|
“THE BRIGHTEST SUCCESS REWARDED THEM FOR THEIR TOILS” Tobin Brings in the Heads |
14 |
There are almost as many accounts of the delivery of the Espinosas’ heads to Colonel Tappan as there were people who participated in the event or claimed to have witnessed it. A point of general agreement, with one exception, was that Tom Tobin and Lieutenant Baldwin’s reduced detachment1 returned to Fort Garland on the morning of Friday, October 16; Tobin himself, always befuddled about dates, says this happened on the eleventh of September.2 They arrived “just after guard mounting,”3 that is, about nine o’clock.4
Tobin, in relating his story later published in The Colorado Magazine, described what transpired;
I rode up in front of the Commanding Officer’s quarters and called for Col. Tappan. I rolled the assassins [sic] heads out of the sack at Col. Tappan’s feet. I said, “Here, Col., I have accomplished what you wished. This head is Espinosa’s. This other is his companion’s head and there is no mistake made.” Lieut. Baldwin spoke, “Yes, Col., there is no mistake, for we have this diary and letters and papers to show that they were the assassins. The diary showed that they had killed twenty-two up to the date the first Espinosa was killed, not counting the Mexican Corporal, the first killed. … There was about thirty killed altogether.”5
Given Tobin’s discomfort with the spoken word, the speech he gives himself in this version is unconvincing to say the least. His grandson, Kit Carson III, in his reminiscences, may have better preserved both the old scout’s terseness and the actual circumstances of the exposure of the grisly trophies:
When grandpa got back to fort Garland he found that Colonel Tappan and some other officers were out horseback riding with their wives. He didn’t say anything; just stood around with his gunnysack, waiting.
After a while the riding party came back and somebody told the colonel Tom Tobin was waiting to see him. So he sent for grandpa, and when he came into the room, he asked, “Any luck, Tom?” Grandpa said, “So-so,” and he held the gunnysack upside down and rolled the two heads out on the floor and the ladies screamed and grandpa said the colonel himself turned kind of green.
For a good many years we lived at Fort Garland in the same room where Grandpa had rolled the heads out on the floor, but it didn’t bother anybody.6
Another eyewitness was Tom Burns, the young freighter who had concealed soldiers in his wagon in hopes of tempting the Espinosas to attack on the second day of the scout. In his 1897 letter to Tobin he recalled the scene:
I was in Col Tappan’s office at the Fort. … [Y]ou came into the office with a flour sac [sic] in your hand and told Col Tappan “I have got them” he said got what, when you put your hand in the sack and pulled out the head of Espinosa. [I]t was a horrible sight … then you took out the head of the boy, he must have been about eighteen years old.
Lt Baldwin and the men said that you had killed both of them, and I saw you take their heads out of the sack. Mr. C.F. Stallsteimer who was at Ft Garland at the time says he had the heads in his hands.7
At least by Burns’s account Baldwin was gracious enough in Tappan’s presence to give Tobin credit for bringing down both Espinosas, an accomplishment he denied the scout later that day when writing his report. As for his own description of the transfer of the heads, Baldwin’s, addressed to Tappan, is the briefest on record: “We delivered to you the heads of the two persons as soon as we arrived.”8
Perhaps the least plausible of the stories, though supposedly gained from Kit Carson III, says Tobin and Montoya arrived at dusk, without any soldiers, and found that Tappan was out walking with his wife—a highly unlikely prospect since Tappan was then a bachelor. The heads, tied in a buckskin bag, were temporarily stashed behind an office door. “In a few minutes Tappan came in, and after hearing Tobin’s short report and examining the evidence he directed the orderly to bury it behind the stables”9
The tracking and killing of the Espinosas were hailed by “Battery”:
Lt. Baldwin’s party was out four days, and traversed some of the ruggedest portions of the mountains to be found in these parts; yet the party with the most determined perseverance, followed the lead of their heroic guide—Thomas T. Tobens [sic]—until the brightest success rewarded them for their toils. From the first, no precaution was omitted, which could in any way add a chance of final success. Perfect silence was enjoined and maintained, and for three days these man-hunters said not a word. The one absorbing idea was of the Espinosas. The thought of their name, and the hope of their capture, that burned in every breast, stilled every tongue! At night, no more fire was made than absolutely necessary, and that, so concealed as to avoid discovery.10
