inflamed a statewide Ute-phobic rage.
“Indians are off their reservation, seeking to destroy your settlements with fire,” warned Colorado Governor Frederick Pitkin, who had enriched himself with San Juan Mountain mine investments. “The Utes must go!” Someone should have reminded Pitkin that the Brunot Agreement explicitly gave the Utes free rein to roam, hunt, and forage “off the reservation” in the San Juan Mountains; to take that freedom away was equivalent to robbing them of their identity. Silvertonians took up arms and prepared for a fight. My ancestors, in the Animas Valley, joined with others at a hastily constructed sod fort on the north end of the valley. Extremists ached for a provocation, so they could settle the “Ute Question” once and for all. “Here in Silverton we have received 40 stand of arms and have perfected a military organization,” noted the Miner newspaper, describing a sort of nineteenth century version of today’s right-wing “militias.” “We say bring on your Utes—the Johns and Joes can soon exterminate them.”
The attack never came, however, leaving the settlers and their representatives in Denver and Washington to resort to more subtle forms of extermination—like labeling the Native Americans as terrorists. The Lime Creek Burn was retroactively attributed to the Utes. A La Plata County resolution forwarded in 1880—a year after the blaze had gone out—claimed that the Utes set the fire to roust game or “to maliciously injure the settlers and miners . . . destroying millions of dollars worth of timber and a vast amount of private property.”
For the next twenty years, every skirmish that involved one of the “Rabid Reds” was framed by newspaper accounts and politicians as a precursor to the next Indian War. Every Ute was deemed a potential terrorist, aching to launch another Meeker Massacre, regardless of the fact that the southern bands, under the leadership of diplomatic peacekeeper Chief Ouray, put up little resistance to the encroachment on their homeland. The persecution was part plain-old racism, and fear of the “other.” Mostly, though, it was a calculated campaign designed to give the white newcomers more land and resources. By 1880, the game populations were already dwindling, thanks to over-hunting by the newcomers, and the Utes competed ably for that scarce resource. In the lowlands, the farmers and ranchers were outgrowing the land that had been stolen on their behalf in earlier treaties, and they wanted more. Meanwhile, the people who had established businesses in Durango had saturated the market. They needed more customers, and a new land rush for Ute reservation lands was just the ticket.
Portraying the Utes as a threat provided a justification for the feds to push them further and further into the margins in the hope that they just might go away. Meanwhile, whites who were truly violent and threatening were allowed, quite literally, to get away with murder, so long as some of their violence was directed toward the Utes.
A LATE SUMMER CHILL SETTLED OVER THE YOUNG TOWN OF SILVERTON as the sun fell behind Anvil Mountain on the evening of August 24, 1881. The light faded, and the saloons—the Tivoli, the Senate, the Blue Front, the Golden Star, the Rosebud, the Star of the West—filled up with miners, merchants, and travelers. It was a rowdy night. Every night was a rowdy night in Silverton.
The crews building grade and laying tracks for the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad had yet to make it into Baker’s Park, but by now their arrival was imminent, and in anticipation the little smattering of houses Rhoda had witnessed had blossomed into a bona fide town with stately residences and a lively commercial district, replete with two bakeries, a furniture-making and undertaker business, and two shoemakers. A man could get his dingy clothes cleaned at the Quong Wah or Sing Lee laundry, stop in at the Tennyson Bath House, and get shorn next door at the Merrifield Barber Shop. The San Juan Herald had emerged that summer to compete with the Miner, making Silverton a two-rag town. Law offices nearly outnumbered saloons. There was just one church.
Olaf Nelson had not been scared away by his brush with death, nor by Silverton’s close call with wildfire. He was here to stay, along with hundreds of others like him, folks from Italy, Austria, Wales, Poland, and China, looking to reinvent themselves on the rugged but quickly civilizing frontier. A few months earlier, Nelson’s wife Louisa had given birth to their first child, Anna. Nelson worked hard but played little, his Lutheran upbringing keeping him above the bawdy fray.
