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WPA Slave Narrative Collection

Interview with Henrietta Lee

Sunday, September 6, 1936

Well, look who came back. It’s a good thing I’m an early riser, Grace Williams, or you might have caught me without my tignon. Worn one for years. Your auntie wore one? All the best aunties wear one.

“Now, I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to tell you today. I didn’t get much rest last night. Talking to you yesterday brought up all those old memories. I sit on this porch every day, watch the world go by, and remember. But it’s a different kind of remembering when you’re telling a story. In my mind I can replay the same things over and over, the best parts, I guess you could call them. But if I’m going to tell this story right and true, I have to give you the bad parts, too. Parts where I don’t come out so shiny or innocent.

“Let me see that notebook. How are you getting this down? Those symbols don’t look like they mean anything to me, but I guess I have to trust you. Suppose this story is going to be like all the others, filtered through someone else. Some of the truth will be lost. Oh no, I don’t mean you’ll do it on purpose, but there’s probably a lot of shifting between what happened sixty years ago, my memories now, my words to you, your shorthand, and then to true words. Right now there’s no story, so I guess whatever you get down will be better than nothing.

“Where’d I leave off? Grace Trumbull. Right. Thinking on it last night, I need to back up a little more before we get to Grace, but we’ll get to her today, don’t you fret.

“After the colonel stole Garet’s ranch and she robbed his bank, we went up to Cheyenne for the winter. It was big enough town we could blend in. Jehu drove freight. I got on as a cook at a hotel. Garet did some nursing for one of the doctors. Mostly watching over people at night. Joan was too young to work, so she and Stella stayed in the little house we rented, took care of it. We got along fine that winter of ’73 to ’74, but none of us were very happy. I hated cooking, being ordered around by people. Course I’m good at cooking, but that doesn’t mean I like it. Garet was a good nurse, but she couldn’t stand being cooped up inside like that. That woman could get by with less sleep than anyone I’ve ever known. Four, five hours. When she had free time during the day, she sweet-talked the livery man into letting her exercise horses, brush them, feed them. Didn’t take him too long to realize who she was. Her reputation as a horsewoman was that good. They spent a lot of time talking horseflesh and racing. That wasn’t Garet’s line, but she’d learned a lot about it from her grandfather. That livery man picked her brain something fierce. He was a gambling man and wanted to make his fortune with the horses. Men bet on anything back then. Probably hasn’t changed, I don’t know. Jehu wasn’t ever much of a gambler.

“The man, I can’t remember his name, got kicked in the leg by a draft horse. Bones sticking out of it from all angles. Garet said blood was spurting everywhere. She saved his life, stopping the blood and sending for the doctor. Course, the man lost the lower part of his leg. He was out for a couple of months and asked Garet to run the livery for him in the meantime. So she did. He appreciated her keeping his business afloat, appreciated her running it so good he was making a tidy profit, even during the slow winter, but he sure didn’t appreciate the fact that other men poked fun at him about it. So when he got a stick to hobble around on, Garet was back to nursing.

“We could have stayed there, had an OK life. We’d made some friends. Garet even thought about opening her own livery to compete with the men. There was a woman there who was going to give her a loan, but Jed showed up and told us he knew just where we could stake a claim that no rich rancher would ever try to steal. None of us liked living in town overmuch, so we followed him to Timberline, his hideout on the Western Slope.

“Brown’s Hole was hell to get to. It was a box canyon that was part of three states, so the law didn’t tend to look too hard for it. Jurisdiction was a booger to figure out. Jed Spooner found the town the year before when he was on the run from the Cheyenne bank holdup. He offered the town money if they’d let them hide out there when needed. Jed kept that town afloat for a few years, until the pressure got too much and he and his gang split up for a spell, went down to Mexico. Those Texas Rangers turned him into a cold-blooded killer. Another story ole Hollywood gets wrong.

“The men were gone and the town was too remote to have much in the way of business. Those settlers were sold a bill of goods by the land promoters, and that’s a fact. Course, everyone lied to settlers. Nothing new. I suppose Timberline was worse off because they were almost trapped in that canyon. There was only one way in and out, and it was treacherous.

