloon, shot and killed a Spaniard named Thorne, and for which he was tried and sentenced to fifteen years in the penitentiary. There were several extenuating circumstances attending the killing, and ten of the jurors who convicted him signed the petition for his parole.”
Osborne hired Hett and took him to the Quien Sabe Ranch, 50 miles from his farm in Lander, high above Lost Cabin in the Copper Mountains.
Johnny and Gus Johnson owned the Quien Sabe. They told Hett to bring his wife and children to the ranch. Part of his job was hunting wolves that infested the area, killing sheep and cattle, and threatening lone riders on the range.
“It was here that I and my family got acquainted with Dick Carr, Missouri Sholz, Tom O’Day, Bob McCoy, Manual Arminto, Ed Anderson, J. Byars, Slick Nard, Black Joe Wimsey, and others. These rustlers were always regular gentlemen and treated my family with the utmost respect and courtesy,” Hett said.
Hett was paid a small wage by the Johnson Brothers and provided with a cabin. He made a lot more money trapping and shooting predators. He caught nine gray wolves, 32 coyotes, and a handful of bobcats that first winter. Wolf hides were selling for four dollars, coyotes 75 cents, and bobcats from 50 cents to a dollar, depending on condition. That was a lot of money at the turn of the 20th century.
“I did not know what kind of an establishment the Quien Sabe Ranch was, but after I arrived there I soon found out that it was a regular meeting place for rustlers and outlaws. Johnny and Gus Johnson, two brothers who owned the Quien Sabe Ranch, were known as the Quien Sabe Gang. Gus Johnson, Black George Wimsey, and Bob McCoy left the ranch late in the evening and the next morning they butchered seven head of beef steers stolen from the roundup, and Bob McCoy took the meat in a four-horse outfit somewhere. I heard they sold it for two cents a pound,” Hett said.
Hett discovered Scholz’s tracks and followed them for about 10 miles. He rode down a draw, and a bullet whistled by his head. He slid off his horse, dropping prone to the ground. Scholz stepped out from behind a boulder, and Hett was waiting with his Winchester leveled at him. Scholz dropped his rifle and said, “Don’t shoot, Charley, I give up.”
Hett took his rifle and turned him over to Sheriff Stough in Thermopolis.
About three or four days later, Sheriff Stough of Lander came to the ranch with a warrant for the arrest of Missouri Scholz. Scholz had left the ranch the previous day. Sheriff Stough deputized me to go with him in search of Scholz, as I was very well acquainted with the part of the country they were traveling through. We traveled through the mountainous country through the greater part of the day until Sheriff Stough’s horses became exhausted and refused to travel. I ran on Scholz’s tracks and followed them for miles, which led into a canyon about a half mile wide where I finally overtook him,” Hett said.
Hett wasn’t welcome after assisting Sheriff Stough in apprehending Scholz.
In 1898, he took his growing family and traveled over Birdseye Pass to the mouth of the Wind River Canyon. You can see the red dirt he farmed there today when driving north into Thermopolis. He took a squatter’s claim on the land.
“I worked five or six months improving my new home when I ran short of money and had to seek employment. As it was almost lambing time it was not hard to get a job. Both my wife and I went to work for William Gable at his sheep ranch on Copper Mountain. While we were out working, Kise Eads, one of the outlaws, jumped my homestead and put his father on it. According to law, I could not do anything about it. Eads offered me a team of horses (broncos) for the place, which I was forced to accept. After I broke the team to work, Kise Eads stole these horses and a set of harness in addition and drove them, with other stolen horses, which he and other outlaws purloined, to Casper where they were sold,” Hett said.
The area from Thermopolis north to Lucerne was then part of Fremont County, then Big Horn County, and finally Hot Springs County. It was wild, untamed country full of wild predators and wilder men. Emma had a frightening encounter one night when Charles was away gathering corral poles.
