Review by Ed Quillen
Local History – July 1995 – Colorado Central Magazine
Where the Bodies Are: In Central Chaffee County, Colorado
by June Shaputis
Published in 1995
No ISBN
In 1875 before Leadville boomed and the railroad arrived, Nathrop was a leading city. It was strategically located near the mouth of Chalk Creek and the foot of Trout Creek Pass, it had a pioneer flour mill built by Charles Nachtrieb to serve the miners at Granite and Oro City (an ancestor of Leadville), and it had a crime rate that would shame any modern metropolis.
The biggest share of the crime wave was the famous “Lake County War” (this was before Chaffee was split off from Lake County) in 1874 and 1875. Vigilantes took charge of the area, and the terror culminated with the shooting of a judge — Elias Dyer, son of John Dyer, the Methodist missionary to the Rockies — in his own courtroom.
Nowhere have I found a more comprehensive account of that war than in Where the Bodies Are, which demonstrates that violence isn’t new. Nathrop’s namesake, Charles Nachtrieb (the pioneers had some spelling problems, too) was shot to death in his own store in 1881 — and the killer, though known, was never brought to justice: “It has been reported that Charles Nachtrieb was not a popular man.”
Quite a few more bodies are revealed in this account of Nathrop, Centerville, Helena, Brown’s Canyon, Gas Creek, and the people who settled them.
However, it’s not a flowing narrative. Sprinkled among the accounts of yesteryear are lists: postmasters, water rights, business locations, grave sites.
This isn’t a book you’d just sit down and read, but it will be handy to have around for reference. All those lists are more than useful if you’re trying to put your finger on a piece of information, but they’re not easy reading.
Even at that, they can provide interesting snippets. Among the Nathrop Cemetery interments, for instance, are Thomas Lynch, who “was run over by a Rio Grande passenger train while drunk Monday night.”
Shaputis’s history seems pretty solid. I saw only one notable error: Nachtrieb’s 1868 mill is “thought to be the first flour mill built `west of the Mississippi’.” However, there was a mill grinding grain at Greenhorn in 1847, and Otto Mears built a flour mill at Conejos in 1865. That’s pretty good — I can usually find at least a dozen in most books.
I would have preferred to see more narrative — a thread that would connect all these pieces and explain how Nathrop managed, over the years, as an agricultural town in an industrial zone. Also, the typography is sometimes congested or confusing, and a book that will be kept around for years deserves a better grade of paper.
Even so, Where the Bodies Are is still a necessity for the local history buff and anyone interested in Nathrop and environs — which in 1875 extended from Oro City to Saguache.
— Ed Quillen
