Review of "Season of Terror: The Espinosas in Central Colorado, March-October 1863" by Charles Price

What Wallace Stegner does for Utah’s legendary outlaws such as Robert LeRoy Parker (a.k.a. Butch Cassidy) in his 1942 book Mormon Country, Charles F. Price has done for neighboring Colorado in his first book-length foray into non-fiction, Season of Terror: The Espinosas in Central Colorado, March-October, 1863. He has humanized some of the American West’s most ruthless killers.

Written in the lyrical prose that is the hallmark of his highly regarded Civil War novels about Western North Carolina (Hiwassee, 1996, Freedom’s Altar, 1999, The Cock’s Spur, 2002 and Where the Water-Dogs Laughed, 2005), Season of Terror takes Price’s literary talents on a long chase through the rugged mountains of Colorado that overlook the dusty plains of New Mexico. The wild but true story follows the exploits and ultimate ambush and killings of two brothers bent on a revenge fueled murder and mutilation spree that claimed the lives of as many as 32 men, women and children.

Price, who is the winner of the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction along with such other notable North Carolina writers as Reynolds Price (no relation) and Charles Frazier, has deep roots in Colorado too, as his wife Ruth Perschbacher Price is from Salida and has extensive family there. The couple actually tracked down on foot many of the details and locations of the shootings and final killings of the outlaws. The book contains many of his own photos and personally sketched maps, breathing life and a sense of place into a tale that in other writers’ hands might have only been dusty pages of long-forgotten and little-explored history.

What normally might be little more than a footnote in a textbook about 19^th century American history, Price turns into a gripping Wild West adventure as he tracks brothers Felipe Nerio and José Vivian Espinosa, who along with their young nephew José Vincente began a reign of terror in the spring of 1863 across the San Luis Valley west of Trinidad. Six months later, as Price documents, they were hunted down and gruesomely beheaded by US Army Scout Thomas Tate Tobin in the snow-capped Sangre de Cristo Mountains near Walsenburg.

Price’s meticulous research vividly tells their story with the help of newspaper accounts from the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Republican, which followed the exploits of the killers on almost a daily basis. His scholarly efforts are praised by historian Stephen J. Leonard, Professor of History and Chairperson of the History Department at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, as being “more than a detailed and gripping account of a raft of killings.” He explains that Price’s work reveals a much larger picture, spanning centuries of conflict between Anglos and Hispanics and painting such a complex tale of Colorado’s early history so different from today’s modern West “that we can imagine it only with the help of an insightful guide.”

Despite his own trekking across the terrain of the Espinosas’ brutal rampage, and despite countless hours poring over newspaper archives and other early accounts of the US Army’s efforts to bring the murderers to ruthless justice, a mystery still remains at the core of Price’s tale. Were the murderers really “desperate and lawless bravos,” as the Denver press described them at the time? Were they the persecuted members of a secretive Catholic sect known as the Penitentes? Were they possibly seeking revenge of the loss of their own small property at that hand of Colorado’s large ranchers? Or, on a more sinister note, were they victims of the broader and more racist effort by Colorado authorities to rid the new U.S. Territory of all vestiges of Hispanic influence following the conclusion just 15 years earlier of the Mexican-American War in which the United States seized more than half a million square miles of Mexican territory, much of which makes up today’s modern southern and western Colorado? Price skillfully addresses these questions but wisely leaves the reader to decide the answers.

Published by the University Press of Colorado, Season of Terror can be ordered from their website at http://www.upcolorado.com/ or from Amazon.com both as a hard cover and as a Kindle edition.

review written by Worth Weller