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

6. “Glorious News! The Mysterious Murders Unraveled at Last”: One of the Slayers Slain

91 6 DOI: 10.5876/9781607322375.c06 “Glorious News! The Mysterious Murders Unraveled at Last” One of the Slayers Slain After amusing themselves by lynching Baxter and repeatedly stretching the necks of Snyder and possibly another innocent victim, “Commandant” Wilson’s squad of the California Gulch posse “then scouted through the country as far northeast as Deer Creek, within forty-five miles of Denver.”1 John McCannon later wrote he believed this movement drove the murderers from the upper end of South Park.2 He may have been right. If the killers had originally entered the Park by ascending Tarryall Creek, it is likely they left it by taking same route downstream.3 This valley, sparsely settled and sheltered on both sides by the rough country of the Puma Hills and the Tarryall Mountains, offered a protected outlet to the south and east. By now the killers must have realized that several parties of aroused citizens were on their trail and it was time to beat a retreat. McCannon seems to have surmised this would be their course, for at some point4 after sending “Com­ mandant” Wilson and his party to the northeast, he and the rest of his company marched on foot from Weston’s wayhouse eastward, past Hockin’s ranch and Pulver’s ranch5 to a point near the deserted mail station of John Addleman, the first of the Park’s murder victims, and there pitched camp. The following day he divided the posse into two sections, one to head east and one north, in an effort to locate some sign of the murderers who he assumed were now on the run. “glorious news! the mysterious murders unraveled at last” 92 These movements suggest that McCannon, whatever his disagreeable qualities , owned a sound head for tactics—he had used Wilson’s men to execute a flanking movement that would drive the killers down the Park, then had split and dispersed his own force to cover their only routes of escape, eastward through the Tarryall Mountains and Platte Canyon to the plains or southward down Oil Creek (now Fourmile Creek) in the direction of Cañon City and the Arkansas Valley. Two members of the posse have left accounts of their expedition. On May 21, a fortnight after the events he described, McCannon himself wrote a report to the Oro City committee, the body that had commissioned him captain of the scouting company. Long afterward, in 1881, he wrote an article for O. H. Baskin’s History of the Arkansas River Valley describing the events of that memorable spring. Joseph M. Lamb6 also gave two versions, both later in life, one in 1894 during an interview with the Denver Daily News and one four years later in a letter to J. A. Israel, then US marshal of Colorado. All four accounts, though differing in some respects, have a similar, reinforcing contour, beginning by offering an implicit impression that the posse discovered the trail of the murderers entirely unaided. But this was not in fact the case. They had help, and a good deal of it at that. The proof is in an article in the Weekly Commonwealth of May 21, which contains an interview with First Lieutenant Luther Wilson of Company F, First Colorado Cavalry, co-commander of the military expedition sent into South Park for the express purpose of capturing or killing the marauders. According to Lieutenant Wilson: The soldiers were frequently on their [the murderers’] trail, but were foiled several times by falling snow. They were on the trail within a few miles of Canon City when the party from California Gulch intersected them, and being nearly worn out they gave up the chase to the citizens, who from being personal friends of the murdered men, and being afoot and with pack animals, were likely to leave no stone unturned in the pursuit.7 This language leaves scant doubt that Lieutenant Wilson, officially charged with the duty of bringing in the murderers and actually following a fresh trail, voluntarily surrendered that responsibility to “personal friends of the murdered men,” almost certainly code words for a lynch mob. The act echoed the surrender of Baxter to the crowd near Fairplay that so distressed Private “glorious news! the mysterious murders unraveled at last” 93 Ostrander, and that also seems to have happened with Lieutenant Wilson’s tacit or even active approval.8 It is unclear exactly when...