“My wife was awakened by piercing cries close at hand. Thinking it was someone in distress, she went out of the cabin to see what was the matter. When she came down to the river bank she heard the cries of one of her dogs. She called to me several times but did not receive an answer. Then she became frightened and ran with the children and dogs to the cabin of Mr. Henry Koppi, about a mile up the river,” Hett said. “Mr. Koppi, an old bachelor homesteader, got up and escorted the family back home. On the way back the cries sounded again, and Mr. Koppi recognized it as the cries of a mountain lion. The next day, when I arrived home, my wife told me about it. Taking the dogs with me, I went down to the river bank to search for the tracks of the lion. Sure enough, within about two hundred yards from where my family stood on the bank, I found the tracks of one of the largest mountain lions I ever saw. Trailing the lion was a very difficult matter, but I just followed our dog and he seemed to sense the direction in which the lion traveled. He led me into the Wind River Canyon over a mile when I discovered the lion under an overhanging rock. It was an old female with two cubs. Of course, I shot all three of them.”
The Hett family moved four miles north to the new town of Thermopolis in 1899. It was a wild, open town frequented by outlaws and roughnecks. Horses, cattle, sheep, and even milk cows routinely disappeared, the product of an active outlaw community that rustled anything with four legs.
Hett supported his family as a carpenter, building many of the new structures popping up all over the rapidly growing town.
“During the winter, the outlaws Caleb and David Hale had been very active in stealing horses and cutting fences. They had induced several of their friends, including myself, to pasture our horses in this enclosure. A short time later, the rustlers cut down a portion of the fence and stole our horses. We notified the County Sheriff at Lander about this outrage and requested that he send some deputies over to run down these rustlers. He sent us the astounding reply that it would be necessary for us to put up bonds to insure the expenses of sending the guardians of law and order to our neighborhood,” Hett said.
This was the kind of response that infuriated locals. Lander was a distant 80 miles away from Thermopolis, with the only routes between the two high mountain passes traversing the Owl Creek and Copper Mountains.
“After receiving this kind of a reply from the County Sheriff, seven of us who had lost our horses in this raid organized a vigilante committee, took the law in our own hands, and went after the outlaws. The Embar Cattle Company offered to aid us in any way they could. It was a hard task to run those rustlers down, as some of the reputed citizens of the town, including a County Commissioner, acted as spotters for this outlaw gang,” Hett said. “One day we located one of their camps situated several miles out in the hills and made a raid on it that night but found the camp deserted. Eventually, most of the stolen horses came back, and several of the rustlers, who were known by the committee to be such, left the country.”
In 1905, Charles Hett began driving a stagecoach over Birdseye Pass to Roundhill Station, near present-day Hiland. Mail and passengers continued on to Casper.
“At that time, it was quite a hardship to come into Thermopolis from Casper. Casper was then situated at the end of the railroad. Prior to the year 1901, there was only one road into Thermopolis from the north. This road was unimproved and so dangerous one hesitated to travel over, especially the hill directly north of the town,” Hett said.
Charles Hett had many jobs, including postmaster at Embar and City Marshal of Thermopolis.
The August 9, 1904, edition of the Wyoming Tribune listed an incident Hett was involved in, the killing of 15 miners at Cripple Creek, Colorado, by dynamite.
HAVE DYNAMITER
“Sheriff Dell of Cripple Creek goes to Thermopolis after alleged noted criminal.
J. J. Neville, charged with being the man who blew up and killed fifteen non-union miners, is under arrest at Thermopolis in this state.
Last Wednesday, Edward Bell of Cripple Creek, sheriff of that place, was in Cheyenne and appeared before Secretary of State Hinkle to have honored requisition papers for the arrest of J. J. Neville, who is charged with setting off the infernal machine at Cripple Creek on June 8, which killed fifteen non-union miners at that place. Wednesday night, Sheriff Bell started for Thermopolis, where Neville has been placed in custody by the local officers.
The granting of the requisition was kept a secret, as Bell stated Neville was not yet under arrest, and he did not want the alleged criminal to know he was in danger of arrest until he was behind bars. Yesterday it was learned Neville had been captured by City Marshal Charles Hett of Thermopolis and is in jail at that place. With Neville was found a 12-year-old boy who is also being held, although it is not known whether he will be taken back to Colorado for complicity in the crime or not.”
Despite being in law enforcement, Hett continued to rub elbows with the criminal element.
