Season of Terror: The Espinosas in Central Colorado, March–October 1863

4. “The People Are Scared Nearly to Death Here”: The Murderers Strike at the Vitals of South Park

61 4 DOI: 10.5876/9781607322375.c04 “The People Are Scared Nearly to Death Here” The Murderers Strike at the Vitals of South Park The gold camp of Montgomery, home to “Dornick,” the garrulous correspondent of the Weekly Common­ wealth, lay in a high valley dominated by the rugged mass of a peak in the Snowy Range that residents had named Mount Lincoln. The settlement lay at the foot of Hoosier Pass, which crosses the Continental Divide toward Breckenridge, then a thriving camp of miners working the gold deposits along the Blue River in what is now Summit County. Despite its forbidding location high in the mountains , in an economic sense Montgomery was far from isolated; a branch of the grandly named Breckenridge, Buckskin Joe and Hamilton Wagon Road Company served it, linking it not only with the diggings on the other side of Hoosier Pass but with all the camps along the Middle Fork of the South Platte down to Fairplay. Colorado Territory had granted a charter for the toll road over to Breckenridge in November 1860.1 Traffic up and down it on the eastern side was constant; in a very real sense it could be called the heart of the mining activity in the upper section of South Park. The settlement boasted five sawmills2 and on Sat­ ur­ day, April 25, 1863, three men were busy at one of them loading lumber into a wagon. One of these, Bill Carter, was a resident of the Mosquito Mining District, which lay several miles to the southwest but was also “the people are scared nearly to death here” 62 served by a branch of the main road. The other two seem to have been from Fairplay. Evidently the trio had climbed this high in the mountains to obtain wood because most of the timber lower down had already been cut since the rush of 1859 to make flumes, sluice boxes, rockers, and the other paraphernalia of placer mining. Late that afternoon Carter decided he’d had enough of the hard work of shoving the heavy boards into the wagon. He declared his intention to return to Fairplay on foot, perhaps to enjoy some of the night life there, but would stop at Mosquito to retrieve his overcoat to protect himself against the chill of the evening. It may seem strange that a man might set out alone near twilight, even along a heavily traveled road, at a time when the whole of South Park was The gold camp of Montgomery. (Photo by William G. Chamberlain, ca. 1880s; courtesy of Park County, CO, Local History Archives) “the people are scared nearly to death here” 63 on the alert for prowling assassins. Perhaps his companions even warned him of his danger. If they did, he ignored them. Maybe he believed the presence of the Colorado Volunteers had made solitary travel safer. He may have reassured himself that most of the killings to date had happened in remote wilderness locations quite unlike the busy placer mining operations all along the Fairplay road and down the next drainage of Beaver Creek northeastward. A Montgomery sawmill with stacked logs, Hoosier Pass in the distance. Bill Carter would have worked at such a mill. (Photo by T. C. Miller, ca. 1880s; courtesy of Park County, CO, Local History Archives) “the people are scared nearly to death here” 64 Even Binkley and Shoup had been murdered in a gulch some distance from the Kenosha House and off the Denver road. Whatever his reasoning, he started off alone as the sun was sinking, leaving the other two to finish the task of loading the wagon. That same afternoon a Mr. Metcalf was getting his mail at the Montgomery post office. We know little about Metcalf; not even his first name has come down to us. We can assume he lived somewhere in the vicinity of Montgomery since he received mail there, and we know from a newspaper account that he, like Carter and his friends, had accumulated a wagonload of lumber that he intended to take down to Fairplay, perhaps to sell. Presumably he was a Republican and maybe an abolitionist, since his mail that day contained a copy of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, some explanatory reports, and a communication from Hiram Pitt Bennett, Colorado’s congressional delegate . Leaving the post office, Metcalf slipped the papers into his left breast pocket, mounted to the...