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

2. “Most Horrible and Fiendish Murders”: The Bleeding of South Park Begins

33 2 DOI: 10.5876/9781607322375.c02 “Most Horrible and Fiendish Murders” The Bleeding of South Park Begins Remembering his entrance into South Park at the height of its first frenzied gold rush in 1859, a prospector from Kentucky named Daniel Ellis Conner later gave a somewhat prosaic description, calling it “a fine, grassy, grazing country in the summer and perhaps forty miles across it. In the winter the snow falls two or three feet deep and remains until May. It is rolling country, interspersed with clumps of trees and small open parks, and at that time a great range for wild game and the Ute Indians in the summer.”1 But some quality beyond what Conner’s matter-offact minimalism can convey lingers in this vast place. It seems a thing somehow implacable and indifferent. Even Conner felt it in time: “This whole land and the imposing mountains of the main divide,” he wrote of a later visit, “were all covered with snow and offered a terribly bleak-looking aspect.”2 In the transitional seasons of spring and fall, what one apprehends is simply the winter that lurks amid the heights early and late, ready to sweep down without warning and turn any soft bright day into a blinding blizzard. In March or September, from Kenosha Pass at the northeastern entrance to the Park, the eyes can sweep the mountain-bound horizon and see starkly different weather patterns at every quarter of the compass; here a storm of rain occasionally veined by lightning, trailing its gray hem over the peaks, its thunders too “most horrible and fiendish murders” 34 distant to be heard; yonder a brilliant welcoming sun in a clear sky; there, immense occluded clouds rolling darkly down from towering summits, spewing squalls of snow; and from yet another direction a constant bone-numbing wind that blows bursts of sleet that sting like birdshot. At any time of the year, the Park can look especially sinister. Latter-day water diversion arrangements, preventing development, have left huge tracts oddly, even eerily vacant. But something else confers a bleak air of the ominous . Even in the glare of high summer, amid the tourist bustle of South Park City and the hum of traffic on Highway 285, a strange gloom can settle over its solitudes and it is not difficult to imagine that what one apprehends is the whiff of a terrible past. From time immemorial the Park was the preferred hunting ground of the Ute Indians because immense herds of bison, antelope, and other game grazed there, but that very abundance excited the envy of other tribes, especially Arapahos and Cheyennes from down on the plains, and many battles were fought for possession of the Park’s buffalo, grasslands, streams, and salt marshes. White explorers witnessed some of these fights, which continued until the early 1860s and took many lives and scalps even as the buffalo herds dwindled and eager Argonauts began pouring into the Park. With the gold rush, inevitably, came rough-and-tumble mining camps like Fairplay, Hamilton, Jefferson, Tarryall City, Mosquito, and Buckskin Joe, bringing in their wake an inevitable contagion of lawlessness: claim-jumpings, robberies, and shootings. South Park’s air of menace is well earned; its ground is dark and bloody indeed. But in the spring of 1863, with the dwindling-away of placer mining, the increasing difficulties associated with penetrating barren rock or refractory ore bodies so as to pursue successful hard-rock mining,3 and the Civil War siphoning young men off eastward to join the ranks of the contending armies, South Park, like most of the gold-rush camps of the Territory, was losing population and, despite some lingering pockets of activity,4 its economy was beginning to stagnate.5 Its original air of forbidding, silent emptiness had begun to replace the feverish gush of hydraulic hoses, the thumping of stamp mills, the grinding of arrastras,6 and the clang of single-jack drilling against cap rock,7 sounds that had characterized its heyday only a year or so before. Measuring sixty miles from east to west, forty-five miles wide, Park County proper contains something like 2,166 square miles. The Park itself is actually a geological basin covering 1,400 square miles of space, counting 900 square “most horrible and fiendish murders” 35 miles of plain and foothills and its ring of mountains as far as their tips...