“WHO IS THERE TO GATHER THE HISTORY OF THIS WRETCH?” The Espinosas Remembered

15

The “Terrible Espinosas” were not soon forgotten. Like a recurring nightmare, the memory of their bloody onslaught came back again and again to the people of Colorado Territory who had suffered the contagion of dread the brothers and their nephew had unleashed.

But fear of one sort or another was not an unfamiliar sensation on the frontier—danger was endemic to the lives all frontiersmen led—and they had learned to combat it with a dry and quirky humor, as this item in the same edition of the Rocky Mountain News Weekly that reported the Espinosas’ attack on Philbrook and Dolores Sánches illustrates:

A little guerrilla excitement obtained here a week or two ago, occasioned by some persons shooting rabbits near the place where Carter was killed last April, just as a timid gentleman from Mosquito was passing. He supposed the shots were fired at him, and ran to Fairplay, a distance of three miles, in about twenty minutes, where he reported having been fired at several times by a party of ten or fifteen guerrillas. All Fairplay patriotically turned out to exterminate the assassins, and a rather awkward explanation ensued on meeting the rabbit hunters, persons well known in the country. If you want a fight on your hands, say guerrilla to any one living in Fairplay.¹

Even at the height of terror in South Park, a Montgomery correspondent could submit the following item to the same newspaper shortly after Metcalf was providentially saved from death when a packet of papers in his breast pocket, including President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and some announcements by Congressional Delegate Hiram Pitt Bennett, turned away an Espinosa bullet:

None stir abroad out of sight of their respective habitations, except in parties of three or more, and armed with double-barreled shot-guns, double shotted with “FFF Hazard” and No. 1 buck-shot. In addition to this, it is thought by many a matter of prudence to carry Bennett’s documents neatly folded in the breast pocket of his coat—as the latest “improved patent life preserver.” “Greenbacks” carried in the same manner would doubtless be as effective in checking the force of a bullet, and I would recommend all strangers desiring to visit this part of the mountains, to wear them in preference to the documents, as they could readily be made available for other purposes in case they were not needed as “breast-plates.”²

At nearly the same time, the Weekly Commonwealth described a humorous encounter also rooted in “the terror occasioned by the late murders,” this time at a ranch on the Platte River where two wayward Mormon travelers, hoping for a drink and directions to their destination, approached the front door, only to awaken an occupant who “hastily dressed, yelling at the top of his voice—‘Robbers, robbers; John, John, get your gun, there’s robbers around the house!’ ”

Our Provos somewhat taken aback by this unlooked for reception, told him to shut up and give them a drink, to no purpose. Insider had got dressed and got his gun by this time and swore he would shoot the Provos if they attempted to open the door, sending John upstairs at the same time to fire out of the window. After another unsuccessful attempt to convince them of their peaceful intentions the Provos mounted their horses and proceeded up the road. They stopped a short distance from the house to fix their saddles, when our courageous ranchmen left the house and after warning them away fired their guns at them. Of course the shots went wide of the mark, and the Provos concluding it was a rather disagreeable vicinity left as soon as they could, amused, yet mad at their adventure.³

But with the passage of time the ravaging of the Espinosas began to take on a less risible aspect and dark thoughts of the season of dread the killers had inflicted on the country prevailed. In the summer of 1864 a traveler in South Park found lurid reminders of “the horrid scenes enacted here by Espinosa, during the months of March, April and May, 1863” on all sides:

We passed by the spot where Brinkley and Shoup were inhumanly butchered by this devilish Greaser, Espinosa. Saw the place where they camped, and where the awful struggle took place. Again, as we enter the Mountain Pass, where the celebrated Red Hills rise grandly beside us another repetition of this awful massacre is brought home more forcibly than pleasantly; for here Layman [sic] and Vinton were shot down, and horribly mangled by Espinosa. The shirt collar which Layman wore when killed was nailed to a Poplar sapling, and there remains to the present day.⁴

Almost exactly a month later, the Daily Mining Journal of Black Hawk gave additional evidence that the Espinosa terror could still be inflamed. “Reports of trouble in the South Park arising from the re-appearance of the friends or relatives of the defunct Espinosas are rife. Would it not be a pious idea to establish a permanent Post [there], that the inhabitants of that exposed and thinly settled region might have some protection from Texan guerrillas, thieving Indians and Greaser desperadoes?”⁵

An editorialist for the Weekly Commonwealth, writing in the same edition that reported Tobin’s slaying of the outlaws, spoke of Felipe as “one of the most fiendish desperadoes of modern times” and posed a question that would assume more and more significance as time passed and vivid recollections of the slaughters began to fade: “Who is there to gather the history of this wretch … with his hands dipped in blood [?] … We doubt not there is enough of the spirit of the evil one penetrating his career, which if brought to light would be a mine of wealth to any publisher of ‘yellow-covered’ literature.”⁶

