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

3. “There Has Been Considerable Excitement”: The First Colorado Cavalry Steps In

49 3 DOI: 10.5876/9781607322375.c03 “There Has Been Considerable Excitement” The First Colorado Cavalry Steps In As reports of the five unexplained murders in the Pike’s Peak country and South Park spread throughout Colorado, speculation on the identity of the killers tended to center on two theories: either they were guerrillas or they were jayhawkers. The early suspicion by the men at Saw Mill Gulch that Indians might have been responsible seems to have quickly dissipated , owing to the fact that no hostiles were known to be on the prowl. The terms guerrillas and jayhawkers sound synonymous to modern ears, but in Civil War–era Colorado they were not. Guerrillas was a term applied almost exclusively to suspected bands of Confederate partisans . Jayhawkers, a pejorative initially coined by South­ erners during the Kansas–Nebraska troubles of 1854– 56 to denote antislavery gangs, had, by 1861, somehow taken on a different connotation, that of criminal activity undignified by any association with the respective sides in the fraternal conflict. By this definition the crimes of rustling, robbery, and murder for profit were referred to as “jayhawking.”1 The Territory had some reason to fret about Rebel guerrillas. The first gold strikes in Colorado had been made by Georgians and in the initial mad rush of 1859 into the diggings, Southerners were heavily represented .2 At the outbreak of war a Confederate flag had been raised in Denver but it was torn down almost at “there has been considerable excitement” 50 once by Unionists.3 While large-scale violence between the factions did not break out, there were individual instances of fights and disturbances involving adherents to either side of the national dispute.4 But overall, Colorado escaped anything resembling the bitter partisan warfare that afflicted border regions like Missouri and the Southern Appalachians, where Unionists and Confederates, former neighbors, turned on each other with a terrible ferocity. Of course an unknown number of the Territory’s males traveled east to join the regular armies of North or South; others stood fast and made an effort to fit in, whatever their sympathies, usually nursing persistent hopes of striking it rich in the diggings. But very early in the war Colorado Territory, politically and editorially, became firmly attached to the cause of Union, though reactions to President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and to the draft law were mixed5 and there was always an undercurrent of pro-Southern feeling in an apparent minority of the population. ThisisnottosaytheTerritorywasentirelyfreeof actualConfederateactivity. In the late summer of 1862 a band of thirty-five men under a Captain George Madison, “supposedly a detachment sent out by the rebels to capture government trains” and to interrupt the mails, was active at Raton Pass, near the headwaters of the Huerfano River and near the Spanish Peaks. The “avowed object of this band” was “to harass and rob the government in every possible way.” Madison was said to be a part of the Texas army that had invaded New Mexico earlier in the year, and was thought by some to be the precursor of yet another such foray.6 Army troops were sent out from Fort Garland in Costilla County in a vain effort to capture these guerrillas7 but Madison soon disappeared8 and the rumored Texan invasion did not materialize. In early 1863 another Rebel gang headed by one Charley Harrison, formerly a Denver gambler and saloon owner,9 made a serious effort to ride west from Kansas with several like-minded souls, intending to raise a body of Confederate troops along the way and seize Colorado’s gold for the Southern cause. But this group ran afoul of Osage Indians on whose land they unwisely trespassed. Fortunately for the Union cause in Colorado, the Osages killed and beheaded all but two of Harrison’s party.10 A third Confederate effort—almost comedic compared with the activities of Madison and Harrison—centered on a place called Mace’s Hole in the Greenhorn section south of the Arkansas River, where an eccentric named Alexander (“Zan”) Hicklin operated a ranch serving as a secret rallying point for Rebel recruits. Hicklin played a sly double game with Union command- “there has been considerable excitement” 51 ers at Forts Lyon and Garland, feigning loyalty to the United States while secretly fostering the activities of a Con­ fed­ erate officer, Colonel John Heffner, whom Rebel authorities in Texas had sent to Mace’s...