“Someone needed to take care of the town, so we did it. I always knew Garet wanted to pull another job. Saw it in her eyes every time Spooner and his boys would get into the bottle and start bragging. She knew she could do it better, and we did.

“We had a good run, too. Two years. Six jobs. Over fifty grand. You better believe it, ’cause it’s a fact.

“You know what, nah. I’m not going to tell you this story if you’re going to sit there and say you don’t believe this and I’m lying about that. We are too early in the proceedings for that. Hell, it isn’t any wonder women’s stories don’t get told. Anything out of the ordinary is written off as fanciful, or an overactive imagination. Like it never once occurs to people that women are just as capable as men, more capable in most cases ’cause we’re not all caught up in being men, and all that means.

“If you’re going to have that attitude about everything I tell you, if you’re going to interrupt me with that, you better get on up and leave right now. I have no time for it. Good.

“Jehu was what you might call our forward scout. He would keep his ears peeled for gossip about goings-on, listen to when payrolls were typically delivered and how. Gauging which mines were most successful, where the booms were, so we could hit the mine office. If we were hitting a bank or an office, Garet and I would move to the town, separately, and get jobs there. Well, I got a job. Garet would pretend to be rich British woman looking for investments or on a jaunt in the West like that Bird woman. You never heard of her? She was a little sensation back then. Wrote a book about her time in the Rocky Mountains. I read it. Not terrible. People didn’t think it too strange when Garet pretended to be the same.

“The first stage we held up in the spring of ’75 was up in Wyoming. Wore masks for that one because we knew men wouldn’t comply with women, especially since there was only three of us, me, Garet, and Stella. Jehu was the driver and he had a signal for us. If he wore a red kerchief around his neck, then there were too many guns in the stage. If he wore a blue one, we weren’t outnumbered. It went pretty smooth, but the odds made me nervous, all the same. There were five men and two women, all told, with only three of us. We knew Jehu wouldn’t try to take us, but you just didn’t know with the others. Went fine, though. We never stole from the passengers, only the businesses.

“We wanted to rob another stage in the mountains because we could disappear before anyone could get to the next town to call for help. We had horses trained in mountain riding. There wasn’t a posse in Colorado that could track us, and we knew it. When Jehu finally got a route that carried a Connolly payroll, I suggested we be bolder still. Purchase tickets on the stage to decrease the number of passengers we had to guard. It was Joan’s first job, so we had three people in a six-person coach. We lucked out even more when one of the passengers got off and his seat wasn’t taken. We were afraid if I rode in the stage someone might get suspicious, a black woman traveling alone wasn’t a common sight. I met the stage on the road at the appointed spot, and Garet had already had the stage stop and had everyone guarded.

“Went off without a hitch, and on the ride up to the cabin where we were going to change horses, I was having visions of doing more regular jobs, maybe going farther afield, doing some jobs in Utah, Wyoming. Hell, maybe even Arizona Territory. There’s nothing like the rush of outlawing, let me tell you. Nothing.

“I didn’t know that was the last job we would do when Garet rode up with Grace Trumbull riding double, but I guess I should have known. You can’t kidnap someone, bring them into your family, and expect for everything to keep going on as it was.

“Losing her ranch on the Poudre changed Garet. In lots of ways, but I think she saw injustice everywhere, even where it might not actually be. She saw the fact that the exploits of a female gang were being ignored, swept under the rug, as one more wrong against women. Hell, I saw it as a free ticket to do what we were doing as long as we could.

“I don’t think Garet wanted to brag about what we’d done, but she wanted us to get credit. Sounds like a contradiction, but it wasn’t. Not really. Garet saw in Grace an outsider who could write about us, objectively I guess. But Garet had a motivation I didn’t know anything about, and wouldn’t for a few more weeks. It was the most selfish thing she ever did, bringing Grace Trumbull along, and for a bit I hated her for it. Grace, not Garet. Garet had done too much for me, for others, to hold a grudge. I’ll be honest, my loyalty and love for Garet were put to the test more than once that summer. But you’ll forgive the people you love for a lot, I’ve found.