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

1. “Alarming Intelligence and Intense Excitement”: First Murders in the Pike’s Peak Country

11 1 DOI: 10.5876/9781607322375.c01 That year, spring came early to the Front Range of the Rockies and to the great cleft in the mountains to the south where the Arkansas River broke out onto the plains. While frosts were still common at night, by the middle of March the weather had warmed and the grass had started and some of it was standing an inch or two high. “Already its emerald tinge is mellowing down the dark brown of the prairies,” one newspaperman exulted. By every account the winter then passing had been the mildest since the settlement of Colorado Territory, “remarkable for the evenness of temperature and slight fall of snow.” To be sure, storms and winds had been unusually severeinthemountainsthemselves,butevengiventhe turbulence on the high peaks, some observers thought accumulations of snow up there had been only twothirds the quantity of the previous year. At the foot of the range, snow had not been uncommon but had usually melted away under bright sunlight within a day of falling. An exception was a “severe storm” of snow over a two-day period in mid-­ December, which “seriously delayed” the mail coaches.1 Still, not once all winter had the temperature in Denver City dropped below zero.2 In fact, wrote Thomas Gibson, editor of Denver’s Weekly Commonwealth, on the first day of March, a Sunday, “Spring came upon us . . . as the swelling buds “Alarming Intelligence and Intense Excitement” First Murders in the Pike’s Peak Country “alarming intelligence and intense excitement” 12 of the cotton-woods show, and they know their business better than anyone can tell them, and have stood too long in this latitude not to be well aware when the time has come to start their young leaves out into the open air.”3 The unseasonable weather seemed miraculous, so much so that one Thursday in mid-March the editors of both the Mile-High City’s weekly newspapers , normally at daggers drawn on any issue of substance, found in it a rare comity. “Saturday was one of the most lovely and beautiful days which mortals anywhere were blessed with,” Gibson rhapsodized. “The air was mild as June, and all nature seemed in the highest enjoyment of the Spring Life which was warming into being everywhere. Overcoats were a burden, and men actually spoke of the necessity of ice.”4 Nor was Gibson’s rival and gadfly, William Byers, editor of The Rocky Mountain News Weekly, inclined to stint on the ecstatic hyperbole. “A lovelier day than yesterday never smiled upon the inhabitants of this mundane sphere. The sun shone all day undimmed by a single cloud, and just enough air was moving to pleasantly fan the cheek through open casements. No June weather in the Eastern States ever excelled it in balmy brightness and sunny magnificence . The afternoon was unusually hot, more like July than March. Spring is upon us. Improve the time.”5 Farmers on the Fontaine qui Bouille6 in the valley of the Arkansas were already obeying that injunction. They were sowing their wheat. Earlier an agrarian enthusiast there, who signed himself R. Stubbs, had written to the News Weekly from near Colorado City: Spring is opening under favorable auspices for the people of this section. Many new farming claims are being taken, and old ones further improved. . . . A greatly increased breadth of land will be cultivated in the coming season. Reapers, threshing machines, corn shellers, &c., will be introduced before another harvest, and now that we have got such a good flouring mill in our midst, may not the people of this valley congratulate themselves that they are entering upon a career of usefulness and prosperity, second to none in the whole country.7 Little more than a fortnight after Stubbs penned this letter,8 and only fourteen miles south of Colorado City on a tributary of the Fontaine qui Bouille, a family named Priest was improving their time by settling on their own claim in a narrow, roadless canyon “filled with majestic pines,” a place becoming known as Saw Mill Gulch because a group of enterprising men were building “alarming intelligence and intense excitement” 13 a new mill there. One of these, fifty-five-year-old “Uncle” Henry Harkens, was an acquaintance of the Priests. So was the owner of the property, Murdoch McPherson. Helping with the construction of the mill were Alden Bassett, a man...