“During the spring of 1905, I was at William Gable’s Ranch (now Mrs. Elizabeth Russell’s Ranch) on Jones Creek, about fifteen miles southeast of Thermopolis, when Jim McCloud rode up and, as I knew him quite well, he asked me if I had anything to eat. I told him to come into the cabin and I would give him a piece of lamb roast. He accepted my invitation and ate like he had not had anything to eat for a day or two. Before he started his meal he took off his cartridge belt and revolver and hung them up on the wall and placed his rifle in a corner of the room.
He informed me that the law had been after him at Green River and that he had to swim the river to escape, and since that time he had some trouble. He also asked me if he could find a trail across Wind River Canyon as he did not want to come into Thermopolis if he could avoid it. I told him that even if he did succeed in getting into the canyon, the river was too high to ford and that it would be necessary for him to go to the state reserve and cross the river on the bridge. Three days after his visit to the ranch he was arrested,” Hett said.
Lawlessness continued in the northern reaches of Fremont County. By 1905, the people of Thermopolis had enough of the feeble attempts of the distant Fremont County Sheriff’s Office in Lander and took the matter into their own hands. An editorial clearly reflected the locals’ sentiments.
The Big Horn County Rustler – August 21, 1905
“The people of this Basin are as law-abiding and peaceable, on the whole, as are to be found anywhere in the United States. They hate thieves, especially cattle thieves, and when a man sets up in business as a brander of calves, he is very apt to find the skull and crossbones painted on his doorpost. If this does not stop him rustling, well, he disappears for the good of the community. We believe it is a direct menace to good government that any man should take the law in his own hands and mete out justice to an offender, yet there are extenuating local circumstances which almost justify a man in protecting his property, even though the protection must come through the instrumentality of a Winchester.
Big Horn County is not a ‘two-by-four,’ but contains 12,000 square miles of territory. No one set of county officers, however honest, energetic, and vigilant they be, can be able to keep an eye on all this widely scattered territory. So, if once in a great while, some cattle rustler passes in his checks in a manner a little out of the ordinary after having been warned again and again, both by friend and foe, well, we are all human and believe in the eternal fitness of things, and it grieves the artistic eye of a cattleman to see on the roundup mother and sucking calf wearing different brands.”
The editorial was a response to the earlier killing of Bob McCoy, ironically, a rustler himself.
Cheyenne Daily Leader
Murder One of Mysteries Which Big Horn Authorities Have Been Unable to Fathom
Apparently no clue has been found to the identity of the assassin of Bob McCoy.
Special to The Leader
Basin, Wyo., July 20, 1905 – The efforts of the authorities to run down the assassins of BobMcCoy, the Thermopolis ranchman who was killed recently in a lonely cabin and his body thrown into the Big Horn River, apparently have been without result.
The sheriff is reticent, but there is nothing to indicate that any clue has been found to the identity of the guilty man or men. Apparently the crime will become one of the rapidly growing list of mysteries which the authorities of this county have found themselves unable to fathom.
Charles Hett indirectly implicated McCoy as a rustler. “Bob McCoy never stole cattle from a poor man,” he once said. Not a glowing testimony to McCoy’s innocence.
Hett served as town marshal in Thermopolis, postmaster at the Embar Ranch, game warden for northern Fremont and then Hot Springs County, and was an active participant in civic organizations in Thermopolis, taking roles in local theatrical productions, singing in the local choir, and serving the people of Thermopolis.
“I was proud of the fact that I did my part in at least helping to rid this part of the country of the lawless element,” Hett said.
It was the actions of men like Hett, working as vigilantes, that led to the creation of Hot Springs County in 1911. Previously, the area was also part of Big Horn and Park Counties. The distance from Thermopolis to Lander was roughly the same as to the Big Horn County seat in Basin and even farther to Cody in Park County. Law enforcement, governance, and courts had to be more centrally located as Wyoming’s isolated communities began to grow.
He was a man who rubbed elbows with members of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s Wild Bunch, but he remained a straight arrow throughout his life. A man of the times.
Charles A. Hett passed away on July 25, 1942, just two weeks before his 81st birthday.