William and Harvey Shipman tragedies: Deaths of father and son: 1870 – 1877
In mid-July 1870, 22-year-old Harvey Shipman was living in the Laramie valley near Sherman. Listed as a gold miner in the census, he boarded with teamster James Sherrod in the vicinity of ranchers Philip Mandell and Thomas Alsop. A week earlier, Harvey’s father William Shipman had been killed in North Park, Colorado, in a gruesome manner. Within the year, Harvey himself would be incarcerated at Ft. Sanders, awaiting trial in Laramie for killing a man with a shovel.
Little is known about the Shipmans. William was born in Vermont in 1813. In his 20s, he made his way west, stopping in Ohio and Wisconsin, where Harvey was born. In 1864, William and his son may have been in the mining camps in Colorado. In 1867, they were in southeastern Wyoming, perhaps attracted by the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad (UPRR) and most certainly by the promise of gold.
Mining camps west of Laramie
Mining fever had been fueled by the editors of the Frontier Index, who, on May 22, 1868, proclaimed the discovery of “gold all around Laramie City,” in North Park and on the Big and Little Laramie rivers. Within a year, two camps of men had gathered to work the mines.
One camp was at the Last Chance mines, fancifully dubbed Cinnabar City by Stephen F. Downey, who had been deputized to take the territorial census of Albany County in 1869. He reported the names of 50 men at the mines, including his brother Billy Downey who kept a diary of his time there.
The other camp was on Independence Mountain at the far north end of North Park in Colorado, established by John K. Gilman and his associates. From 1867-1868, Gilman made significant profits as co-owner of a company supplying railroad ties for the UPRR in camps at Pine Bluffs, Sherman, Ft. Sanders, and Jelm. In 1868, one of his sub-tie contractors, John H. Mullison, followed the well-known Cherokee trail from the upper Big Laramie River west to North Park, naming Independence Mountain and finding evidence of gold there.
By 1870, Gilman and his tie camp manager, John Bratt, had bought several claims on Independence Mountain and built a cabin and corrals at a site that was used for both tie cutting and mining. Bratt hired both of the Shipmans to work his claims, and numerous others worked there in 1869 and 1870.
Wagon Travel Difficult
A major drawback for both the Last Chance and Independence Mountain miners was the lack of roads to the sites. The dense forest had posed serious problems for the Cherokee Indians in 1850 who tried this short cut to North Park on their journey to the gold mines in California. They had to abandon several wagons. The geologist Ferdinand Hayden, on a hunting party in 1868, had the same trouble. He reported that his wagons had to be unloaded and “jerked by man force” over fallen trees to make any progress. It took his party five days to go 40 miles.
Without wagon roads, the mines could not be economically viable. Pressed to assist the miners, the Wyoming territorial legislators passed two acts in December 1869 to establish wagon routes to the mines. They identified three commissioners for each road. The North Park road commissioners were John Gilman, George Van Dyke, and W. H. Harlow, all based in the town of Sherman. They were tasked to start determining a route from Sherman to North Park by May 1870.
Troubles in North Park
In creating these acts to build roads to the mines near Laramie, the legislators had ignored signs that all was not well on Independence Mountain. North Park and the North Platte river valley were traditional hunting grounds of the Ute Indians. Although the Utes had been confined to the White River Indian Agency in an 1868 treaty, several Ute bands still traveled to their northern hunting grounds every summer. In late August 1869, Mullison returned to Sherman with the news that the Ute tribal members Colorow, Captain Jack, and Piah had ordered all the miners to leave North Park.
The next summer, in late June of 1870, the Utes were back on Independence Mountain, stealing the horses of Gilman’s camps, threatening to commandeer all their gold and pelts from trapping, and again ordering all miners to leave. By that point, George Van Dyke was in the camp, fulfilling his duties of determining a route from Sherman to North Park. On June 28, he wrote a letter, published in the Laramie Sentinel, in which he raised the alarm over the belligerence of the Utes. He wanted help from the Wyoming territorial governor John Allen Campbell to ensure that the white miners had clear rights to the area.
Within a week of that letter being published, the Gilman camp became the site of violence fomented by tribal rivalries and mining encroachment. A band of 70 Northern Cheyenne or Arapaho Indians had traveled south to North Park from the Rawlins area, where they encountered their traditional enemies, the Utes. They engaged in battle on July 4. A group of miners from Cheyenne City, returning from a failed attempt to reach Hahn’s Peak, found themselves in the middle of the battle. Declining the pleas of the Utes to lend them their weapons, they traveled on to Gilman’s cabin, where they found a grisly scene.
Van Dyke had not left when the Utes had given their ultimatum a week before, opting to take care of William Shipman, who had a broken leg. The Utes had given those two men 20 days to leave, acknowledging Shipman’s sickness. But during the July 4 battle, Shipman had been killed, his body riddled with bullets and two axes buried in his head. Van Dyke’s body was nearby. Also in the area were another miner and three trappers who had been killed.