In the happy circumstances the hyperbole was justified. Nor was Colonel Tappan any more restrained in the congratulatory order he issued on Saturday, October 17. He began by praising the efforts of the officers and men who had sought and rescued Dolores Sánches on the night after the attack. Then he extended his “admiration and thanks” to Baldwin and the men of his detachment “and to Thomas T. Tobins [sic], Esq., who accompanied Lieut. Baldwin as their guide, for their energy and activity in the pursuit, the patience and perseverance of their march, the success of their efforts in the capture and beheading of the assassins, Espinosas; and thus ridding the country of these dreaded murderers and highwaymen.” He continued:
Therefore, in behalf of the men, women and children of this Territory; in behalf of the friends of those whom Espinosa has assassinated, and in my own behalf, I thank you and congratulate you upon the final success of your efforts in the capture of those who for a long time have evaded pursuit, and whose knowledge of the country and skill in covering their trail and hiding, have for so long a time enabled them to escape capture and the death their manifold crimes merited.
I congratulate you, heroic soldiers of Colorado upon being instrumental in the saving of many valuable lives, or had these assassins (who only a few hours before their death placed upon paper a statement that they had already murdered thirty two Americans and intended to assassinate many more) been allowed to continue in their course of blood we know not how many or who would have fallen victims.
The success which has attended your efforts is the result of your energy, courage and perseverance. Not intimidated by the difficulties and dangers which beset you, you continued to support and follow your brave guide and accomplished the object for which you were sent.
Again I thank you, and hope that an honorable course in the service of your country and immortal renown awaits you.11
It is both agreeable and somewhat surprising to note the prominence awarded Tobin both in the newspaper account and by Tappan, especially in circumstances where the temptation to attribute all success to the military must have been very great. After all, Tappan’s highest-priority assignment—given him by Chivington, no doubt, in hopes his detested subordinate would fail—had been accomplished against odds and Tappan, in his order, could have been excused for grabbing all the glory for himself and his troops, as indeed Baldwin had already done in his report. Still, it is fairly obvious that without Tom Tobin’s tracking skills the army would never have cornered and killed the Espinosas, and that the scout actually deserved an even larger share of praise than he received.
But to his credit Tappan was not content with a mere expression of thanks; he also told Tobin he had seen a report in the Rocky Mountain News that Governor Evans had offered a reward of $2,500 for the capture of the Espinosas. Tappan, Baldwin, and others at the post urged Tom to apply for it.12 Tobin, quite well off at the time,13 had undertaken the duty without any thought of payment or reward, but upon the advice of the officers and his friends he eventually put in a claim for it. His repeated attempts to secure the reward as his material circumstances deteriorated and age and ill health beset him would form a melancholy chapter of his later life.
The ultimate disposition of the Espinosas’ heads has remained a mystery. For a time they were on display in the adjutant’s office at Fort Garland, which was located in the same building as Tappan’s quarters.14 After that, their fate is uncertain. Perhaps they were simply buried behind the stables at Fort Garland after all. They were now useless as evidence; the materials found in the Espinosas’ camp had removed any doubt about the identities of the dead.
But nineteenth-century America was fascinated, if not infatuated, with death and with the relics of death.15 While the photographs Mathew Brady took of dead soldiers at Antietam are often truthfully cited as first acquainting Americans with the ghoulish spectacle of mass death,16 it should also be remembered that likenesses of deceased infants, wives, husbands, and other loved ones were cherished mementos in the homes of bereaved families throughout the late Victorian age. Equally as compelling and popular, if much more lurid, were the preserved physical remains of infamous persons, especially heads.17 The taking of heads and other body parts as proof of death was actually not uncommon on the frontier. Consequently the heads of the terrible Espinosas took on a morbid significance among the citizens of Colorado Territory who had lived in fear of the rampaging outlaws for six long months. Stories about them have abounded throughout the ensuing years.
