Bronco Lou could outshoot and outride just about anyone in the region and was “fierce as a fiend in her ferocity or as gentle as a lamb or as soft as an angel in her devotion to those she liked.”18 When she and a group of her cohorts got tangled up with a southern Colorado posse, Lou not only nursed the outlaws back to health while they were in jail, but then planned and carried out their escape. When they were recaptured, and about to be hanged, Lou again rescued the men. She allegedly killed two husbands prior to her arrival in Silverton, and singlehandedly saved a third husband’s life from an Indian attack (he left her shortly thereafter). On that August night, Lou would be the least of Ogsbury’s troubles.
At about eleven p.m., Ogsbury was roused from sleep by a knock.
“Clayt, wake up,” said a familiar voice. Ogsbury opened his eyes and saw Charlie Hodges, a local businessman. He was accompanied by Luke Hunter, sheriff of La Plata County, who had finally arrived with the warrants. Ogsbury quickly got dressed, fighting the temptation to ask Hunter what in the hell had taken him so long. He suspected Hunter of going easy on the Stockton gang. As far as Ogsbury was concerned, they should have all been behind bars already.
Little did Ogsbury know that Hunter, after arriving in Silverton, had taken his time finding the marshal, and in the meantime had indirectly warned the outlaws that the local law was on to them. “We’ll need help,” said Ogsbury. “I’ll send for Thorniley [San Juan County Sheriff George Thorniley], and we can round up a few others, just in case there is trouble.”
“That won’t be necessary,” replied Hunter. “I know these men. They’ll give in peacefully.”
So the three of them, Ogsbury, Hodges, and Hunter, set off toward the Diamond Saloon, aka Lower Dance Hall, Silverton’s rowdiest drinking establishment.
As they drew near, they saw the silhouette of a man in the street and stopped. Ogsbury instinctively reached down and lightly touched the handle of his pistol. He peered into the darkness in an attempt to identify the still, silent figure.
A flash of light, a crack in the night, and then a sickening thud as Ogsbury’s body hit the dusty street.
The shooter was one Bert Wilkinson, a tall, skinny, freckle-faced nineteen-year-old from a prestigious family, who had taken up with a rough crew. He and his companions took advantage of the chaos that ensued. Wilkinson and Eskridge headed for the hills, while Kid Thomas, an African American, tried to hide out in town. It didn’t work and Thomas, “The Copper Colored Kid,” was captured and tossed in the small town jail. The next day, a mob of vigilantes broke him out and hanged him in the streets of Silverton.
Thomas’s companions, meanwhile, managed to head up Mineral Creek, over into the San Miguel River drainage, and then into the Dolores, before crossing back to the east, ending up at the home of Ellen Louise Wilkinson, Bert’s mother, just south of where Purgatory Ski Resort sits now. Ellen Louise sent her son and his companion several miles east, to a less-traveled place on Missionary Ridge. A couple of days later, she summoned gang leader Ike Stockton, and asked him to go help her son escape to Mexico. Stockton ambled into the fugitives’ camp, sent Eskridge away, then marched Wilkinson right into the hands of the law, betraying his young protégé for the $2,500 reward on his head.
Wilkinson was tossed into the Silverton jail, and less than a week later vigilante justice reared its ugly head once again. A mob broke into the jail, ordered the guard to leave, and put a noose around Wilkinson’s neck.
“Do you have any last words?” a voice asked from the crowd.
“Nothing, gentlemen. Adios,” replied Wilkinson, and he kicked the chair out from beneath himself.
Such are the violent pangs felt by a frontier community, awash with wealth from the mines, in its adolescence. Contrary to how today’s peddlers of the wild, wild west, with their fake gunfights, might portray the history of Silverton and Durango, the reality is, this sort of lawless, highway-robbing, gun-slinging, and frontier justice were a mere blip on the region’s record.
The murder of Marshal Ogsbury and the lynchings that followed were not just the climax of this short period in history, but also the dying gasp. In Silverton, the Diamond Saloon was shut down and demolished and Bronco Lou run out of town. Ike Stockton was gunned down in the streets of Durango, not because he was an outlaw, but because he betrayed his young friend. Stockton’s gang disintegrated and the Coe-Stockton feud evaporated. Communities moved to end the lawlessness, and even implemented gun control statutes that are far stricter than today’s. “Firearms in the daily walks of life have no place in our modern civilization and should not be carried,” noted a Durango mayor in 1903. The communities of the San Juan country, though still brand new, were maturing.
ELEVEN MONTHS AFTER THE SILVERTON SHOOTING, a far more cataclysmic sound than a gunshot would echo through Baker’s Park: the whistle of the first steam locomotive. The railroad had finally arrived, marking a huge pivot in the region’s history.
Prior to that fateful day in July 1882, mail and supplies were brought into Baker’s Park by horse, mule, or wagon on rugged trails over high mountains. Throughout the 1870s, the most traveled route to the outside world was a seventy-mile journey to Del Norte, in the San Luis Valley. The trail crossed the Continental Divide at Cunningham Pass, elevation 12,090 feet (currently part of the Hardrock Hundred ultramarathon course). During the winter, which at these elevations can last six months or more, the horses and burros were traded for wooden skis, ranging from six to twelve feet in length, known as snowshoes.
Heroic and hardy mail carriers—mostly Nelson’s fellow Scandinavians—plied the long boards, usually tag-teaming the route and braving avalanches, frostbite, hypothermia, and snow blindness to keep Silverton running through the winter. One mailman once carried sixty pounds of newsprint over the route in order to keep the local rag in print. Astoundingly, only one mail carrier perished. On November 27, 1876, John Greenell, née Greenhalgh, set out from Carr’s Cabin on the other side of the divide on the return trip to Silverton. He never arrived. A group of searchers found his body a few days later, frozen to death near the top of the pass, his hand rigidly clutching his mailbag.
The train was challenged by snow, as well, but it opened up a thick artery connecting Durango, rich with coal, timber, cattle, and crops, with the mineral-rich veins around Silverton.19 The miners got access to heavy equipment that would have been almost impossible to haul over the passes with mules, and they could then send their ore by the railcar-load back down to Durango and the new San Juan & New York smelter built along the Animas River’s banks. Potential investors in the mines no longer had to brave sphincter-puckering wagon rides over steep passes to see future prospects.
The rails stretched from Denver down to Alamosa, in the San Luis Valley, then further south to Chama, New Mexico, where they picked up the old Ute and Spanish trail to Durango before following the Animas River to Silverton. The railroad’s advent didn’t just impact the mining camps. The pair of steel ribbons and the coal-eating, smoke-belching locomotives that rode on them rapidly transformed the entire region’s landscape, cultures, and economy. The locomotives sucked up water from rivers and streams, and new coal mines were opened to feed the chugging beasts. Glades of tall, straight, and wise old ponderosas near Chama, on the Tierra Amarilla Land Grant, were sheared down en masse now that there was an easy way to haul them to market. Once-isolated villages along the old Spanish trail, settled in the 1870s by members of the New Mexican Penitente Brotherhood looking to flee religious persecution from mainstream Catholics, were suddenly linked to the outside world.
Towns and sawmills and cattle-loading chutes popped up along the tracks; subsistence farms and ranches morphed into commercial-sized operations. And in the high country, the mostly entrepreneurial mining trade slowly transformed into an industrial-scale concern, funded by outside capital. In 1881,