Yet such has not been the case. Yes, today the Espinosas are remembered, but not widely or very well. Their monstrous depredations remained sufficiently fresh in the minds of the generation who endured their atrocities to be fairly accurately rehearsed in the early histories of the time, such as Frank Hall’s History of the State of Colorado (1889, 1890, 1895) and O. H. Baskin’s History of the Arkansas River Valley, Colorado (1881), and in memoirs like Father J. L. Dyer’s The Snow-Shoe Itinerant (1890) and newspaper interviews with old-timers like Joseph Lamb (1894, 1897). Later, in the early decades of the twentieth century, other relatively reliable firsthand accounts such as Tom Tobin’s and Henry Priest’s appeared in periodicals such as The Colorado Magazine.

But within twenty years of the killing of Vivián, Felipe, and José Vincente, sensation, myth, and legend had already begun to overtake the factual telling of the Espinosa story, and not by writers of “yellow-covered” literature as the editorialist had predicted, who with very few exceptions strangely ignored the worst instance of serial murder in the history of the American West. It was instead journalists of the Hearst stripe who endowed the saga with all the gaudy trappings of melodrama.

Let one example suffice, a retrospective appearing in the New York Times, of all places. Published in 1884, the piece was headlined “The Terrible Espinosas: A Memory of Early Days in Colorado: The Mysterious Murders Which Caused a Reign of Terror in the Mining Camps of 21 Years Ago”:

During [the] troublous days of 1863 an unknown danger came. So mysteriously did it work that for the time it fairly paralyzed the mountain communities. In March nine men had been found along the trails near Cañon City. Each man had a bullet in his head. So nearly similar were the death wounds that these mysterious assassinations naturally gave rise to much speculation. And this was increased when it was learned that three weeks before two men had been similarly killed in Santa Fé and also a soldier in Conejos. … Along the mountain roads dead bodies were found, each with the fatal bullet in its skull. … One singular fact appeared to be this, that all were killed on the wagon roads or on the trails; none were ever found off the beaten paths. … [The murderers] were the notorious Espinosas, outlaws from Mexico, two cousins. [The leader] had begun as a religious monomaniac … impelled by his patron saint to commit these deeds for the purpose of expiating his father’s sins. … With this task before him, he enlisted a cousin in his cause, and together they started north from Chihuahua. It was a trail of blood they left behind them. … It was evident that gain had played no part in this mission of the elder Espinosa. None of the bodies of his victims had been robbed.⁷

Though the article gives a more or less accurate description of Tobin’s taking of Felipe and his nephew, otherwise its multiple exaggerations are so obvious that they need not be enumerated here. Sensationalism only proliferated in years to come.⁸ One of the more amusing of these anecdotes, appearing in an Albuquerque newspaper of 1953, not only identified the murdering Espinosa chief as a wealthy young aristocratic rancher wronged by the Americans after their takeover of New Mexico but, in telling of his death at the hands of Tom Tobin, unearthed the recollections of Loren Jenks, the civilian scout who accompanied the Tobin–Baldwin expedition but got separated from the detachment by mistakenly following the tracks of some Ute Indians.⁹

Identified as “a pioneer prospector,” Jenks claimed “he organized in 1863 a party of trappers and frontiersmen to hunt down Espinosa ‘and his band of ruffians’ and selected Tom Tobin, an Irish trapper then living at Taos, as his chief lieutenant. Jenks said his group came upon the tracks of the outlaw in a mountain pass near Fort Garland, Colorado, and he divided his force, Tobin leading one party and he the other.”¹⁰ Though awarding himself an imaginary leading role in organizing and leading the expedition, Jenks was at least generous enough to grant Tobin credit for killing the Espinosas.¹¹

More recently, books and magazine articles have, from time to time, summarized the exploits of the Espinosas, but as this is written, no reliable, fully researched book-length treatment of their terror raid has yet appeared. The fullest account is in James E. Perkins’s fine biography of Tom Tobin, and even there the Espinosa outbreak is confined to a single chapter. The present work is an attempt to fill this gap in the historiography of perhaps the most singular criminal event in the annals of nineteenth-century Colorado, if not of the entire West.

There is a poignant example of how, by as early as the 1930s, memories of the bloody days of 1863 had almost completely disappeared even in South Park, the Espinosas’ most prolific killing ground. In 1939 Laura Shoup of Boise, Idaho, daughter of George L. Shoup,¹² former officer of the First Colorado Cavalry, whose brother Abram Nelson Shoup was murdered by the Espinosas, set out by automobile with some friends and relatives to travel to South Park in an effort to find the grave of her uncle. Stopping at the village of Hartsel on the southern edge of the Park, she could find no one who had ever heard of the Espinosas, but a woman identified as a longtime resident suggested she go on to Fairplay, the county seat, and inquire there.

