Growing Up with the Wild Bunch

So said Josephine Bassett McKnight Ranney Williams Wells Morris to a young reporter in 1960. She was a four-time divorcee whose fifth husband died of natural causes...though persistent rumors say otherwise. She raised two sons and lived an adventurous but frugal life at her homestead on Cub Creek, in-western Utah. Josie was raised in the notorious outlaw hideout of Brown's Park, Colorado, where she eventually became infatuated with Butch Cassidy. She recalled: "After one of Butch's rich uncles died [euphemism for a bank or train robbery], we put him up, hiding him in the hay loft.... He asked me, 'What am I going to do to keep from being bored?' Well, all I can say is, I didn't let him get bored." Josie's brother-in-law, Hi Bernard, commented; "Josie... is a jolly good-natured woman, she works like a steam shovel, and then she hunts up some unworthy bums and gives away the proceeds of her labor. Her hobby is husbands, she has had five or six good men and discards them one after the other without a backward glance." In this first full-length biography of Josephine Bassett, research flushes out the truth, dispelling myth as Josie's own words recount her story. Book jacket.