Article by Virginia McConnell Simmons
Regional History – September 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
This account is based on Simmons’s narrative history, Drifting West: The Calamities of James White and Charles Baker, recently published by the University Press of Colorado (2007).
A LITTLE-KNOWN EPISODE during the early settlement of present-day Chaffee County occurred when two drifters engaged in a shootout. Had I not been digging into the careers of Charles Baker and James White, I would have missed this bit of action, which happened when Baker, White, George Strole and Joe Goodfellow were passing through Central Colorado on a prospecting trip in June of 1867. It was just a few years after the original excitement of the Pikes Peak Gold Rush had peaked and waned.