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“THE PEOPLE ARE SCARED NEARLY TO DEATH HERE” The Murderers Strike at the Vitals of South Park |
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The gold camp of Montgomery, home to “Dornick,” the garrulous correspondent of the Weekly Common-wealth, lay in a high valley dominated by the rugged mass of a peak in the Snowy Range that residents had named Mount Lincoln. The settlement lay at the foot of Hoosier Pass, which crosses the Continental Divide toward Breckenridge, then a thriving camp of miners working the gold deposits along the Blue River in what is now Summit County.
Despite its forbidding location high in the mountains, in an economic sense Montgomery was far from isolated; a branch of the grandly named Breckenridge, Buckskin Joe and Hamilton Wagon Road Company served it, linking it not only with the diggings on the other side of Hoosier Pass but with all the camps along the Middle Fork of the South Platte down to Fairplay. Colorado Territory had granted a charter for the toll road over to Breckenridge in November 1860.1 Traffic up and down it on the eastern side was constant; in a very real sense it could be called the heart of the mining activity in the upper section of South Park.
The settlement boasted five sawmills2 and on Saturday, April 25, 1863, three men were busy at one of them loading lumber into a wagon. One of these, Bill Carter, was a resident of the Mosquito Mining District, which lay several miles to the southwest but was also served by a branch of the main road. The other two seem to have been from Fairplay. Evidently the trio had climbed this high in the mountains to obtain wood because most of the timber lower down had already been cut since the rush of 1859 to make flumes, sluice boxes, rockers, and the other paraphernalia of placer mining.
Late that afternoon Carter decided he’d had enough of the hard work of shoving the heavy boards into the wagon. He declared his intention to return to Fairplay on foot, perhaps to enjoy some of the night life there, but would stop at Mosquito to retrieve his overcoat to protect himself against the chill of the evening.
It may seem strange that a man might set out alone near twilight, even along a heavily traveled road, at a time when the whole of South Park was on the alert for prowling assassins. Perhaps his companions even warned him of his danger. If they did, he ignored them. Maybe he believed the presence of the Colorado Volunteers had made solitary travel safer. He may have reassured himself that most of the killings to date had happened in remote wilderness locations quite unlike the busy placer mining operations all along the Fairplay road and down the next drainage of Beaver Creek northeastward. Even Binkley and Shoup had been murdered in a gulch some distance from the Kenosha House and off the Denver road. Whatever his reasoning, he started off alone as the sun was sinking, leaving the other two to finish the task of loading the wagon.
That same afternoon a Mr. Metcalf was getting his mail at the Montgomery post office. We know little about Metcalf; not even his first name has come down to us. We can assume he lived somewhere in the vicinity of Montgomery since he received mail there, and we know from a newspaper account that he, like Carter and his friends, had accumulated a wagonload of lumber that he intended to take down to Fairplay, perhaps to sell. Presumably he was a Republican and maybe an abolitionist, since his mail that day contained a copy of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, some explanatory reports, and a communication from Hiram Pitt Bennett, Colorado’s congressional delegate. Leaving the post office, Metcalf slipped the papers into his left breast pocket, mounted to the box of his ox-drawn wagon, and began his trip down the mountain toward Fairplay.
At some point on the descent Bill Carter overtook Metcalf’s slow-moving outfit, passed it, and continued on his way. Four miles west of Fairplay, just below a spot where a road forked off to the right toward Buckskin Joe and within sight of a hostelry called the Cottage Grove House, Carter was surprised to encounter two mounted men, one large and formidable-looking, the other smaller. One wore a white broad-brimmed hat. Both appeared dark-complexioned, as if they were Mexicans or blacks, or perhaps white men who had smeared their faces with burnt cork. One of these shot Carter in the chest, killing him instantly. His body was then dragged a short distance from the road and thrown into a snowbank; his head was viciously hacked as if with a tomahawk. The killers rifled his pockets and stole his overcoat.
About this time Metcalf was approaching the scene in his ox wagon. The murderers concealed themselves in some brush by the roadside and when Metcalf was within about a hundred yards of their ambush site, one of the assailants fired a shot and struck Metcalf in the left breast, providentially striking the thick packet of papers he had pocketed after getting his mail, leaving him bruised but unhurt. The report of the gun and the smell of Carter’s blood spooked Metcalf’s ox team and the frightened animals bolted. One of the killers fired a second shot just as a wheel of Metcalf’s careening wagon struck a rock, causing the rig to rebound. Metcalf fell backward and the bullet missed—a second time fate saw fit to spare the good Republican’s life.
