The 1881 killing of Clayton Ogsbury
An episode from a particularly violent chapter in Four Corners Country history
A late summer chill settled over the young town of Silverton as the sun fell behind Anvil Mountain on the evening of August 24, 1881. The light faded, and the saloons—the Tivoli, the Senate, the Blue Front, the Golden Star, the Rosebud, the Star of the West—filled up with miners, merchants, and travelers. It was a rowdy night. Every night was a rowdy night in Silverton.
The crews building grade and laying tracks for the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad had yet to make it into Baker’s Park, but by now their arrival was imminent. In anticipation, the little smattering of houses Franklin Rhoda had dismissed seven years earlier as a fly-by-night mining camp had blossomed into a bona fide town with stately residences and a lively commercial district, replete with two bakeries, a furniture-making and undertaker business, and two shoemakers. A man could get his dingy clothes cleaned at the Quong Wah or Sing Lee laundry, stop in at the Tennyson Bath House, and get shorn next door at the Merrifield Barber Shop. The San Juan Herald had emerged that summer to compete with the Miner, making Silverton a two-rag town. Law offices nearly outnumbered saloons. There was just one church.
Olaf Nelson — who would later go on to stake the Gold King claim — had not been scared away by his near death by landslide, nor by Silverton’s close call with the Lime Creek Burn of 1879. 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.
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. After a Coe ally was killed, 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 Dec. 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. 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.
The incident garnered its own “Mrs. Romney and the Outlaws” episode of the television series Death Valley Days in 1965. In “Mrs. Romney and the Outlaws,” Romney roused the townsfolk to kill the bad guys, thus allowing Durango to “mature and prosper.” In real life, Romney ends up being far less heroic.
A couple of months after they were run out of Durango, the Stockton-Eskridge boys helped chase down and kill “bands of renegade Indians” who had allegedly killed three ranchers near Gateway, Colorado. Suddenly the gang of recidivists and murderers were considered heroes by the white colonial-settlers, whose fear of and disdain for the Ute people tended to override their sense of morality or ethics. 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 north of Durango, 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. Had Lou been a man she would surely have gone down in history as one of the West’s outlaw folk heroes, a la Jesse James and Billy the Kid. Instead, she was described as a a “wily she-devil, “enticing seductress,” and “prostitute and thief,” who, it was rumored, killed as many as five lovers and husbands.
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.” 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 three men 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 figures.
A flash of light, a crack in the night, and then a sickening thud as Ogsbury’s body hit the dusty street.
***
The bullet entered Ogsbury’s chest and went right through him, leaving no chance of survival. But before he expired, Ogsbury identified the shooter as Bert Wilkinsonm a tall, skinny, freckle-faced nineteen-year-old from a prestigious family, who had taken up with a rough crew. In the chaos that ensued, Wilkinson and Eskridge headed for the hills, while Kid Thomas, a Black sixteeen-year-old and another gang member, remained in town. It didn’t work and Thomas, aka “The Copper Colored Kid,” was captured and tossed in the small town jail. The next day, a mob of vigilantes broke him out and, dispensing with any presumption of innocence or any semblance of a trial or justice, lynched him in the streets of Silverton.
Thomas’ 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.
***
The murder of Marshal Ogsbury and the lynchings that followed were not just the climax of this short period in history, but also the dying gasp. In Silverton, the Diamond Saloon was shut down and demolished and Bronco Lou run out of town. Eskridge was arrested in Gunnison in September of 1881 and extradited to New Mexico to face the law for his crimes there.
About a month after Ogsbury’s murder, Ike Stockton and another gang member named Gilbreth rode into Durango and strolled down the street as if they owned the place. The sheriff and his deputy promptly arrested Gilbreth, but when they went in pursuit of Stockton, the latter backed into a doorway at the corner of H and First streets and drew his revolver. Both lawmen fired, with one bullet entering Stockton’s thigh, shattering the bone. Some say Wilkinson — or at least his ghost — was also present.
The jail was not considered strong enough to house the outlaws, so the lawmen took them to the smelter on the south side of the Animas River. “On the way to the smelter,” a newspaper reported, “stimulants were freely administered to Stockton to keep him from fainting for he was suffering from severe pain.” Once at the smelter, a doctor amputated Stockton’s leg. The next morning, he died. The Stockton-Eskridge gang was no more, and a particularly bloody chapter in southwestern Colorado history came to a close.
Such are the violent pangs felt by a frontier community, awash with wealth from the mines, in its adolescence. Contrary to how today’s peddlers of the wild, wild west, with their fake gunfights, might portray the history of Silverton and Durango, the reality is, this sort of lawless, highway-robbing, gun-slinging, and frontier justice were a mere blip on the region’s record. Communities moved to end the lawlessness, and even implemented gun control statutes that are far stricter than today’s. “Firearms in the daily walks of life have no place in our modern civilization and should not be carried,” noted a Durango mayor in 1903.
This account of Clayton Ogsbury’s murder was excerpted and adapted from my book, River of Lost Souls: The Science, Politics, and Greed Behind the Gold King Mine Disaster (Torrey House, 2018). It was informed by Allen Nossaman’s Many More Mountains, Volume 3, along with: various editions of the San Juan Herald, La Plata Miner, Dolores News, and Durango Record newspapers; The Story of Hillside Cemetery, by Freda Peterson; Pioneers of the San Juan Country, Volume 3; The Coe-Stockton Feud, by Stan Zamonski, in Wild West magazine, 1992; the Chicago Tribune; and the San Juan County Historical Society Archive.
How tightly connected were the Rio Arriba and Colorado communities? The geographic range of the Stockton gang seems extensive.
Totally fascinating.