This she and her party did, and after the county clerk told them of an old graveyard on a hilltop nearby, they found the spot and were thrilled and moved to locate the grave of Abram Nelson Shoup, marked by a headstone that his brother George had arranged to be placed there. The stone was found to be broken and some men were hired to mend it, and while this work was being done, one of the party chanced to meet a man named Fisher who turned out to be “the one man in Fairplay who knew the story of the killing of Uncle Nelson and his young mining partner.”¹³ Ms. Shoup continued:

This Mr. Fisher went to Park County in 1876; there he had mined, driven freight teams and had been marshal at one time. He knew Tom Paine Kennedy, who had been acquainted with Uncle Nelson, and from him heard the story of the murder, and he was able to take us to the spot where the cabin had stood. He said the two young men were mining near there and were occupying a cabin, which was about three miles from Fairplay. Espenosa [sic] and another Mexican had a grudge against the Americans and left a trail of blood on their way toward Mexico, killing twenty-six men as they went. Mr. Fisher … had … heard that Espenosa ha[d] finally been killed by the scout Tom Tobin.¹⁴

How should the Espinosas be remembered? Or perhaps the better question is, should they be remembered at all? In the Introduction we saw how Movimiento activists are ready with answers to both these questions arising from radical politics. Yes, they will say, the Espinosas are rightly remembered as Chicano patriots who resisted Anglo oppression and, in consequence, deserve a place in the first rank among icons of Hispanic resistance.

Perhaps anti-imperialists will say the Espinosas were first victims of, and then rebels against, colonial conquest by a foreign power that contemptuously insisted on replacing valued traditional institutions and practices with alien ones. Therefore, this rationale might go, the Espinosas are a deterrent example worthy of study by the leaders of any great power seeking to control a weaker, especially when the conquering power exerts destructive force and expropriation, as the American army did in its attack on the Espinosas in San Rafael, an act that provoked an appalling vengeance.

Exponents of liberation theology may offer an argument that, to the extent the Espinosas can be considered religiously motivated—a premise far from certain—the acquiescence of the Vatican in the nearly forcible replacement of Padre José Martínez with Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy at the head of the church in New Mexico contributed to the alienation of many devout Hispanos like the Espinosas and their Penitente hermanos, whose forms of worship had evolved over time in ways the central church condemned as unorthodox and wished to eradicate. That some of these changes were imposed in part at the behest of the mainly Protestant American conquerors must have helped incite a radical religious resistance and caused it to mix with the already simmering anti-imperialist sentiment among New Mexicans. This view would seem to regard the Espinosas as worthy of remembrance, again, as cautionary examples. Without endorsing their bloody acts, such a view can at least partially explain the outbreak and argue that religious hierarchies, when under the influence of secular powers, meddle with indigenous forms of worship only at their peril.

Finally there is the view that the Espinosas were “social bandits,” Robin Hood–like figures plaguing a corrupt establishment, espousing the grievances and earning the acclaim and support of the downtrodden underclass.

All these points of view are deserving of study. But whatever the Espinosas’ provocations, grievances, or mental states, their reign of terror was in no sense justifiable and may have been inspired by no motive more complicated than criminal insanity.

But we would do well to remember not just the slaughters perpetrated by the Espinosas but also the deeds of “Commandant” Wilson’s faction of John McCannon’s posse: the lynching of Baxter and perhaps a second man, both innocent of the killings for which they died, and the torturing of Snyder by repeated hanging, as well as the ambushing of Vivián Espinosa by McCannon’s own party, which historian Stephen J. Leonard implies may have qualified as a lynching, since Vivián was given no opportunity to surrender.¹⁵ The same may even be said of Tobin’s stalking and slaying of Felipe and José Vincente. In the end, if the imposition of terror is an evil deserving of study, then the response to terror is an equally instructive phenomenon.

NOTES

1. Rocky Mountain News Weekly, October 21, 1863.

2. Ibid., May 16, 1863.

3. Weekly Commonwealth, May 14, 1863.

4. Black Hawk Daily Mining Journal, July 23, 1864.

5. Ibid., August 22, 1864.

6. Weekly Commonwealth, October 28, 1863.

7. New York Times, February 24, 1884.

8. See the Introduction for some of the more preposterous versions of the story.

9. See Chapter 13.

10. Albuquerque Tribune, November 27, 1953.

11. Ibid.

12. Shoup had served as governor of Idaho and one of the state’s first senators.

13. Letter of Laura Shoup to Walter C. Shoup, August 20, 1939; University of Idaho Library, Special Collections and Archives.

14. Ibid.

15. Leonard, Lynching in Colorado, 4.