Many of the accounts about Jimmy Daugherty presume that the trader was buried somewhere at Jimmy Camp. This presumption is given further credence in a famous copy of Alice Polk Hill's book, Tales of Colorado Pioneers. This copy was given to the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum in years past. In the margin of the pages dealing with Jimmy Camp are several handwritten notes:
"Jimmy Camp was my home for years.' "We lived in the log house for a long time....' "We dug up Jimmy Bones. We dug up Jimmy Stone - Keep it in the House."(1)
The author of these handwritten notes remains a mystery to this day. It was obviously someone who had lived at Jimmy Camp, someone who had found a gravestone with the name Jimmy written on it, someone who had dug up the grave. But yet, the question remains: the grave of whom?
It seems highly unlikely that this was the grave and gravestone of the original Jimmy Daugherty. In the first place, not one of the three visitors to Jimmy Camp in the years immediately following his murder - Rufus Sage in 1842, Francis Parkman in 1846, and Mormon John Steele in 1847 - mention having seen Jimmy's grave. Either Jimmy was never buried, or - if buried - his grave was not marked. Secondly, not until the coming of the gold seekrs in the late 1850's, did anyone actually see a grave at Jimmy Camp. And this was a fresh grave, with the name "Jimmy" on a marker at its head.
The existence of this other "Jimmy" grave was first discovered by Colorado College professor, F.W. Cragin, during his turn-of-the-century interviews with old Pikes Peak gold seekers. O.H. Baxter, interviewed in 1903 at Pueblo, recalled a rather recent-looking grave when he passed through Jimmy Camp on his way to South Park in December of 1858. The grave had a marker at its head inscribed "Jimmy ---Froze to death. May 3, 1858." Baxter remembered that the grave was a new one. In fact, some members of his party thought that perhaps it was no grave at all, but rather a blind meant to hide a cache of goods. They even discussed the practicality of digging it up to see if something of value was buried there.(2)
An interview with Anthony Bott helped to substantiate the existence of this early grave. He also passed through Jimmy Camp in the late fall of 1858 while on his way to winter quarters at the base of Pikes Peak. He recalled a signboard with the words "Froze to death." Bott said he always understood that the man buried there was of Captain Marcy's command, and had frozen to death during the great blizzard of May, 1858.(3)
Further proof of this came during an interview with an old mountaineer named Felipe LeDoux. LeDoux had been a guide with the Marcy-Loring Expedition of early 1858. The expedition had been on its way with supplies from Fort Union in New Mexico to Johnston's army in Utah, when they were caught by a spring snowstorm at the edge of Black Forest in present-day Colorado. The storm lasted for two days. The snow fell to a depth of several feet, with drifts of up to twenty feet. In the fury of the storm, the herd of 300 horses and mules broke loose and stampeded some forty miles to the south. Captain Marcy described the early efforts to retrieve the fleeing animals:
"Three of the herdsmen followed them as far as they were able, but soon became exhausted, bewieldered, and lost on the prairie. One of them succeeded in finding his way back to camp in a state of great prostrations and suffering. One of the others was found frozen to death in the snow, and the third was discovered crawling about upon his hands and knees, in a state of temporary delirium, after the tempest subsided."(4)
Second Lieutenant John Dubois, who commanded the mounted guard for the Marcy Expedition, reported that the dead herder was brought into the camp on Black Squirrel Creek and buried there. This report is substantiated by a number of gold seeker diarists, most of whom reported a grave from the year 1858 near the trail crossing of Black Squirrel Creek.
Felipe LeDoux, however, spoke in his interview about a second herder named "Felipe Abeitia" (probably Abeyta) who - when in danger of freezing - dug a hole in the bank of Jimmy Camp Creek. He sat in this hole, covering his knees with a blanket, until he finally did freeze to death. Cragin surmised that when the burial detail found the frozen man they did not know his name, so they named him for the camp where he was found, inscribing "Jimmy" on the stone that headed his grave. This may have ben the same "Jimmy Stone" written of in the margins of Alice Polk Hill's book, now in the Colorado Springs Piuoneers Museum.(5)
The second grave at Jimmy Camp was dug just a little over a year after the first. The young man buried there was a member of a gold seeking party that had started for the goldfields by way of the Santa Fe Trail. One of the party's members, Dr. George Willing, kept a diary. On 9 June 1859 he wrote:
"At Jim's Spring, fifty miles south of Auraria; on Thursday, June 9th, we deposited in their last resting place, the remains of Thomas Alexander, from Montgomery County, Missouri. He had been ill nine days of bilious remittent fever, and though every attention was bestowed on him that circumstances permitted, yet nothing could avert the fatal shaft. His death made a painful gap in our little party, for he had been a general favorite with the whole train. We buried him beneath the shadow of the Peak he had toiled so anxiously to reach. It seemed a pity he could not have been spared only a little longer."(6)
Another party of gold seekers from Texas passed through Jimmy Camp just two days later. In that party was one A.M.Gass, who took note of the spring and of the nearby grave:br>
"June 11th (1859) We nooned, today, at a spring of the coldest and best water that I have seen on the route. It is known as Jimmy's spring, or Alexander's grave; a Missouri man, by the latter name, having been buried here on the twelfth of april, 1857."(7)
Gass' inexact date for the freshly-dug grave can only be explained by the fact that he did not make this entry into his diary until that evening, when the party was already encamped at the edge of Black Forest. His powers of recall - after a hard travel - had obviously failed him.
Although for a short time after Gass' visit Jimmy Camp was commonly referred to as "Alexander's Grave," the marker bearing the gold seeker's name seems to have soon disappeared and the grave was forgotten. Years later, Professor Cragin drew up a map of two old Jimmy Camp graves, based on information given him by a Mrs. William Atkins, a long-time area resident. The graves located on his map were probably those of the Mexican herder Fellipe Abeyta and 1859 gold seeker Thomas Alexander. Both graves were located near Jimmy Springs and close to structures erected there by the earliest of the pioneers.
©1999 2000 Richard Gehling
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FOOTNOTES -
(1) - Handwritten notes in the margins of a copy of Tales of Colorado Pioneers by Alice Polk Hill, now in possession of the Colorado Springs Piones Museum.
(2) - F.W. Cragin's notes of an interview with O.H.P. Baxter at Pueblo, 17 July 1903. Cragin Collection, Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum.
(3) - F.W. Cragin's notes of an interview with Anthony Bott at Colorado City. Cragin Collection, Colorado Springs Pions Museum.
(4 ) - Randolph B. Marcy, Thirty Years of Army Life on the Border (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1866) p.254.
(5) - Cragin's notes of an interview with Felipe LeDoux. Cragin Collection, Colorado Springs Pionees Museum.
(6) - George M. Willing, "Diary of a Journey to the Pike's Peak Gold Mines in 1859," Overland Routes to the Gold Fields, 1859 ed. by Leroy R. Hafen (Glendale, Calif.: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 1942), p.372.
(7) - A.M.Gass, "Diary," Overland Routes to the Gold Fields, 1859, ed. by Leroy R. Hafen (Glendale, Calif.: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 1942), p.230.