THIS LAND IS MY LAND
THE KILLERS MOVED WITH VICIOUS EFFICIENCY, dispatching their victims at the edge of America’s frontier. One murder became two, then five, then eight, and then drifted higher into double figures. Seemingly each month in the new Colorado Territory, another man was found shot or mutilated. On March 16, 1863, 58-year-old Franklin Bruce was first in the string, shot near his sawmill outside Cañon City. One month later, five men were murdered near the gold mining settlement of Fairplay; one was shot in the arm before being chased down a hill and shot again. When residents discovered his body, the man had been stripped and attacked with a tomahawk.
All of the victims were white men, settlers who’d arrived from elsewhere in North America. Residents speculated on the killers’ identities—they were Confederate guerillas spreading havoc across Union-controlled land, perhaps, or Native Americans defending their territories. Early on in the spree, no one had survived to identify the attackers.
One afternoon in late April, Edward Metcalf was leading a team of oxen over a mountainous trail near Fairplay when a bullet struck him in the left breast. Metcalf recoiled but didn’t fall: The bullet was stopped by a bundle of mail and a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation that Metcalf had tucked into his jacket. The oxen bolted at the sound of the weapon, sending Metcalf’s wagon careening over the trail. A second shot was fired, but the wagon struck a rock, and Metcalf was bounced out of the way. At the echo of gunshots, a nearby resident grabbed a rifle. He saw two men as they scrambled away.
When news of the shooting reached town that night, a group of at least six men tracked down the injured man. They found him with a cut on his forehead. “The people are scared nearly to death here [and] none but the bravest dare go out at all,” a private in the 1st Colorado Cavalry wrote in his journal the next day.
Though Metcalf didn’t get a close look at his would-be murderers, he and the man who rushed to his aid saw enough to create a rough description. One of the shooters was taller than the other. Both were dark-skinned—people of Mexican descent, they assumed. It wasn’t much, but it was something. The West’s most feared killers had finally been seen.
The Colorado Territory in 1863 was a merciless place. Just five years earlier, though, it had been a land of possibilities. When two men discovered gold in a placer deposit along Little Dry Creek (possibly in present-day Englewood) in 1858, it sparked excitement unlike anything seen since the California gold rush a decade earlier. Tens of thousands of prospectors traveled from their homes on the East Coast and in the Midwest, crossing the plains to reach the Rocky Mountains. The new residents built cabins and sawmills and encampments with names like Denver City, Colorado City, Golden City, Tarryall, and Gold Hill. By 1860, an estimated 43,000 residents were living within the territory, of which the vast majority were white men. All of them were hopeful they’d soon be rich.
The promise of wealth was