That night, in a sleeping room in the back of the Senate Saloon on 13th and Greene (in the now-vacant lot north of the Teller House), Town Marshal David Clayton Ogsbury was trying to do the same. He was dead-tired, but unable to sleep.16
Ogsbury, born in New York, had come to the San Juans in the early 1870s. He had been a saloon owner, prospector, bridge designer, and store clerk. But his real calling was law enforcement, and as Silverton’s marshal he was one of the area’s most respected lawmen. On nights like this, however, he would just as soon be prospecting.
Young Silverton was boisterous, but some semblance of law and order tended to keep the stew from boiling over into bloodshed. The same could not be said for Silverton’s junior, downstream neighbors, Durango and Farmington. Ogsbury’s colleagues in the lower Animas River country had been dealing with cattle rustling, highway robbery, and theft, much of it perpetuated by two warring gangs, the Farmington-based Coe-Hambletts and the Stockton-Eskridge gang, led by Ike and Port Stockton, cattlemen who had come up from Texas, and Harg Eskridge, who owned a Durango saloon.
In late 1880 the simmering tension between the two gangs boiled over into outright war when a Coe ally was killed and, in retaliation, the Coe-Hamblett boys shot and killed Port Stockton. The Stockton-Eskridge faction retreated to Durango, the Coe-Hambletts pursued them, and in April of 1881 the two gangs clashed in an intense firefight on the edge of town. A stray bullet made its way into the office of the Durango Record, the young town’s first newspaper, where it just missed hitting publisher, editor, reporter, and writer Caroline Westcott Romney. Romney, a forty-year-old seasoned journalist, came to Durango from Chicago via Leadville the previous year, and printed the first issue of the Record on a “job press” in a canvas tent on a frigid, snowy December 29, 1880. Romney wasn’t one to be cowed by gangs of rustlers or anyone else: During her three-year tenure in Durango she was a champion for women’s rights, rallied against prostitution, and held a special disdain for opium dens and their patrons. And as soon as the dust from the firefight had settled, she stood up to the Stockton-Eskridge gang and demanded they be run out of town.17 And they were, sort of. Town leaders asked the bunch to leave, and even paid them $700 as an incentive, which was enough to get them to skedaddle, for a while.
But a couple months later, the Stockton-Eskridge boys were instrumental in chasing down and killing “bands of renegade Indians” who had allegedly killed three ranchers near Gateway, Colorado. Ute-phobia festered at a fever pitch among the white newcomers, and they not only forgave the gang of recidivists and murderers for their past deeds, but elevated them to the status of Indian-fighting heroes. Even Romney, who thought the scant amount of land left to the Mouache, Caputa, and Weenuchiu bands would be more productive in white hands, was swayed, becoming one of the gang’s most vocal defenders. When the criminals moseyed back into town, lawmen like La Plata County Sheriff Luke Hunter turned a blind eye, allowing them to continue their lawless ways.
On that late-August afternoon, gang members Bert Wilkinson, Kid Thomas, and Harg Eskridge’s brother Dyson went on a robbing rampage on the Animas Toll Road, and were rumored to be headed toward Silverton. Ogsbury waited anxiously, though there was little he could do once they arrived, since he had yet to receive a warrant from La Plata County.
Typically, Ogsbury had to grapple with slightly more benign crimes. Two days earlier, for example, he had tossed Bronco Lou—the barkeep at the Diamond Saloon—into jail for enticing a man into her bar then robbing him blind. Bronco Lou (aka Susan Warfield, Susan Raper, Susan Stone, Bronco Sue, Lou Lockhard, and Susan Dawson) was one of the more colorful characters of the time, and had she been a man would surely have gone down in history as one of the West’s outlaw folk heroes along with Jesse James and Billy the Kid. Instead, she was maligned as a “prostitute
