OCR Text |
Show Page 67 hotel held a banquet. Then everyone went to a movie and afterward to a dance. Queen Ann reigned until the morning sun pinked the Colorado sky. After the trial Ann found she had earned a new title: "Queen of the Cattle Rustlers." In fact, there is strong suspicion she deserved that title. In later years Ann wrote, "I did everything they accused me of, and a whole lot more." And with reference to changing brands, a practice useful only to rustlers, Ann admitted to having become more skillful than she was when she changed Dixie Burr's brand years earlier. That job she described as "a sloppy imitation of brand blotting." But "me heap savy now," she wrote. Perhaps she really was guilty of the single act which brought her to trial, especially considering the questionable character of some of her associates, such as the three witnesses who "disappeared." If Ann was indeed guilty of cattle rustling, what made a woman from a respectable, well-off family, a woman with a good upbringing and an excellent education step outside the law? Perhaps it was simply another way of getting even with Ora Haley. Perhaps it was simply a challenge. Although women's roles were changing in those years, Ann lived in a time when those roles were still quite well-defined. Ann had no interest in the usual women's occupations, finding no challenge in them. Yet she was a person who needed the excitement of a challenge to make her feel alive. She had |