“TIMES WITH ME HAVE SADLY CHANGED” Destinies

16

On the day after Christmas in the first year of the twentieth century, an elderly Tom Tobin persuaded a friend¹ to write a letter for him to the Honorable George L. Shoup, senator from Idaho, in Washington, DC.

It will be remembered that Senator Shoup, once a lieutenant in the First Colorado Cavalry, had lost a brother during the Espinosas’ murder raid through South Park. A few years earlier, upon hearing that Tobin had fallen on hard times, Shoup had sent the old scout, through an intermediary, $200 as an expression of “warm gratitude for his bravery and for his noble work in disposing of that arch-fiend and desperado, Espinosa.”²

By now Tobin, in better days a noted scout whose deadly skills lesser men had often called upon to sweep away dangers that impeded settlement of an unforgiving frontier, found himself beset by illness, poverty, and old age, bereft at last of his old-time stubborn self-sufficiency and silent pride.

He expressed himself as “an humble petitioner” and admitted that “[t]imes with me have sadly changed.” He was, he said, “78 years old, very feeble, always bedridden and almost blind,” and completely unable to earn even the meager living to which he had been reduced in recent years. “You,” he told Shoup, “are one of the many who know what I have done … and that I have never received anything from the Government by way of acknowledgement of services during nearly fifty years.”

The last image of Tom Tobin, 1902, at seventy-nine years of age. (Photo courtesy of History Colorado, scan no. 10047139)

Governor Evans and others, he complained, had from time to time promised to pay him $2,500 “for the killing of the Mexican bandits, the Espinosas.” But only after “much petitioning and wrangling in several Colorado Legislatures” had he received but a portion of the full reward, amounting in all to $1,500.³ “I would ask you now,” Tobin entreated, “in these the hours of deepest misery after a long and eventful life, to help a deserving old and broken-down man.”⁴

Upon receiving the letter, Shoup generously endorsed it to Colorado senator Edward M. Teller, saying, “if you will introduce a Bill for the relief of Mr. Tobens [sic] I will render all the assistance in my power to secure favorable action in the Committee on Pensions, of which I am a member.” He noted that Tobin was “undoubtedly very deserving of a pension.”⁵ But for unexplained reasons nothing came of this effort.

This was only the latest of a series of appeals for assistance Tobin had attempted since falling on hard times in the late 1870s and 1880s. In July of the same year he wrote to Shoup saying he had applied to the federal government for a monthly pension of a meager eight dollars based on his service as a volunteer during the Pueblo Revolt of 1847, but his application was rejected because official records showed he had not served in a regularly constituted military unit.⁶

Tobin’s descent into penury had not been swift, but it had been sure. In 1863, the year of his greatest achievement, he had enjoyed affluence, owning properties both in the plaza of Costilla in New Mexico Territory and at his ranch on Trinchera Creek near Fort Garland, and he was doing a thriving business as a provision contractor for the post. Though he had already entered his middle years, his constitution was sturdy, as his stamina during the hunt for the Espinosas had shown. His wife had just given birth to a daughter, and after delivering the heads of the Espinosas to Colonel Tappan he had closed down his ranch for the winter and hastened home to his family in Costilla. On November 9 the proud parents traveled to Conejos for the baptism of the infant who, like her mother, was christened María Pascuala; the new child soon came to be called Pascualita, or “Little Pascuala.” Soon Tom’s wife became pregnant again, but in the meantime, on December 31, Dominga, Tobin’s Navajo mistress, also gave birth to a daughter. This child was baptized María Catarina Tobin and her birth was recorded as “natural,” a term denoting an unknown father. Tom was listed as the child’s godfather.

The newly pregnant María Pascuala pointedly did not attend the ceremony of baptism for Dominga’s child. There can be little doubt either that she disapproved of the relationship with Dominga and the illegitimate child or that Tobin, for his part, remained unperturbed by her feelings or by the feelings of anyone else. He was, as always, content within himself even if his behavior inflicted pain on those he loved, and that he did love Pascuala is beyond question. She gave premature birth to a son on May 28, 1864. The child was baptized José Cristóbal Tobin but, to the distress of both Tobin and Pascuala, he died about June 5.

Dominga herself was baptized as a Christian and given the name María Dominga Tobin. In the summer of 1868, after the government required all Navajo slaves to be returned to their natural families, Dominga and three-year-old Catarina were compelled to join the Navajos, then returning to their homeland after their disastrous starving time at the Bosque Redondo Reservation in New Mexico. The fates of Dominga and Catarina after leaving the Tobins are unknown, though James Perkins believes both mother and child perished in a freak blizzard while being transported to the new Navajo Reservation in western New Mexico and eastern Arizona. It is difficult to imagine what their lives must have been like there, given the inevitable stresses and jealousies of the situation, but we can be certain Dominga did not wish to return to her tribe, for in 1865 when Lafayette Head prepared his census of Indian slaves being held in Costilla County, he noted that she had expressed a desire to remain with the Tobins. Eventually Tobin sold his holdings in Costilla and moved María Pascuala and the family to Trinchera Ranch, where he would live for the rest of his long life.

Tobin, who could inflict shame on his beloved wife by openly fathering a child with another woman, who could kill without thought or hesitation even when his victims were his own relatives by marriage, whom life on the raw edge of the frontier had hardened to an implacable toughness—this same man was also capable of such a tender sensitivity that as long as he was financially able, in fact for many years, he secretly contributed to the welfare of Felipe Espinosa’s destitute widow, María Secundina, and her children, María Vincenta, José Domingo, and María Manuela.

There is even a persistent story that in the immediate wake of the deaths of Felipe and José Vincente, Tobin secretly rode out to the death site, recovered the headless bodies, and returned them to the family for Christian burial in an undisclosed location.⁷ Kit Carson III also said that his grandfather, whenever questioned about the location of the killings, intentionally misidentified the site, naming the ravine on Quindaro Creek when in fact it was in another place, which he never revealed.⁸

While the first act can easily be interpreted as a charitable one, meant to ease the anguish of Felipe’s surviving loved ones, the second one is harder to explain. At first blush it would seem to imply not so much concern for the feelings of Felipe’s family as some degree of respect for Felipe himself. While knowledge of the whereabouts of the death site might have caused Secundina and the children some discomfort that Tobin might have hoped to avoid, the more common reason for concealing such a location has to do with considerations of public notoriety. Tobin may have kept the real location secret as a way of fending off the morbidly curious or to prevent some kind of desecration of the spot by vengeful survivors of Felipe’s victims, or even to keep it from becoming a shrine for Hispanos regarding Felipe as a patriot saint fighting against Anglo oppression. Even if they were distantly related, it is difficult to believe Tobin could have felt any degree of respect for the murderous Felipe. In the end, as is true for much of what we know of Tobin, his real intentions must remain a mystery.

What is certain is that his generosity improved the circumstances of Secundina and her family. As long as his own resources permitted, he sent food and money not only to Secundina and the children but also to the other members of the Hurtado family. In time Secundina remarried. And on May 23, 1872, Tom attended, by special invitation, the wedding of seventeen-year-old María Vincenta Espinosa, Felipe’s daughter. He signed the wedding book as one of the honored witnesses. Clearly there was far more to Tom Tobin than the ruthless self-absorption and saturnine reticence many observers saw.

But by 1876 Tom Tobin’s luck had begun to turn bad. In that year, while hunting, he was severely mauled by a sow bear protecting her cub. Twelve years later, at the age of sixty-four, he was shot in the groin and pelvis by his son-in-law William Carson in a violent argument over the hard-drinking Carson’s treatment of his wife, Tobin’s cherished daughter Pascualita.⁹ Tobin had actually attempted to kill Carson, attacking him with a knife and a pistol in one of the mindless frenzies of savagery that John Francisco said often consumed him in a fight.

Shortly before this, María Pascuala had died at the age of fifty-seven, and her loss had devastated the old scout. His serious wounds and the passing of his wife caused a swift deterioration of Tobin’s health and spirits. Seven months later he rallied briefly to marry a second time, taking to wife a forty-year-old widow, María Rosa Quintana. About this time, though illiterate himself, Tobin developed an interest in education, established schools for poor Hispano children, and even, improbably, became president of a school board.

In his declining years Tobin loved to dress up in his old scouting finery and pose for photographs, holding the big Hawken rifle with which he had once been so expert. It was a spectacular buckskin outfit covered with beadwork and purple-dyed decorative patterns—a full-length fringed coat, pants, vest, leggings, and moccasins. Sometimes he also wore his feathered bear-fur cap and sometimes a broad-brimmed plainsman’s sombrero. His buffalo-tail holster was buckled about his waist, on some occasions holding his old cap-and-ball Navy Colt and on others a nickel-plated, ivory-gripped Colt double-action revolver, Model 1878, presented to him in 1883 by an admirer and engraved with his name. For Tom was famous, even if he was poor. He was the man who killed the Espinosas. The old Hawken had twelve notches on it now.

Tom died virtually penniless on May 15, 1904, still hoping to receive the balance of his reward for ridding Colorado Territory of its most horrific marauders. Sadly, despite his charity toward Secundina, he was troubled in his last days by fears that relatives of Felipe Espinosa would seek him out and murder him. He was eighty-one years old, a weak and querulous old man living his last days amid the crumbling adobes of the ranch he no longer could afford to own. At the moment of his passing, all the dogs for miles around began to howl and continued to do so for hours. Next day the then-owner of Trinchera Ranch churlishly turned Tom’s surviving family members off the place.¹⁰

Tom and Pascuala Tobin now lie buried side by side near Fort Garland, in the shadow of Blanca Peak.¹¹

NOTES

1. Ferdinand Meyer, a longtime acquaintance who had been one of the earliest merchants in the plaza of Costilla and later served as sutler of Fort Garland; Simmons, The San Luís Valley, 85.

2. Perkins, Tom Tobin, 240–241.

3. On April 3, 1893, the Colorado General Assembly appropriated $1,000 “for the relief of Thomas T. Tobens [sic]” and “in full payment for the killing of the Espinosa Brothers”; State of Colorado, Laws Passed at the Ninth Session of the General Assembly of the State of Colorado, Convened at Denver on the Third Day of January, A.D. 1893 (Denver, CO: Smith-Brooks Printing Co., 1893), 62. Secrest, “The ‘Bloody Espinosas,’” says Tobin received $500 in state money in 1872 under the administration of Governor Edward McCook, an old friend. Interestingly, Secrest notes that John McCannon, leader of the California Gulch posse that killed Vivián Espinosa, also sought unsuccessfully to claim the reward, writing Senator Teller with typical effrontery, “I never received or claimed the reward, as I don’t think the State is under any obligation to pay a reward offered by a territorial Governor, but I need it now.” Senator Teller replied that he saw no way for McCannon to receive the reward “unless you apply to the Legislature.” McCannon followed through in typical blustering fashion, as recounted in Appendix B.

4. Perkins, Tom Tobin, 249–250.

5. Ibid., 250.

6. Ibid., 248.

7. Personal discussion by the author with Joey Gallegos, staff assistant, Fort Garland Museum, December 4, 2009.

8. Carson, “The Lives of Two Great Scouts,” 198.

9. William (Billy) Carson was the eldest son of Tobin’s old partner Kit Carson. He later died of an accidentally self-inflicted gunshot wound and Tobin took in and raised his children, including Kit Carson III.

10. Over the years Tobin had gradually sold off all his Trinchera holdings to William H. Meyer (no relation to Tom’s old friend Ferdinand Meyer) and others; after Tobin’s resources were completely exhausted, Meyer permitted Tobin and his family to remain on the property until the old scout’s death, agreeing to provide a casket and a suit of clothes for the destitute Tobin’s funeral. The day after the burial, Meyer sent his foreman to displace Tobin’s survivors.

11. All the information above, relating to Tom Tobin’s private life, is taken from Perkins, Tom Tobin, 177–263.