The heads are sometimes said to have been stored in a hidden recess of the Colorado Historical Society (now History Colorado) or in the basement of the State Capitol. But perhaps the most bizarre theory of all tells that Tobin put Felipe’s head in a crock of alcohol to preserve it until he could carry it to Denver to claim the reward, only to learn that the post doctor had stolen it and started for Pueblo. However, the doctor happened to drop the crock on the way, breaking it. Tobin, following the doctor to recapture the purloined head, found it lying by the roadside, retrieved it, and hurried on into Pueblo in search of more alcohol with which to repickle the now much bedraggled trophy. There was momentary confusion when it was discovered that for the first and possibly last time in its history Pueblo lacked a sufficiency of alcohol to preserve the head; but before day’s end a supply train arrived and relieved the shortage.18
Unfortunately for the veracity of this entertaining account, Fort Garland’s physician, Dr. L. B. McLain, was considered an officer of high reputation, “competent and attentive to his duties,”19 and thus most unlikely to have made off with the pickled head. It may be worth noting that in 1920, in a piece about Tom Tobin, a Colorado Springs newspaper stated that the head of Espinosa “is reported to have been preserved in alcohol, and afterward taken to Pueblo, where it is now said to occupy a place in a collection of skulls of notorious murderers.”20
There is also a stubbornly unverifiable story that when Chivington assigned Tappan to Fort Garland in August with orders to capture or kill the Espinosas, he insisted that the heads be obtained as proof positive of the outlaws’ demise; but when Tappan obediently shipped the trophies to headquarters in Denver, Chivington publicly condemned him for having committed an “unchristian” act, a strangely finicky reaction for the perpetrator of the Sand Creek Massacre, where Colorado troops under his personal command gleefully slashed body parts from the slaughtered Cheyenne, including female genitalia that they draped over their hats and saddle horns.21 One cannot help wishing this particular tale might be substantiated, if only in order to savor its black irony.
Mystery also surrounds the writings found in the camp of the Espinosas: the “memorandum book, several letters” and the strangely worded request for a pardon from Governor Evans.22 The memorandum book, also referred to in some sources as a diary, may have been the item Kit Carson III said Tom Tobin found while searching the bodies of the Espinosas. “Grandpa told me he … found a little book listing all the people they had killed. He thought it listed twenty-five killings. I don’t know whatever became of the little book. I think grandpa turned it over to the colonel [Tappan].”23 On the other hand, Frank Hall, historian and former legislator, wrote in his History of the State of Colorado, “By a memorandum book taken from one of the Espinosas, for a long time in my possession, it was found that they had killed thirty-two Americans in the course of their different raids.”24
It will be recalled that Felipe had ridden into Conejos in September, delivering a letter to the home of Lafayette Head and also addressed to Governor Evans, claiming he had killed twenty-two men in all and thought his “bravery” deserved an “honorable amnesty,”25 wording similar to the writings found in the camp on Quindaro Creek, which the Weekly Commonwealth said was also addressed to the governor, translating it as follows:
They [the Anglos] ruined our families—they took everything in our house; first our beds and blankets, then our provisions. Seeing this we said, “We would rather be dead than see such infamies committed on our families. These were the reasons we had to go out and kill Americans—revenge for the infamies committed on our families. But we have repented of killing. Pardon us for what we have done and give us our liberty, so that no officer will have anything to do with us, for also in killing, one gains his liberty. I am aware that you know of some I have killed, but of others you don’t know. It is a sufficient number, however. Ask in New Mexico if any other two men have killed as many men as the Espinosas. We have killed thirty-two.26
Here the translation falters, though the writer, “Battery,” says Espinosa seemed to acknowledge burning the Philbrook carriage and killing the mules; he also called Americans “gringos and cowards” and “ridiculed the idea of their taking him.”27 So reminiscent are these sentiments of the purported content of the September letter left at Major Head’s that the possibility arises it might have been a copy of the previous missive, which Felipe had retained, or perhaps a more recent document in which he feverishly repeated his earlier rants. However, “Battery” writes that all the papers found in the camp “are of a late date,” but also says a second letter, “which seems to have been written to his wife,” seems “particularly” so.28 If Felipe did mention killing the mules and burning the buggy, the letter found on him must have been written within a day or two of his death.