Aftermath
News from the miners who fled began to be published by July 7. Stephen Downey made an emergency ride to the Last Chance mines to warn the crew there, who abandoned the site. Soldiers from Ft. Sanders—sent to investigate the murders—found the bodies and “bloodied” papers and clothing, but none of the battling tribal members. Because the battle had occurred partly in Colorado Territory, Governor Edward McCook had jurisdiction and conducted an official investigation that resulted in the Ute Indians being exonerated from responsibility for the murders.
Despite his monetary success with tie camps, Gilman disappeared for good from Wyoming, showing up later that summer in Utah and then in Deadwood, South Dakota. Mining in the two areas west of Laramie languished for a couple of years, and efforts to establish roads also stalled until 1876 when Downey initiated efforts to build the North Park Road. Many in Wyoming and Colorado continued to blame the Utes for the killings at Gilman’s camp, and their suspicions helped to fuel the tensions between the Utes and the encroaching white settlers that culminated in the Meeker Massacre of 1879.
Harvey Shipman stayed
There is no indication if Harvey Shipman was at Gilman’s camp in June, but news of his father’s death would have weighed heavily. For the next several months he was in the Tie Siding and Sherman areas, working for and boarding with local teamsters, ranchers, and hotel keepers. On December 8, during a card game in Sherman, he hit and killed Charles Wood with a shovel, was incarcerated at Ft. Sanders, and appeared for trial on March 9, 1871.
The Laramie Daily Sentinel reported at length on this trial, which was noteworthy for including three women among the men on the jury, Lottie Cardwell, Harriet Conkey, and Martha Boies. Harvey pled not guilty although he had admitted to the murder. The county attorney, Stephen Downey, opened with his witness, W.H. Harlow, who had been one of the road commissioners with Van Dyke. As Justice of the Peace at Sherman, Harlow confirmed that he had conducted an examination of the prisoner on Dec. 8. During this exam, Shipman could not explain why he had hit Woods, who was a friend.
M.C. Brown, the defense attorney, then announced that he would try to establish insanity as a defense. He called several witnesses who had known Shipman. Walter Sinclair, a deputy sheriff in Albany County, attested that in 1867 – 1868, Shipman was courteous, obedient to his father, social, cheerful, and pleasant. But then, according to those who had boarded and worked with Shipman in the year before he killed Wood, he became “strange and abstracted,” unusually quiet and reserved, and melancholic.
The insanity plea was not convincing, and the jury found Shipman guilty of manslaughter. Lacking a territorial prison, the county sent him to Detroit for an incarceration of two years. His prison term began on March 28, 1871. In November 1872, he was sent to a “pest house” for some kind of contagious illness, and he was released from prison two weeks later, having served 1 year and 2 months of his sentence.
Harvey Shipman’s death
After his release, Harvey Shipman again headed west, making it to Omaha where, now age 25, he enlisted on Aug. 23, 1873, in Company M of the 2nd Cavalry regiment of the army, serving at Ft. Laramie. He deserted two years later on Aug. 14, 1875.
He showed up one more time in the historical records with newspaper accounts of his death in 1877. After deserting from the army, he returned to North Park, partnering with a man named Green. They were trappers, establishing a base in a clearing that later became known as Shipman Park, high above North Park in the Roosevelt National Forest, where the streams empty into the Laramie River.
In a July 9, 1877, article titled “Dead and Alone,” the Laramie Daily Sentinel described how Green had left Shipman in February, with both men agreeing that Shipman would leave the cabin by June 20. A man named John Evans visited the cabin in late June, only to discover Shipman dead on the floor, having suffered from an abdominal ailment, perhaps appendicitis. Evans estimated that he had been dead about six weeks. He alerted Green and C. T. Waldron, who had a ranch and roadhouse on the Big Laramie River above Jelm, and the three returned on July 1 to bury Shipman on a crib of poles, topping the dirt with two buffalo skills.
It was a painful, lonely death for a young man who had already experienced tragedy and disaster. Stories had been circulating about how the two Shipmans, father and son, had once spent a winter snowed in, existing on hides and shoe leather. And the locals in North Park would sometimes talk about how a ghost could be seen haunting the grave at Shipman Park.
By Jane Nelson
Source: Free use Google map with annotations by Jane Nelson
Caption: Map of the southern Laramie valley and the upper end of North Park. Black line shows approximate route from Sherman to Gilman’s camp on Independence Mountain, 1868 – 1870.
Source: courtesy photo
Caption: Photo of Harvey Shipman’s 1877 grave in Shipman Park. Taken in 1909 by James Hardman, long-time early rancher in the Big Laramie River valley.