Joel Estes, namesake of Estes Park, brought five slaves into Colorado, Chloé Duplessis pointed out at a recent meeting of the Black Coloradan Racial Equity Study Commission. As Elaine Tassy reports for CPR, based on a handout from Duplessis, Estes took the slaves “back to Missouri and put them on his farm, gave them some livestock and provisions to last for a year and freed them a year before Abraham Lincoln’s Proclamation.”
Slavery in Colorado was not the only moral outrage. ChaToyya Walker, another member of the Commission, noted that around ten to twenty Black people in Colorado suffered “lynching from the mid 19th century up until 1902.”
Mob “justice” was a much broader problem in Colorado’s history, as Metro historian Stephen Leonard makes clear in his 2002 book, “Lynching in Colorado 1859–1919.” As Colorado heads to its 150th birthday next year, now seems a good time to take a clear-eyed look at some of the upsetting facts of our state’s history. We cannot properly appreciate what’s good about our state or our moral progress without understanding what’s gone wrong.
A sentence from Leonard’s book indicates the nature of the problem. “After John Preston Porter Jr., an African American youth, was burned at the stake near Limon in November 1900, Sheriff John W. Freeman refused to arrest well-known mob members because, he said, ‘it would involve Lincoln County in a needless and fruitless litigation against its own citizens.'” In other words, it would be inconvenient to hold members of a violent and murderous mob accountable for their actions.
Porter, a 16-year-old boy, had been accused of raping and murdering a 12-year-old girl, obviously a horrific crime for which, if the evidence warranted, Porter should have been prosecuted and punished consistent with the Constitution and his age. In fact, writes Leonard, the evidence against Porter was circumstantial and never tested in court, and Porter’s confession was coerced.
As Leonard relates, a group of men “chained and tied” Porter to an iron rail and stacked kerosene-soaked lumber around his feet. Porter told a reporter at the scene to tell his “papa that I have gone to heaven.” Can you imagine: a reporter, at the scene of a mob burning a child at the stake! This event was anticipated in advance.
Leonard writes, “Once, when [Porter] slipped out of the fire, he begged to be pushed back so he could die quickly. Instead, onlookers heaped wood on his head. He tried to blow the sparks away.” Leonard quotes the Denver Times: “The great crowed shook with enjoyment of the situation.” Leonard calls Porter’s story “a potent yet largely ignored reminder of the combined power of racism and vigilantism.”
Of interest is how the news media handled the story. Leonard quotes the Rocky Mountain News as saying that Porter, based on his behavior before and while being burned alive, was “not endowed with human feelings… but animal.”
The Daily Camera, quotes Leonard, wrote that, although generally it opposed lynchings, in Porter’s case “we relent and almost we consent.” Regarding widespread smears that Black men tended to assault white people, the Camera added, “Everyone knows it is in the Negro blood and can only be eliminated, if ever, by the moderating tendencies of climate and society for centuries.” Yes, such flagrant racism used to be common in Colorado’s newspapers.
I looked up the November 17, 1900 edition of the Daily Camera, and the lead article had this to say, right next to ads for wall paper and jewelry: “Citizens of Limon drove out to the scene of last’ night’s barbecue and kindled a fire anew. Porter’s bones were placed on this new funeral pyre and they were burned until nothing but ashes remained. . . . Nothing but satisfaction is expressed with last night’s work. Not a man dissents and all say, ‘well done.'” Repulsive.
The Colorado Springs Gazette took a “balanced” approach, opining (again as quoted by Leonard), “So far Judge Lynch in Colorado has been able to distinguish between the innocent and the guilty. We have no guarantee that this will always be the case.” Yet the Gazette took Porter’s guilt as a given, despite acknowledging that Porter had endured four days in the “sweat box” in the Denver jail and had been “threatened with the lynchings of himself, his father, and his brother” if he didn’t confess.
Various parties denounced the horrific act of violence. In Denver, religious leaders called a mass meeting to condemn the mob,” Leonard writes.
In glancing through the newspaper archives, I found a letter published in the Daily Camera from a John R. Furlong that begins: “It is deplorable to contemplate the fact, that within the borders of Colorado are, today, three hundred murderers running at large. There is no question whatever but that every person who took part in, aided or abetted in the burning alive of Preston Porter, is purely and simply a murderer, and a murderer of the vilest type at that.”
But tacit support for mob violence was widespread. Not only did Sheriff Freeman refuse to hold the perpetrators accountable, writes Leonard, but “Colorado’s Georgia-born governor Charles S. Thomas… had failed to protect Porter” prior to the lynching. Thomas, who, incidentally, had served as a Confederate soldier, when asked his opinion of Porter’s lynching, said, “My opinion is that there is one less negro in the world.” (See the Daily Camera article for yourself.)
According to an Aspen Daily Times article, Thomas said, “Porter certainly ought to be brought before the proper tribunal and given a trial.” But he also said, “As a matter of fact hanging is far too good for Porter. . . . If there could be an excuse for lynch law this was one of the cases. Lynching is in the blood of the Anglo-Saxon race. The Anglo-Saxon honors woman and her purity and whenever that is violated he will stop at nothing and hesitate at nothing to get vengeance.” This was the governor of Colorado, openly excusing a horrific murder and grotesque miscarriage of justice.
Porter’s murder is one of many Colorado lynchings that Leonard discusses. He summarizes, “In eight years of mining this material I have unearthed more than 175 Colorado lynchings, starting in 1859 and ending in 1919, with all but two occurring before 1907.” During these years lynchings “far outpaced legal executions as a means of disposing of suspected criminals,” he writes.
Many lynchings were motivated largely by racism against Black people and members of other ethnic minorities. Among other cases, Leonard writes of “the hanging of a ‘Mexican’ in Golden in 1867, which prompted other Hispanics to leave the area; the Denver killing in 1880 of Look Young, a Chinese man who had committed no crime; and the knifing, hanging, shooting, and rehanging of Daniel Arata, an Italian, in Denver in 1893.”
Leonard’s book is grim. Yet it has some bright spots. Sheriff William Cozens of Central City displayed moral courage, as Leonard describes. After a man had been convicted of murdering “his rival in love” in 1863, he writes, a mob showed up for the perpetrator “armed with a hangman’s rope.” Leonard continues, “With the toe of his boot the sheriff traced a line across the dirt street, warning that he would shoot anyone who crossed it. The rabble pressed forward until Cozens fired in the air. They backed off, reluctantly accepting civilization at the point of a gun.”
Leonard writes, “Lynching might have ended at an early date in other parts of Colorado had every lawman boasted Cozens’s backbone.”
As for the murderer, he was hanged, legally, with Cozens in attendance. Although from 1897 to 1901 Colorado banned capital punishment with the support of governor Alva Adams (namesake of Adams County who first served as governor from 1897 to 1899), it was not until 2020 that Governor Jared Polis signed Senate Bill 100 to finally repeal the death penalty and commuted the death sentences of the final three people on death row here.
Today, extra-legal killings are almost universally reviled and legal executions are forbidden in 23 states plus the District of Columbia. Moral progress often is painfully slow, but it can and does happen when individuals stand up for what’s right.
