Río Tinto by Michael Zimmer

Author:Michael Zimmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 2017-07-19T15:27:00+00:00

Battle of the Hogup

Part IV

* * *

by Eric Cranston

From

True Tales of the Old West magazine

November/December, 1956

The subsidization by Lester Kerns and Columbus Wright of supplies delivered to the entrenched citizens of Hogup in the late afternoon of January 10, 1879, has been well documented and needs no further discussion here. Even though neither man was present as the crates of food and supplies were passed out, their involvement in the relief efforts was already common knowledge among the hungry strikers. Perhaps it was equally well known to Clifford Baker and Lawrence Mueller.

Jeffrey Callahan, that indefatigable chronicler of the Hogup conflict, was in Gunnison on the evening of the tenth, telegraphing an update on the strike to his editors at the Denver News, when the vehicle carrying Baker and Mueller arrived in town. He “observed its course down Gunnison’s snowy main avenue through the frost-etched windowpanes of the telegraph office,” and would comment later that he thought it odd when the coach turned down an alley between the Atlantic Hotel and a cooper’s shop. He claimed to think it odder still when the coach reappeared only minutes later to continue its journey to the Muncie Boarding House, where Messrs, Baker, and Mueller maintained separate accommodations on the third floor. Callahan reported that their time of arrival in Gunnison was shortly after 7:00 p.m., well after dark at that time of year.

According to depositions collected in the weeks succeeding the strike, Baker and Mueller ordered a hearty supper at the Coal Creek Café, next door to the Muncie, then returned to the lobby of the boarding house where they enjoyed an evening of lively conversation and “enchanting music,” the latter provided by the proprietor’s twelve-year-old daughter, Alice Stevenson, on the piano. In a telephone interview conducted with the now eighty-seven-year-old former Miss Stevenson, currently a resident of Santa Monica, California, she made it a point to inform this chronicler that Lawrence Mueller seemed especially intrigued by her ministrations of the ivories that night, and encouraged her to continue on well past her usual bedtime, until the recital was “disrupted by that awful unpleasantness at the Atlantic.”

The unpleasantness in question was the eruption of gunfire from two blocks away, involving, according to witnesses, at least two shotgun blasts and “three to four” reports from a revolver. Upon investigating the source of the shooting, the Atlantic’s night clerk discovered the bodies of Kerns and Wright lying in the upstairs hallway of the hotel’s second floor. An autopsy performed that same evening by Gunnison physician E. J. Hunsaker determined that the cause of death to both men were multiple .31-caliber pellet wounds from what appeared to be buckshot from a 10- or 12-gauge shotgun. The physician’s report also noted that both men had been delivered a coup de grace to the head by a bullet of at least .44/100 caliber.

The murders of Kerns and Wright, and, indeed, it was never considered anything less than homicide by the citizens of Hogup, were investigated by then Acting Sheriff Benjamin Meeks.

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