Hands Up; or, Thirty-Five Years of Detective Life in the Mountains and on the Plains / Reminiscences by General D. J. Cook, Chief of the Rocky Mountains Detective Association

by D. J.‏ ‎ Cook

MUSGROVE AND HIS GANG.

CHAPTER XII.

THE BAD CHARACTERS BROUGHT TO DENVER BY THE UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD BUILDING—L. H. MUSGROVE AND HIS GANG—ARREST OF MUSGROVE—ED. FRANKLIN AND SANFORD DUGGAN COME TO HIS RESCUE—HIGHWAY ROBBERY IN DENVER.

For a few years previous to 1868 Denver was a paradise of quiet and repose. The mining excitement, which had attracted so many people to this region a few years before, had subsided to a great extent. The settlers were becoming accustomed to a residence in this region. The novelty of the life in the Far West had died out. There were few mining “booms,” if any, and the “hard cases” which invariably follow in the wake of mining discoveries of importance had become disgusted with the slow life in this section, and had folded their tents and quietly departed for more inviting and, to them, more congenial fields. Of course, the good people had no fault with this state of affairs. They went on following their customary avocations, delving steadily for the precious metals, tilling the soil and building up town and country. In a word, Denver seemed, within a remarkably short period, to have settled down into the perfect repose, so far as crime was concerned, of the New England village.

But with the approach of railroads there came a change—a radical and important change. The building of a new railroad in any section always introduces a large element of irresponsible and vicious people. In the West the percentage of this element is larger than in the East. But as the Union Pacific was the pioneer railroad line built across the plains, and as the country was new and inviting to men of adventurous spirit, its construction was probably accompanied by a greater number of arrivals than that of any other line built since in this region. There were gamblers of all degrees, sneak thieves, burglars, highwaymen, horse thieves, murderers, fugitives from justice and amateurs in crime. In many places along the line of the road it was “quite the thing” to be a bad man, and honesty and civility were at a serious discount. Yet in places the better element would ultimately gain the ascendancy. In many cases the contest was close and often there was doubt as to whether the good or the bad would triumph. As a rule, however, respectability asserted itself, although frequently not until much blood had been shed and the most heroic measures resorted to to rid the various communities affected of these human pests. There were vigilance committees at Cheyenne, Laramie City and other places along the line of the Union Pacific, which, after months of endurance of the most terrible outrages, took the law into their own hands. The results were numerous warnings to offenders to leave these places, and many “neck-tie parties” as well, at which no “duly elected” judge sat for days in weighing the evidence, but where justice was seldom, as in other courts, blind. The action of these vigilance committees was so energetic and efficient that many of those of the worst classes were compelled to get away from the railroad camps, and large numbers of them poured into the Colorado towns.

Of such were Sanford S. C. Duggan and Edward Franklin, whose tragic fate, as well as that of L. H. Musgrove, it is the purpose of this and succeeding chapters to treat.

Musgrove was one of the marked villains of the pioneer days of Colorado, and as cool a character as it was ever the fortune of a detective or criminal officer to fall in with. He was a man of large stature, of shapely physique, piercing eye and steady nerve, who might have stood as the original for the heavy villain of the best story of a master in romance literature. He was a man of daring, inured to danger, calm at the most critical times—a commander whose orders must be obeyed, who planned with wisdom and who executed with precision and dispatch. He was the leader of an organized band of horse thieves, highwaymen and murderers, who infested the western plains, with Denver as general headquarters, during the years 1867-’68. They made the railroad towns a convenience in disposing of their booty, but did not spend time in loafing about these places when there was other and more profitable business to attend to in other places. Musgrove was a southern man by birth, being a native of Como Depot, Miss. He had gone to California during the days of the gold excitement on the coast, and had located in Napa valley. His sympathies were with the South in the rebellion, and he quarreled with a Napa man about the merits of the conflict, which quarrel resulted in his coolly shooting the other party down. He was compelled to leave the place, and afterwards stopped in Nevada, where he killed two men before being driven from that then territory. Leaving Nevada, he came to Cheyenne, and from Cheyenne to Denver. He was at first, after crossing the mountains, engaged as an Indian trader about old Fort Hallack, until a half-breed Indian had the temerity, half in sport, one day to call him a liar, when Musgrove calmly pulled his revolver from his pocket, and, taking deliberate aim, planted a bullet square in the middle of the Indian’s forehead.

This transaction served to put an end to Musgrove’s Indian trading, for he was compelled to leave the Indian region on very short notice. After this little affair he organized a band of horse thieves, which operated throughout the entire plains country, and which was one of the most formidable bands of desperadoes known to frontier history. Musgrove was a perfect organizer. He had his operators in Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Texas, Nebraska, Kansas and others of the western states and territories, and carried on a regular business of stealing and selling stock. They would drive off entire droves of horses from one section and sell them in another five hundred miles away, and would steal another drove in the neighborhood of the late sale and drive it for sale back to the place at which they had made the previous raid.

Musgrove’s band was broken up by degrees. As early as the spring of 1868 Gen. Cook, accompanied by Col. Egbert Johnson and one or two others, tracked four of them down after a two days’ march, and captured them at the point of Winchester rifles in a cabin near the city. Col. Johnson proved of invaluable service in this work in tracking the scamps, as he had had much experience in the mountains. In doing this work he had to even wade through a lake of water. Later he went to Georgetown after another of them, and capturing him there brought him to Denver alone. They were compelled to stay in a hotel at Idaho Springs all night, and both slept in the same room, Johnson setting his gun by the side of his bed and telling the desperado that if he made a move during the entire night he would blow his brains out. The fellow was as quiet as a mouse, and was afraid to get up when morning came, so thoroughly was he convinced that Johnson would put his threat into execution.