A man named Allen, who was staying at the nearby Cottage Grove House, heard the gunfire, snatched up his rifle, and ran out into the main road just as Metcalf’s wagon hurtled past. Dusk was falling but Allen got a good look at the killers and may have even fired at them, but they made a safe escape.3
Private Ostrander’s diary tells what came next:
A man4 came running into town, this evening about dark, and said that he had been shot at, and chassed [sic] by two men, three miles from here towards Buckskin Joe’s. He said that he saw a man that lives in this town [Fairplay] by the house of McCarter a little while before and he thought that he was killed. A half dozen men and some citizens went to look for him and found him shot in the breast and cut in the forehead with the but [sic] of a gun or some sharp instrument. He has a brother living here.5
A participant later recalled that the search for Carter’s body went on for two hours before it was located, “mainly through the untiring efforts of his brother,” who was “overcome with grief” once the mutilated corpse was found.6
The same source described the reaction of the populace around Fairplay:
The whole town was aroused, and a party formed to scour the country. As soon as it was fairly light on Sunday morning … messengers were sent to Buckskin, from where a large force turned out to aid in the search for the murderers. The country for miles around was searched. … The murderers were tracked from the scene of the murder to Platte River, a large track leading, and a smaller following. They took up Platte River in the water, and their trail was lost.7
Ostrander’s diary entry for that Sunday tells how the Firsters also took up the hunt for the killers:
Some citizen thought he heard a couple of gunshots in a northeast direction about seven o’clock last night and it was thought that the murderers had possibly gone over into veever [Beaver] gulch, and killed somebody. So Lieuten’t Oster, and five of us went over to see about it. Nobody had been killed and there had no gunshots been heard in the neighborhood. Ten of us with Lieu’t Wilson, and about a dozen citizens went to look for the trail to day. We found it, and followed it, till about the middle of the afternoon when we lost it. We hunted about three hours for it and then gave it up as a bad job and came home. The people are scared nearly to death here none but the bravest dare go out at all.8
Death sites of the six victims in and around South Park.
Incredibly, that same evening, only about twenty-four hours after killing Carter, the murderers attacked again, killing and mutilating two more victims at Red Hill Pass on the main road between Denver and Fairplay, another central and very exposed location in the middle of the South Park goldfields, with witnesses nearby. Clearly the murderers intended a bold stroke, slaying three men in two days within a compass of only five or six miles, in the thick of the region’s most populated area. It was an attack calculated to exacerbate the terror Carter’s murder had already stirred up.
The dead at Red Hill Pass were Fred Lehman and Sol Seyga,9 residents of California Gulch10 on the western side of the Snowy Range. They and a group of neighbors were returning from Central City, where Lehman had testified in US District Court against one George W. Brown, thought to be a member of an outlaw gang that had rustled ten of Lehman’s mules at Frying Pan Gulch the previous fall.11
Red Hill is a long, pine-clad Dakota Hogback formation running north–south, bisecting the South Park basin.12 Today’s Highway 285 cuts through this ridge at a place now called Red Hill Pass, but in 1863 the pass of that name was located one mile due north of the present one.13 Its name apparently referred to the salmon-colored rock present in the ridge and especially noticeable in the cut of today’s highway. At the time of the killings the original pass was “wooded and rocky on the top and the road crosses … (at a place) just wide enough to admit a wagon.”14 Even now that ridge has a forbidding air, wearing its dark shroud of pine forest fringed in early spring with stands of bone-white aspen not yet ready to bear leaves, these dismal hues contrasting with the livid tint of the exposed rock, which at times suggests the color of strawberry pulp—or of blood.
Lehman and Seyga had passed Stubb’s ranch a mile or so east of Red Hill about four o’clock and an hour later were walking their horses up the hill and had nearly reached the narrow slot of the pass at the summit when they were ambushed. Seyga was shot in the breast and instantly killed. Lehman was not so fortunate. He was wounded in one arm and, equipped with a Colt’s Navy revolver, evidently engaged the killers in a running fight back down the hill until he was fatally shot through the body.
