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.