Colorado’s first execution as a state was a Buffalo Soldier who killed the wrong man
Capital punishment has walked hand in hand with much of the its sketchy history in Colorado. Michael Radelet from the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder, counts 102 legal executions and 175 lynchings.
He notes that William Gilpin, Colorado’s first territorial governor, first authorized the death penalty on Nov. 5, 1861, and two years later “under territorial authority took the life of William S. Van Horn, who was hanged before a crowd of thousands” in Central City” on Dec. 18, 1863.
Though a pretty bold way to introduce the color of law to the Wild West’s storied history of swift justice, it does not match the story of the first death under a figurative state flag.
James “Jimmy” Miller was a 23-year-old Buffalo Soldier private in the U.S. Colored Troops at Fort Lyon on Aug. 26, 1876 — 25 days after Colorado became a state — when he attended a dance in tiny Las Animas.
According to the story, a drunk white man whose name is lost to history told Miller the dance hall was for whites only and drove him out at the point of the gun, as another white patron, John Sutherland, tried to step in on Miller’s behalf.
“Miller and a friend, Benjamin Smith, later returned and randomly shot into the bar, missing the thug but killing Sutherland. Both men received death sentences; the governor commuted Smith’s sentence,” according to the Colorado State Public Defender’s Office “Catalog of Colorado Executions.”
Some context of the times: The Buffalo Soldiers today are honored as the heros they were, freed slaves who took up arms to defend a country that, until the Civil War, had viewed them as little more than chattel. Fort Lyon, had been under a cloud of national shame since it served as the base from which Col. John Chivington led 700 Colorado militia volunteers on a merciless attack on peaceful Arapaho and Cheyenne, killing 128 women,children and elders — a cowardly attack The History Channel called “a depraved slaughter,” in which bodies were scalped and mutilated, including sexual organs.
The Buffalo Soldiers came west to help stem the retaliatory attacks from numerous tribes and help ensure safe passage for overwhelmingly white settlers, but in 1869, when white soldiers at Fort Lyon instigated a brawl in a theater, Buffalo Soldiers with the 10th Cavalry were pulled from the area, leaving the 9th Cavalry, to which the doomed Miller belonged.
The Colorado Catalog of Executions describes Miller’s end this way:
“At the hanging, which the governor delayed two weeks so Miller could join a church and be married, the trapdoor would not open at first, and when it did, it fell to the ground. Miller dropped through the opening in the platform, but the rope was too long and his feet came to rest on the trap door that had fallen below him. The trap door was quickly removed so Miller could swing unimpeded. He hung for twenty-five minutes before expiring. Later, the sheriff, distraught over the bungled hanging, resigned his position and left the community.”
Oddly, Fort Lyon today is a state prison, and its end is uncertain.