Three other men had been traveling a short distance behind Lehman and Seyga. They too had been in attendance at the Central City court session. One of them, Nathan S. Hurd, who had built the first road into the Mosquito holdings, had once employed Lehman and Seyga at a quartz mill he operated. He and his two companions came upon the blood-splashed scene while the bodies were still warm and saw to their horror that in addition to being shot, Lehman and Seyga had been savagely tomahawked. The bodies had been stripped and their horses taken. Hurd and the other two tentatively searched the immediate area. They found Lehman’s paper collar pinned to a tree, “upon which something was written in Mexican … saying that vengeance was to be wreaked upon Americans as a sacrifice to the Virgin.”15
This evidence, together with the eyewitness accounts of Metcalf and Allen, confirmed at least the physical appearance of the mysterious assassins and clarified their purpose. They were not Rebel guerrillas or rampaging jayhawkers at all but Hispanos apparently conducting some sort of vendetta against Anglos, seemingly for religious reasons. We can guess what effect this realization must have had on the miners in South Park, who were accustomed to seeing “Mexicans” as meek, humble, illiterate, superstitious, and above all harmless laborers, operating the arrastras that ground their ore, selling the firewood they burned to keep warm in their cabins, or herding the sheep that furnished the meat they ate. Overnight that dismissive attitude would change. By Monday, every Hispano in South Park—indeed, every person whose coloring was dark—would be regarded with fear and suspicion.
For reasons that are unclear, Hurd and his friends seem not to have spread word of the killings that Sunday night. Some of them could have kept watch over the bodies while others carried the word into Fairplay, but evidently this did not happen. Perhaps they were afraid to hang about in the darkness of the pass with the killers possibly lingering nearby in search of fresh victims. Maybe they simply stampeded for home. Whatever the reason, news of the atrocity at Red Hill Pass did not reach Fairplay until the next morning at about nine o’clock when, according to Ostrander:
One of the boys came rushing in … and said, two more men killed Lieutenant, whereupon he jumped up from a game of poker and sung out saddle up! Which was done in about the time it takes me to write it. Lieu’t Oster with three of us sent down to Guirand’s ranche about 12 miles from Fairplay to watch from a hill, while Lieu’t Wilson went to look for the corpses, and the trail. He found them at the red hills. One shot through the heart, lying in the road, and the other a little to one side, shot in the arm, and cut in the head with a hatchet. He found the trail of one man, and he had macisins [moccasins] on, as every trail we have followed has been, which he followed till dark and then came in here about 8 o’clock.16
The Reverend John Dyer, the Methodist missionary, found himself caught up in the whirlwind of events precipitated by the discovery of the dead men at Red Hill Pass. He has left us a description of what occurred. “At this time there were a few soldiers at Fair Play,” he wrote, speaking of Wilson’s and Oster’s detachment. “A number were sent to bring in the dead bodies, and try, if possible, to capture the murderers. Just as the soldiers passed the second dead body, they saw a man coming on the road, whom they first thought to be a traveler. But he, seeing them about the same time, and having heard of the numerous murders … thought they would surely kill him; and dropping his coat in the road, put out south.”17
The Reverend John L. Dyer, the “Snow-Shoe Itinerant” who saved Foster from a lynching. (Photo courtesy of History Colorado, scan no. 10027605)
Was the lone traveler perhaps dark-complexioned? Whatever his pigmentation, the fact that he had fled aroused the troopers’ suspicions, already sharpened by the tensions and anxiety pervading the Park. The Firsters mounted up and gave chase “at full speed.” Reverend Dyer wrote that the fugitive was “a man in the prime of life and active, especially on this occasion,” and “made a good race.” What had begun as a comedy of errors now took a sinister turn. “The word came to Fair Play that they were after the murderer,” Dyer remembered, “and another company started on horses to try to head him off.”18 With two parties of agitated riders closing in on the terrified stranger, the grim possibility of a lynching was taking shape.
Dyer wrote: “But Mr. John Foster—for that was his name—evaded them all. At one time his pursuers were very close on him, as he passed over a sharp ridge, but he got over before they got quite to the top, and that gave him a chance to turn his course and throw them off his track.” Dyer made the preposterous claim that Foster covered “fifteen or twenty miles” in his marathon run, reaching Fairplay “in his socks, without coat or hat.”19
It is impossible to know exactly what the terrain was like in 1863 between Red Hill Pass and Fairplay, but today, from the wooded heights of the old pass southwest to the edge of town, the land is flat and treeless except at one point where a low ridge covered with aspen slopes down from the north; this might have been Dyer’s “sharp ridge,” though it doesn’t look sharp to modern eyes.
There would have been impediments, though. Perhaps there were structures that have long since disappeared, which Foster would have had to dodge. Depending on the desperate runner’s route, there might have been at least two creeks to cross, Crooked Creek, a small one, and Beaver Creek, a larger one, closer to Fairplay; and in late April, with snow still on the ground in places and the soil boggy from melt, the going for men and horses would have been heavy.
