Charles F. Price

The Lake County War: Unanswered Questions

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By Charles F. Price

One hundred and forty years ago this June, gunfire punctuated the predawn darkness at the base of Land’s Hill on the west side of what is now Hwy. 285 between Salida and Buena Vista. Shot twice from ambush, a homesteader named George Harrington fell dead. His wife, Helen Mary, pulled his body from the flames of a burning outbuilding.

The couple had been trying to extinguish a fire kindled by arsonists to lure them from their nearby dwelling house on Gas Creek, exposing them as targets against the glare of the flames. This murder in the early morning of June 17, 1874, witnessed by the couple’s infant daughter and Harrington’s visiting young sister, ignited the worst calamity in the history of Central Colorado, an event now known as the Lake County War. (The area of the conflict was then in Lake County but became a part of Chaffee County upon its creation in 1879.)

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Book Reviews

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

By Charles F. Price
University Press of Colorado, 2013
ISBN 978-1-61732-236-8
$34.95, cloth, 352 pages

Reviewed by Forrest Whitman

A new book about an old terrorist threat is getting a lot of press in Central Colorado lately. Felipe and Vivian Espinosa, and later their nephew Jose Vicente, terrorized Colorado in 1863 (some would extend that threat into 1864). By some accounts they hoped to lead a revolt against the U.S. Government at a time when the U.S. was gradually taking control of New Mexico and Southern Colorado. By some accounts they killed upwards of forty people, all innocent Anglos. They themselves boasted that the kill was 42 Anglos, but other authorities point to 32. At least one of the murdered was of Salida interest. The victim, Henry Harkins, has descendents who knew Harkins well.

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The Fading of a Legend: Doc Holliday in Leadville

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By Charles F. Price

On July 17, 1882, nine days after a visit to Salida – described in the April and May 2009 issues of Colorado Central – John H. (“Doc”) Holliday pulled into the town’s division yards on a DR&G train from Pueblo, headed for the silver camp of Leadville. This time he didn’t get off.

Perhaps on his previous sojourn the Arkansas River burg just hadn’t offered the right inducements. The notorious gambler and gunman was a high roller and Leadville, even if past the apogee of its boom, still boasted the kinds of fast-paced action Holliday preferred. Later that day when he stepped off the train at Leadville’s four-gabled brick depot, Doc was at the summit of his fame, or infamy, seemingly in the pink of health and no doubt looking forward to fattening his bankroll at the camp’s several classy gambling parlors such as the Monarch, the Board of Trade, the Texas House and Mannie Hyman’s Saloon.

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Bat Masterson; Buena Vista Marshal?

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by Charles F. Price

One of the standard histories of Salida, Eleanor Fry’s Salida: The Early Years, asserts that famed Western lawman and gambler W.B. (“Bat”) Masterson once acted, albeit briefly, as town marshal of Salida’s upriver neighbor, Buena Vista.

Wrote Fry, “Town fathers needed to rid the place of ruffians who ran off peace officers as fast as they could be hired. Masterson’s presence, at $30 per week for three weeks, apparently accomplished what local officers couldn’t. It didn’t hurt that Masterson had posters printed warning outlaws he would shoot them on sight.” No source is cited for this assertion and Fry, now in retirement in Pueblo, can only recall gleaning the story from old Salida newspapers.

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Doc Holliday In Salida: Sightseeing Or Bloody Business? (Part Two of Two)

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by Charles F. Price

Editor’s note: In part one of this piece, which ran in the Feb. 2010 issue, the author documents a visit by the notorious gunman to Salida and attempts to determine whether it served as stopping off point for a secret trip to Arizona to “dispose” of John Peters Ringo.

In Denver during the extradition wrangle, a goofy con-man named Perry Mallon, pretending to be sheriff of Los Angeles County, California, briefly got the authorities to detain Doc on a trumped-up murder charge, but was soon discredited. While Doc was embroiled with Mallon, Bat Masterson, then marshal of Trinidad and a friend of Wyatt’s, slyly filed a bogus larceny complaint against Doc, hoping that case would give him legal dibs on Holliday over Mallon (this was a favor to Earp since Masterson actually despised Doc). The larceny case was slated for a hearing in Pueblo on July 11 — thus Doc’s trip through Salida.

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Doc Holliday In Salida: Sightseeing Or Bloody Business? (Part One of Two)

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by Charles F. Price

Was Salida the jumping-off point for the last killing in the West’s most famous vendetta, the one spawned by the so-called Gunfight at the OK Corral?

At least one recognized historian thinks so. Karen Holliday Tanner, whose collateral ancestor was the Georgia-born gambler/gunman/failed dentist Dr. John H. (“Doc”) Holliday, writes in a 1998 biography of her famed forebear that when he stepped off the train in Salida in the summer of 1882 he quickly met with Wyatt Earp and others west of town and in a roundabout trek by horseback and train slipped secretly into southeastern Arizona to slay John Peters Ringo, one of the last remaining members of the cowboy gang they had battled in Tombstone earlier that year.

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Espinosas Scapegoating Goes Awry

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The Strange Case of Capt. E. Wayne Eaton

Part Two

By Charles F. Price

Maj. Archibald H. Gillespie and Capt. Ethan Wayne Eaton seem to have openly clashed first in early February 1863, days before Carleton’s order for the re-arrest of the Espinosas arrived. The issue was relatively trivial—Gillespie felt the escort for his census of the Fort Garland area should be mounted, but Eaton contended the major’s orders from Carleton didn’t specify a mounted escort and assigned him dismounted men instead. The dispute may have been a minor one but it inspired in Gillespie a strong dislike for Eaton.

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Espinoas Scapegoating Goes Awry

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The Strange Case of Capt. E. Wayne Eaton

Part One

By Charles F. Price

The first and surest consequence of any calamity is the laying of blame. Whatever the disaster, natural or human, someone must pay for letting it happen. The worse the event, the more urgent the need to find and punish a party who can plausibly be held responsible. And if an actual culprit can’t be exposed, and if those in power fear they may be seen as accountable, a scapegoat will always do.

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The Rampage of the Espinosas, second of two parts

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Article by Charles F. Price

History – November 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine

ON APRIL 29, 1863, the bodies of five of the six men murdered by the Espinosas in South Park were buried in a little cemetery atop a windblown hill behind the town of Fairplay — where they still rest today. A few days later on May 3, a group of vigilantes, under the command of miner John McCannon, gathered there to pay respects to the slain before setting out to avenge them.

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Sources for the Espinosa articles

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Sidebar by Charles F. Price

History – November 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine

Books:

Dyer, J.L., The Snow-Shoe Itinerant, Cranston & Stowe, 1890 (Reprint).

Malkoski, Paul A., ed., This Soldier Life: The Diaries of Romine H. Ostrander, 1863 and 1865, Colorado Territory, Colorado Historical Society, 2006

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The Rampage of the Espinosas, part 1

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Article by Charles F. Price

Local History – October 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine

Terrorists inspired by religious fanaticism launch a murderous attack on a culture they regard as godless, greed-based, racist and colonialist.

Fear-stricken, yet determined to protect themselves and discover and exterminate the terrorists, that culture retaliates with urgent violence, overriding civil liberties and resorting to extralegal actions, including torture.

Sound familiar? Maybe. But this happened in the mid-nineteenth century, not in the early years of the twenty-first, and these terrorists were Roman Catholic Hispanics, not Muslim jihadists.

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