To confuse matters further, the reader will remember that the McCannon posse found what was called a “memorandum book” on the body of Vivián Espinosa at Oil Springs Canyon, dated “Plaza de Conejos, 1863,” also addressed to Governor Evans, alluding to the reward posted against the brothers by Marshal Hunt after the fight at San Rafael in January. This message, as translated by the correspondent “Dornick,” stated that the Espinosas were “sworn to exterminate Americans” and would “kill Americans while they live.”29
None of these documents is known to have survived in the original. We have their fragmentary texts only in imperfect newspaper translations or in the form of characterizations by persons, all Anglos as far as we know, who saw them. The apparent similarity of their content makes it impossible to judge when they were written, and over the years the particular provenance of each has been lost. Clark Secrest, in attempting to sort out the confusion for an article about the Espinosas in the magazine Colorado Heritage, noted the remarks of Kit Carson III and “Dornick” and stated there appeared to have been two separate “diaries,” one taken off Vivián’s body and one reclaimed from Felipe’s camp, but Secrest concluded both are lost.
In December 1895 [Secrest wrote], Colorado US Senator Henry Teller wrote to John McCannon … stating that he (Teller) recalled McCannon having taken a diary from Vivián’s body. Teller adds that he and lawyer Wilbur Fiske Stone … translated the diary from the Spanish and that it contained a “record of their bloody deeds.” Frank Hall … wrote to The Denver Post of October 20, 1901, that Stone showed him the diary, from which, in Hall’s words, “it was wholly impossible to gather any rational motive for their deeds except that [the killings] appeared to be given as blood offerings to the Virgin.30
This 1901 statement by Hall would seem to contradict his assertion in his History of the State of Colorado that Vivián’s memorandum book had been “for a long time in my possession.” Regrettably the matter must be left here. One can only hope that the “diary,” the “memorandum book,” and the “letters” are sequestered somewhere in private hands, and will one day be released for public scrutiny. Only then can we speak knowledgably about the true intentions and feelings of the Espinosas—or know for certain just how many Americans they claimed to have murdered.
Tobin returned to his ranch on Trinchera Creek and took up his annual routine, completing preparations for the move to his winter home in Costilla. But before he was able to depart, a messenger arrived from Costilla to tell him Pascuala, whose kinsman he had just killed, had given birth to a baby girl on October 23. At this same time his Navajo slave girl Dominga was in her seventh month of pregnancy. At the center of this combination of circumstances, any ordinary man might have set out for Costilla with mixed feelings, but somehow one suspects that Tom Tobin left unvexed. He probably rode south in complete serenity. He was who he was, and it was up to others to adjust to that reality. He took Dominga with him.31
NOTES
1. Tobin recalled that the party consisted of himself, Baldwin, and six soldiers. The troopers who had broken off earlier with Loren Jenks had never rejoined.
2. Tobin, “The Capture of the Espinosas,” 65.
3. Weekly Commonwealth, October 28, 1863.
4. Baldwin, “Scout from Fort Garland,” 705.
5. Tobin, “The Capture of the Espinosas,” 65.
6. Carson, “The Lives of Two Great Scouts,” 200. Carson was the grandson of both Tobin on his mother’s side and the famed scout and Indian fighter Kit Carson on his father’s side; he lived at Fort Garland when his paternal grandfather commanded there after the Civil War.
