Helter Skelter

The name Azel Galbraith should be familiar to anyone claiming to be an Estes Park resident, but my guess is, 99% of long-timers will need to quick Google it before nodding their heads in agreement.

Azel Day Galbraith is buried in Canon City, his wife and son in Fort Collins.  This discrepancy alone should give one pause, but provide the dates of burial, and suddenly the tragedy becomes nearly self-evident.  Jennie S. Galbraith (maiden name Lamb ring any bells?) and her 8-year-old son both died within minutes of each other on a cold morning in Russell Gulch, Gilpin County, 22 February 1904, while Azel Galbraith died shortly after being fitted with the hangman's noose on 7 March 1905.

Jennie had so much going for her, while Azel was a gambler, womanizer, drunkard, and idler, an all-around waste of breath.  What did she see in him, what redeeming features penetrated the glare from his dome?  Did they meet prior to her graduation (as valedictorian) from Fort Collins High School in 1892?  Did they meet in Elkanah Valley, while her father and older brother Carlyle were guiding folks up Longs Peak?

Sorry for the watermarks, but this guy refuses to budge on his overinflated price - if the photographer attribution is correct, this is Lamb's Ranch prior to 1890.  Look closely, and note that four people, not three, are on the porch.

When Azel was taken into custody in Denver in April 1904, confession in pocket, he was shocked to learn it was merely on the charge of passing bad checks.  The bodies had not been found, but in a nasty turn of luck, they were discovered shortly thereafter by his landlady at Russell Gulch, 40 miles distant, who had tired of waiting for three months of back rent, and, finding the house stripped almost bare of furniture, prepared to take what she presumed was warming irons (based on the lumps) from beneath the bed covers as collateral.  Not that Azel would have wandered far from his mistress at the Brown Palace had he posted bail or gained release another way (while it was still just the bad checks charge, his sister had entrusted the Larimer County sheriff with $600 to go to Denver and clear things up) prior to the discovery of a child's lifeless limbs as the lumpen-formers.

The absolute best early history of Estes Park languishes on microfilm in the Fort Collins library, poorly reproduced and only partly legible.  The author, one Jennie Lamb.  The same Jennie Lamb who, God knows why, married Azel Galbraith in November 1892, the same Jennie Lamb Galbraith who, God knows why, bore him a son in December 1895.

All of the milestones of her life cemented in the dreariness of winter, sadness and bitter cold hanging over such a bright and cheery girl.  He shot her in bed, while her head was turned, and went outside to fetch his son, force him into the same bed, answering concerns that his mother wasn't moving by reassuring him she was just sleeping, distracting him by pointing out an imaginary bird near the window, the top of his head reduced to a porridge of bone, brains, bronze hair, and blood, to steal from Nabokov.  

Why has Estes Park forgotten her?  Indeed, why have we forsaken them?