Even so, and bearing in mind the fact that terror gave wings to Foster’s feet, it is hard to understand how men on horseback could not manage to overtake him—unless the ruffianly Firsters had spent the morning verifying their reputation for imbibing spirituous liquors at all hours of the day and night. At any rate, the distance between today’s Red Hill Pass and the edge of Fairplay on Highway 285 is almost exactly two miles; Foster had farther to go, perhaps as much as three but hardly more than four miles, and certainly not Dyer’s fifteen or twenty.
Private Ostrander, still based at Guiraud’s “French Ranch” south of Fairplay, spent that Monday patrolling without success, but the next night “came across some citizens from Fairplay, who said the trail we were following was that of a man who saw the boys yesterday and took them for guerrillas and ran all day and came in after dark. He was scared nearly to death and threw away his coat hat comfiter [sic] and handkerchief.”20 Thus if Foster did not cover fifteen or twenty miles, Ostrander’s diary confirms he certainly ran a good long way.
The Reverend’s account continues:
As the people saw [Foster] in his plight, they halloed: “There comes the murderer!” But I recognized him, as he kept a “Methodist Hotel” in California Gulch, and kept in between them and him until he got to the first house. The door being open he went in, and it was some time before he could relate his feat, as he was very short of breath and badly scared, and did not know till then but it was the murderers that had been running him so close. After a while his pursuers came, feeling mortified that he had got away from them; but when the facts were known, they felt relieved, for although they had been outrun, they had been saved from killing an innocent man.21
One wonders whether the charitable preacher correctly divined the temper of the mob. It is more than likely, given events about to unfold, that they felt cheated of the chance to hang somebody, anybody, simply to relieve the oppressive tension that each new day in South Park seemed to deepen.22
The Rocky Mountain News Weekly of May 7 gave voice to the feelings of outrage, dread, and frustration now pervading the Territory: “All [the murders], from the first, have been marked with a peculiar singularity—the most fiendish and diabolical atrocity. … There is today, no more known about, or who are the perpetrators, than when tidings came of the first one. … These acts will probably go on until the people take the matter in hand and make a terrible example of some of the suspected.”23 Evidently the writer of this piece was unaware that Metcalf and Allen had at least identified the killers of Carter as either Mexicans or blacks. But apart from that small lapse, he had correctly judged the mood of the people of South Park.
On the same day an editorial note in the Weekly Commonwealth also summed up the prevailing mixture of paranoia and resolve:
It seems to us some organization of the Vigilance Committee or secret police style is needed among our mountain friends to detect and punish the thieves and murderers swarming in the Park and adjacent portions of the Territory. The soldiers undoubtedly do their best. But they are easily eluded. If these robbers have any organization it is secret, permitting them to appear in the community as good citizens, and the only way to ferret them out is for all honest men to band together and spare neither vigilance in detecting nor rigor in punishing, whenever they can be caught. It was done in San Francisco, in Denver, and many other localities in the West. What man has done man can do.24
NOTES
1. Simmons, Bayou Salado, 78, 81; Helmuth, The Passes of Colorado, 108–109.
2. Ghost Towns and History of the American West, http://www.ghosttowns.com/states/co/montgomery.html, accessed January 18, 2013.
3. This account of the attacks on Carter and Metcalf is a composite of three primary sources, one a contemporary newspaper account and two later reminiscences. “Dornick” wrote a description from Montgomery on May 2, 1863, one week after the fact, which was carried in the Weekly Commonwealth of May 7. The first reminiscence is from an article entitled “Early Days in Park County” in the Fairplay Flume of February 9, 1900, written by an unidentified person known as “An Old Timer,” who was personally involved in the incident. The second is from the Reverend John L. Dyer, the Methodist minister who served several years in South Park and was well placed to know the parties involved. There are small discrepancies between these versions. “Dornick” and Dyer have Carter merely passing Metcalf on the road and later being killed, implying that they were strangers; “An Old Timer” says that Metcalf, Carter, and another man were all part of the same wood-collecting party; that Carter went on ahead; and that the other two men followed in the ox-drawn wagon, only to come upon Carter immediately after he was murdered. According to this version, both Metcalf and his friend were tumbled backward when the ox team bolted and the wagon wheel struck a stone in the road. Dyer’s account agrees with “Dornick’s” that Metcalf was alone. Though both he and “An Old Timer” wrote many years after the events they describe, their memories are remarkably detailed, especially as regards the events subsequent to the killings, and in the main all three accounts coincide. It is Dyer who gives the important information that one of the assailants wore a white broad-brimmed hat and that both were “either negroes or blackened,” though his additional comment, “I suppose he [Metcalf] had never seen a Mexican,” is nonsense, as Mexicans were working the goldfields and herding sheep throughout South Park at the time; Dyer, The Snow-Shoe Itinerant, 152. In the narrative above the author has attempted to reconcile the small differences among these three sources.