7. Letter of T. D. Burns to T. T. Tobin.
8. Baldwin, “Scout from Fort Garland,” 705.
9. Smith, “The Adventures of Three Fort Garland Heroes,” 6.
10. Weekly Commonwealth, October 28, 1863.
11. Ibid.
12. Tobin, “The Capture of the Espinosas,” 65. Tobin went on to say no copy of that edition of the newspaper could be found because of the flood that carried away the News printing office, but the great Cherry Creek flood did not occur until May 20, 1864; see Smith, The Birth of Colorado, 192, and Berwanger, The Rise of the Centennial State, 14. To the author’s knowledge no such reward notice has been found in editions of the Rocky Mountain News during the spring and summer of 1863; though its existence is commonly referred to in secondary sources, the actual date of its publication is not given. There can be little doubt such a notice was published, as both Tom Tobin and John McCannon eventually filed claims for it. See Secrest, “The ‘Bloody Espinosas,’” 16. See also Appendix B.
13. Carson, “The Lives of Two Great Scouts,” 200; “Grandpa was doing pretty well at the time, so he didn’t try to collect the reward money. But when he got to be an old man and wasn’t doing so well he put in a claim for the reward.” See Appendix B.
14. Weekly Commonwealth, October 28, 1863.
15. For instance, see Michael Lesy, Wisconsin Death Trip (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973), 2000.
16. William A. Frassanito, Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America’s Bloodiest Day (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978), 16; Frassanito quotes the New York Times of October 20, 1862: “Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought the bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along streets, he has done something very like it.”
17. Frontier annals are rife with what we would consider ghoulish examples, especially pickled heads. James D. Horan and Paul Sann, Pictorial History of the Wild West (New York: Crown Publishers, 1954), 24, show a carnival advertisement announcing the exhibition of the head of California outlaw Joaquín Murieta and the deformed hand of his compatriot, Three-Fingered Jack; Edward E. Leslie, The Devil Knows How to Ride: The True Story of William Clarke Quantrill and His Confederate Raiders (New York: Random House, 1996), xxi, tells of the preservation of the skull of the celebrated guerrilla chieftain, to which artificial flesh and features were later applied. Whole corpses, after public examination, often ended up in anatomy labs, as described by Ted Yeatman, Frank and Jesse James: The Story behind the Legend (Nashville, TN: Cumberland House, 2000), for the cases of Clell Miller, Bill Stiles, and Charley Pitts of the James–Younger gang, killed in their raid on a bank in Northfield, Minnesota; Pitts’s corpse was later submerged in a lake by a physician so as to reduce it by decomposition to a skeleton. Horan and Sann, Pictorial History of the Wild West, 210, tell how strips of skin from the body of outlaw Big Nose George Curry were tanned and made into pocketbooks and moccasins. Photographs of dead outlaws were all the rage; Glenn Shirley, West of Hell’s Fringe (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978), offers a gallery of such likenesses (the Dalton brothers, Bill Doolin, Tulsa Jack Blake, Little Dick West, Ned Christie, and many more).
18. Taylor, Colorado South of the Border, 216.
19. Thompson, New Mexico Territory during the Civil War, 44.
20. Colorado Springs Gazette, July 11, 1920.
21. There is an extensive literature dealing with the Sand Creek Massacre, but Perkins, Tom Tobin, 183–187, gives some of the most graphic testimony offered before the 1865 military commission charged with investigating the affair. Ironically, the chairman of this body was Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Tappan, Chivington’s old enemy and an advocate of Indian rights.
22. See Chapter 13.
23. Carson, “The Lives of Two Great Scouts,” 200.
24. Hall, History of the State of Colorado, IV: 381.
25. See Chapter 10.
26. Weekly Commonwealth, October 28, 1863.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid. For the letter to Secundina, see Chapter 13.
29. Weekly Commonwealth, May 21, 1863. See Chapter 6.
30. Secrest, “The ‘Bloody Espinosas,’” 15. This secondhand recollection by Hall is the only piece of evidence supposedly from the hand of an Espinosa, other than the bloody paper collar pinned to the tree in Red Hill Pass (see Chapter 4), which explicitly gives a religious motive for the killings.
31. Perkins, Tom Tobin, 170.