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

Introduction

1 “In the spring of the year mentioned, the entire region of country between Pueblo and Park counties, indeed all sections of the Territory, became in a measure panic stricken by accounts of terrible and mysterious massacres of travelers on the lonely roads leading from the southwest to the South Park. Every little while, residents of certain localities disappeared, and upon search being instituted by friends, their dead bodies were found. Who committed these horrible deeds no one could comprehend, since all traces were lost.”1 The “year mentioned” was 1863. The place was the newly organized Territory of Colorado. The inexplicable carnage lasted eight months. No one knows how many were murdered; the generally accepted count is ten or eleven but the killers themselves boasted of having slain thirty-two, and such a number is far from implausible. They also tried to take the lives of two other men and they raped a woman. “Ask in New Mexico,” one of them wrote, “if any other . . . men have ever been known to have killed as many . . . as the Espinosas.”2 There were three of them: a pair of New Mexican– born brothers, Felipe Nerio and José Vivián, and their nephew, José Vincente. In their short but vicious eruption into frontier history no other malefactors Introduction introduction 2 inspired more fear and dread over a greater expanse of country than this trio, yet today they and their grisly rampage are largely forgotten, save in the local and regional lore of Colorado. And even in the Centennial State the Espinosas are not widely remembered. When they are, sensationalism has been the order of the day. As recently as the 1970s, the then-director of the museum at old Fort Garland3 regularly staged reenactments of the dramatic moment when famed plainsman Tom Tobin dumped the severed heads of Felipe and José Vincente out of a gunnysack in front of the commandant’s office—in the case of the reenactment, heads especially fashioned of papier-maché—much to the disgust of many Hispanic Coloradans. The museum’s current director, Rick Manzanares, says people still stop by asking to see the real heads, which they imagine have been preserved . (They haven’t.)4 Why have the Espinosas escaped widespread notoriety when their atrocities far exceeded the crimes of figures better known in the annals of Western outlawry ? One reason might be that their actions did not fit neatly into any of the frontier stereotypes. They were not gunmen like John Wesley Hardin, “Texas Billy” Thompson, or “Wild Bill” Longley; they killed no one in straight-up confrontations but always by stealth, from hiding. They were not feudists like the Earps and the Clantons, or the Tewksburys and the Grahams, nor were they caught up in range wars like Billy the Kid. Though they stole, they were not rustlers in the mold of John Kinney’s band, or robbers of banks and trains such as the James–Younger gang. Nor were they cowboys gone wrong like Butch Cassidy or Tom Horn. They were, as best we can determine, only labradores , poor Hispanic farmers who became what we would call serial killers, a category of crime more readily associated with our own time than with the nineteenth-century Western frontier. Their obscurity may also be attributable in part to an accident of historical timing. Their murders occurred during a pivotal phase of the Civil War back East. While they were killing Coloradans, the attentions of most Americans wererivetedonthegreatcampaignsandbattlesof Chancellorsville,Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, and Chattanooga, which yielded up butcher’s bills on a scale previously unimaginable. With such torrents of blood being shed on the battlegrounds of the East, who except those directly concerned was going to notice a string of violent deaths in a remote Western territory? Another reason they are not better known is that credentialed historians have not told their story in any detail. There exists no single comprehensive, introduction 3 book-length account of their activities that adheres strictly to the principles of historiography. Local and regional histories and some historical journals tell portions of the story; one well-documented biography of Tom Tobin offers a good deal more, though that account is confined to but a single chapter of a book crowded with the other exploits of its remarkable subject. It may be that some scholarly historians have preferred to dwell on what are perceived as the more wholesome aspects...