4. This could have been either Metcalf or Allen, the witness at the Cottage Grove House.
5. Ostrander, This Soldier Life, 17.
6. The brother was named Charles Carter. “An Old Timer” wrote in the Fairplay Flume article that “the brother was so overcome with grief and so shocked, that long after he would awake from his sleep and exclaim: “Oh, my brother, my brother!” Bill Carter’s body was taken into Fairplay that night and was eventually buried in the Fairplay Cemetery along with Binkley and Shoup. His burial place is unmarked.
7. Ibid.
8. Ostrander, This Soldier Life, 17.
9. “Dornick’s” article in the Weekly Commonwealth, May 7, 1863, unaccountably calls Seyga “Vinton,” though the name is Seyga in the cemetery listing of the Park County Local History Archives (Park Country cemetery records, http://www.parkcoarchives.org/Cemetery_Records_Name.pdf, accessed January 18, 2013) and also appears in other contemporary sources. Interestingly, Ostrander also calls this victim Vinton, which perhaps was a first name; he refers to Lehman as Leland, obviously a phonetic spelling (Ostrander, This Soldier Life, 18).
10. The present location of Leadville, Colorado.
11. See Chapter 3, note 15. On April 13, Brown, Isaac Roberts, Jonathan Leeper, and two men known only as Slatten and Harrison had been indicted for larceny by a grand jury of the US Second District Court in Central City. They were charged with stealing several mules, the property of Frederick and Ernst Lehman and Leonard Kirscht, on September 12, 1862, in Lake County. Second District Court records indicate a trial jury found the defendants guilty but do not show the sentences imposed. Brown sought a new trial, arguing that the crime, if it occurred, took place outside the proper jurisdiction of the court. The records do not show the final disposition of the case, nor do they include a list of witnesses; Record Group 21, Records of the US District Court of the US Territory of Colorado, Bankruptcy, Civil and Criminal Case Files, 1862–74, Case #54, United States of America vs. George W. Brown, Isaac Roberts, Jonathan Leeper, Slatten and Harrison, National Archives and Records Administration, Rocky Mountain Division, Denver, CO. See also Parkhill, The Law Goes West, 42–43. Parkhill, who examined US District Court records in the 1950s, found a true bill of indictment charging “Vincent Moore, a disloyal citizen, with conspiring on September 12, 1862, with Jonathan Leeper, George W. Brown, John Haffner, James Richie and others, to give aid and comfort to the rebellion by providing rebels with pistols, blankets, horses, mules, bacon, 1,000 pounds of flour, and $50 in cash.” The Lehman mule-stealing case against some of the same individuals must have been related to this charge, since the date of the offense, September 12, 1862, is the same in both instances.
12. Simmons, Bayou Salado, 16.
13. Helmuth, The Passes of Colorado, 178.
14. Weekly Commonwealth, May 7, 1863.
15. Ibid.; The Alaska Citizen, May 8, 1911, citing an interview with Hurd. A correspondent for the Black Hawk Daily Mining Journal, in a letter published July 23, 1864, told of traveling through Red Hill Pass over a year after the murders. He wrote, “The shirt collar which Lehman wore when killed was nailed to a poplar sapling, and there remains to the present day.”
16. Ostrander, This Soldier Life, 17–18.
17. Dyer, The Snow-Shoe Itinerant, 152–153.
18. Ibid.
19. Rocky Mountain News Weekly, May 7, 1863, credited Foster with “remarkable speed and endurance,” having made “a six hours’ run over the mountains and through the woods.”
20. Ostrander, This Soldier Life, 18.
21. Dyer, The Snow-Shoe Itinerant, 153.
22. It should be noted that “Dornick,” in his long article in the Weekly Commonwealth of May 7, believed Foster was shot at and chased by the real murderers. Despite this lapse, his piece correctly linked the killings of Bruce, Harkens, Addleman, Binkley, Shoup, Carter, Lehman, and Seyga to the same killers. By coincidence, the Rocky Mountain News Weekly drew the same conclusions, also in its issue of May 7, the first time these connections were made.
23. Rocky Mountain News Weekly, May 7, 1863.
24. Weekly Commonwealth, May 7, 1863.
