How a Hidden Corner of the American West Became a Refuge For Outlaws

There were three main hideouts in what we now think of as they “Wild West,” and they were 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 US, 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.

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.

As would happen decades later across the plains with buffalo, in the mountains and valleys of the West in the late 1830s the beaver would be thinned almost to extinction, and hunting parties did not earn enough to pay off their creditors. There were fewer and fewer trappers using Brown’s Hole as an escape from the harshest winter weather. The locale was not abandoned, though, because some men chose to settle there, often marrying Indigenous women. These families farmed and foraged for themselves and cared little about the doings back east, including a war between northern and southern states.

Jim Bridger reenters the story after the Civil War because he had shown the railroad builders a route through the mountains that would help them finish off the transcontinental tracks. When the railroad reached Rock Springs in Wyoming, suddenly Brown’s Hole was not as far off the beaten path as it had once been. And a major figure in bringing civilization closer was John Wesley Powell.

Born in upstate New York in 1834, Powell became one of the most intrepid explorers of nineteenth-century America. Barely out of his teens, he participated in explorations of the Mississippi River valley, spent four months walking across Wisconsin, and rowed the length of the Mississippi from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. Because of several Midwest adventures, Powell was elected to the Illinois Natural History Society at only age twenty-five.

A fervent abolitionist, just weeks after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, he enlisted in the Twentieth Illinois Infantry. A few weeks after that, he was commissioned a lieutenant. And by the end of 1861, he was a captain in the Second Illinois Light Artillery. During the especially bloody Battle of Shiloh the following year, Powell lost most of his right arm when struck by a minié ball while in the process of giving the order to fire. The raw nerve endings in his arm caused him pain for the rest of his life.

He could have sat out the remainder of the war but that was not his nature. As soon as he recovered sufficiently, Powell was back in battle, including the successful siege of Vicksburg in 1863. By the time of the Atlanta campaign in the summer of 1864, he was a major commanding an artillery brigade. After the Battle of Nashville, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel, but Powell would always prefer to be called “Major.”

After the war, it was back to wandering the West. Though essentially one-armed, Powell led several expeditions into the Rocky Mountains and on the Colorado and Green Rivers, collecting specimens and drawing maps along the way. He and six others became the first white men to scale Longs Peak, in 1868. The following year, with ten men in four boats and packing ten months’ worth of food, Powell led an expedition that further explored the Colorado River as well as the Grand Canyon. The participants did not get to eat all that packed food because the journey that began on May 24, 1869, was completed by the end of August.

It was during his 1869 travels that Powell hiked through Brown’s Hole, which he renamed Brown’s Park. Two years later, he was back, encountering two Texas cattlemen named Harrell and Bacon, who had wintered there with their herd. Over time, this became a common practice. Cattle ranches proliferated in Texas after the Civil War, and some of the owners drove them north to Wyoming and Montana where it was not so hot and there was plenty of water and range land for grazing. Some herds would be late leaving, and rather than risk getting the beeves caught in early snowstorms, they would be sheltered in Brown’s Hole.

As Charles Kelly informs, “Previous to arrival of the Texas herds, horses were the only form of property in the country worth stealing, and all pre-railroad outlaws were horse thieves. The arrival of immense herds of cattle, however, changed all that; thereafter, Brown’s Hole became principal headquarters for the more profitable cattle-rustling business.”

Some cowboys, either because they were budding entrepreneurs or just plain thieves, would cull a few head here and a few head there from the large herds grazing in and around Rock Springs. There were also beeves that had wandered off and could be captured. A good place to hide the cattle until it was safe to sell them was Brown’s Hole.

There were also legitimate ranchers in the area. Through the 1870s and 1880s, much of the surrounding range became occupied by large cattle outfits, with some of them having moved full-time from Texas. Their herds grazed on thousands of acres, and to their mind, there was no room for small operations with only a couple hundred head. Not satisfied with enough, they wanted it all. The small-spread ranching families, referred to as homesteaders or “nesters,” had just as much right to be there…but not the might.

In some instances, enough pressure was applied that homesteaders realized they had no future in the region, so they picked up and moved on. Less subtle methods were to set a nester’s barn on fire or to poison his cattle. Sometimes, the only way to get rid of the truly stubborn residents was to kill them and leave their bodies in remote spots. Thus originated the term dry gulching, with ravens and vultures benefiting along with the big ranchers.

For the homesteaders who managed to stick it out, stealing cattle was seen as self-defense, though sometimes it was not quite stealing. As Charles Kelly notes, “With so many thousands of cattle roaming the country there were always some who managed to escape roundups and carried no brand. These mavericks, according to the law of the range, belonged to the man who first put his mark on them.” The beeves could be driven into Brown’s Hole, branded, and then pushed back out onto the open range.

Word got around that Brown’s Hole was a good place not only to conduct secret cattle collecting and branding but also for humans to hide out. A man did not necessarily have to be a criminal to find his way there; he might just want to find some sanctuary from troubles back east or south and think about starting over. But in the 1870s and 1880s, there were men who committed a variety of crimes, including bank and train robberies, and if lawmen were on their trail, the isolated beauty of Brown’s Hole was a safe haven. Marshals, sheriffs, and their deputies were not brave or foolish enough to enter the sheltered valley. To gain entry, there were two trails from the north and one from the south—all of them perfect for an outlaw ambush.

One government agency that did maintain access to Brown’s Hole, even through snow and sleet and rain, was the U.S. Postal Service. The hole may have seen no tax collector, elected government, or school system, but the mail got through. A man named Parsons owned a store in the Utah section of Brown’s Hole, a portion of which was used as a post office. During the winter months, the mail was brought in and out from the Mormon town of Vernal, which was fifty miles over Diamond Mountain, and the rest of the year, it came and went via the Green River.

Otherwise, if you did not have a stamp (but maybe a bounty) on you, you stayed clear of Brown’s Hole. By the mid-1890s, while much of the American West was being settled and was tamer than in previous decades, with the more famous criminals dead or in prison, the remote valley had become one of the three main stops on the very busy Outlaw Trail.

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From Bandit Heaven: The Hole-in-the-Wall Gangs and the Final Chapter of the Wild West by Tom Clavin. Copyright © 2024 by Tom Clavin and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan.