Olaf Nelson had not been scared away by his brush with death, nor by Silverton’s close call with wildfire. He was here to stay, along with hundreds of others like him, folks from Italy, Austria, Wales, Poland, and China, looking to reinvent themselves on the rugged but quickly civilizing frontier. A few months earlier, Nelson’s wife Louisa had given birth to their first child, Anna. Nelson worked hard but played little, his Lutheran upbringing keeping him above the bawdy fray.
That night, in a sleeping room in the back of the Senate Saloon on 13th and Greene (in the now-vacant lot north of the Teller House), Town Marshal David Clayton Ogsbury was trying to do the same. He was dead-tired, but unable to sleep.16
Ogsbury, born in New York, had come to the San Juans in the early 1870s. He had been a saloon owner, prospector, bridge designer, and store clerk. But his real calling was law enforcement, and as Silverton’s marshal he was one of the area’s most respected lawmen. On nights like this, however, he would just as soon be prospecting.
Young Silverton was boisterous, but some semblance of law and order tended to keep the stew from boiling over into bloodshed. The same could not be said for Silverton’s junior, downstream neighbors, Durango and Farmington. Ogsbury’s colleagues in the lower Animas River country had been dealing with cattle rustling, highway robbery, and theft, much of it perpetuated by two warring gangs, the Farmington-based Coe-Hambletts and the Stockton-Eskridge gang, led by Ike and Port Stockton, cattlemen who had come up from Texas, and Harg Eskridge, who owned a Durango saloon.
In late 1880 the simmering tension between the two gangs boiled over into outright war when a Coe ally was killed and, in retaliation, the Coe-Hamblett boys shot and killed Port Stockton. The Stockton-Eskridge faction retreated to Durango, the Coe-Hambletts pursued them, and in April of 1881 the two gangs clashed in an intense firefight on the edge of town. A stray bullet made its way into the office of the Durango Record, the young town’s first newspaper, where it just missed hitting publisher, editor, reporter, and writer Caroline Westcott Romney. Romney, a forty-year-old seasoned journalist, came to Durango from Chicago via Leadville the previous year, and printed the first issue of the Record on a “job press” in a canvas tent on a frigid, snowy December 29, 1880. Romney wasn’t one to be cowed by gangs of rustlers or anyone else: During her three-year tenure in Durango she was a champion for women’s rights, rallied against prostitution, and held a special disdain for opium dens and their patrons. And as soon as the dust from the firefight had settled, she stood up to the Stockton-Eskridge gang and demanded they be run out of town.17 And they were, sort of. Town leaders asked the bunch to leave, and even paid them $700 as an incentive, which was enough to get them to skedaddle, for a while.
But a couple months later, the Stockton-Eskridge boys were instrumental in chasing down and killing “bands of renegade Indians” who had allegedly killed three ranchers near Gateway, Colorado. Ute-phobia festered at a fever pitch among the white newcomers, and they not only forgave the gang of recidivists and murderers for their past deeds, but elevated them to the status of Indian-fighting heroes. Even Romney, who thought the scant amount of land left to the Mouache, Caputa, and Weenuchiu bands would be more productive in white hands, was swayed, becoming one of the gang’s most vocal defenders. When the criminals moseyed back into town, lawmen like La Plata County Sheriff Luke Hunter turned a blind eye, allowing them to continue their lawless ways.
On that late-August afternoon, gang members Bert Wilkinson, Kid Thomas, and Harg Eskridge’s brother Dyson went on a robbing rampage on the Animas Toll Road, and were rumored to be headed toward Silverton. Ogsbury waited anxiously, though there was little he could do once they arrived, since he had yet to receive a warrant from La Plata County.
Typically, Ogsbury had to grapple with slightly more benign crimes. Two days earlier, for example, he had tossed Bronco Lou—the barkeep at the Diamond Saloon—into jail for enticing a man into her bar then robbing him blind. Bronco Lou (aka Susan Warfield, Susan Raper, Susan Stone, Bronco Sue, Lou Lockhard, and Susan Dawson) was one of the more colorful characters of the time, and had she been a man would surely have gone down in history as one of the West’s outlaw folk heroes along with Jesse James and Billy the Kid. Instead, she was maligned as a “prostitute and thief.” Lou was no prostitute. She was a skilled larcenist, but also so much more. Bronco Lou could outshoot and outride just about anyone in the region and was “fierce as a fiend in her ferocity or as gentle as a lamb or as soft as an angel in her devotion to those she liked.”18 When she and a group of her cohorts got tangled up with a southern Colorado posse, Lou not only nursed the outlaws back to health while they were in jail, but then planned and carried out their escape. When they were recaptured, and about to be hanged, Lou again rescued the men. She allegedly killed two husbands prior to her arrival in Silverton, and singlehandedly saved a third husband’s life from an Indian attack (he left her shortly thereafter). On that August night, Lou would be the least of Ogsbury’s troubles.
At about eleven p.m., Ogsbury was roused from sleep by a knock.
“Clayt, wake up,” said a familiar voice. Ogsbury opened his eyes and saw Charlie Hodges, a local businessman. He was accompanied by Luke Hunter, sheriff of La Plata County, who had finally arrived with the warrants. Ogsbury quickly got dressed, fighting the temptation to ask Hunter what in the hell had taken him so long. He suspected Hunter of going easy on the Stockton gang. As far as Ogsbury was concerned, they should have all been behind bars already.
Little did Ogsbury know that Hunter, after arriving in Silverton, had taken his time finding the marshal, and in the meantime had indirectly warned the outlaws that the local law was on to them. “We’ll need help,” said Ogsbury. “I’ll send for Thorniley [San Juan County Sheriff George Thorniley], and we can round up a few others, just in case there is trouble.”
“That won’t be necessary,” replied Hunter. “I know these men. They’ll give in peacefully.”
So the three of them, Ogsbury, Hodges, and Hunter, set off toward the Diamond Saloon, aka Lower Dance Hall, Silverton’s rowdiest drinking establishment.
As they drew near, they saw the silhouette of a man in the street and stopped. Ogsbury instinctively reached down and lightly touched the handle of his pistol. He peered into the darkness in an attempt to identify the still, silent figure.
A flash of light, a crack in the night, and then a sickening thud as Ogsbury’s body hit the dusty street.
The shooter was one Bert Wilkinson, a tall, skinny, freckle-faced nineteen-year-old from a prestigious family, who had taken up with a rough crew. He and his companions took advantage of the chaos that ensued. Wilkinson and Eskridge headed for the hills, while Kid Thomas, an African American, tried to hide out in town. It didn’t work and Thomas, “The Copper Colored Kid,” was captured and tossed in the small town jail. The next day, a mob of vigilantes broke him out and hanged him in the streets of Silverton.
Thomas’s companions, meanwhile, managed to head up Mineral Creek, over into the San Miguel River drainage, and then into the Dolores, before crossing back to the east, ending up at the home of Ellen Louise Wilkinson, Bert’s mother, just south of where Purgatory Ski Resort sits now. Ellen Louise sent her son and his companion several miles east, to a less-traveled place on Missionary Ridge. A couple of days later, she summoned gang leader Ike Stockton, and asked him to go help her son escape to Mexico. Stockton ambled into the fugitives’ camp, sent Eskridge away, then marched Wilkinson right into the hands of the law, betraying his young protégé for the $2,500 reward on his head.
Wilkinson was tossed into the Silverton jail, and less than a week later vigilante justice reared its ugly head once again. A mob broke into the jail, ordered the guard to leave, and put a noose around Wilkinson’s neck.
“Do you have any last words?” a voice asked from the crowd.
“Nothing, gentlemen. Adios,” replied Wilkinson, and he kicked the chair out from beneath himself.
Such are the violent pangs felt by a frontier community, awash with wealth