10/3/1929 - Along the Arkansas River where it flows east out of the Grand Canyon of the Arkansas (known as the Royal Gorge, a 1,250 foot deep, six mile long rent in the southwestern landscape of Colorado that in November of 1929 will be spanned by what will be the highest suspension bridge in the world until 2001), at the small town of Canon City, a peaceful, warm, Indian Summer Thursday afternoon is shattered when the escape plans of Colorado State Penitentiary convicts, Albert A. "Danny" Daniels (#14277, thirty-seven-years-old, serving a twelve to fourteen year sentence) and James "Jimmie" Pardue (twenty-six-years-old, real name Walter J. Hollub, #12822, serving a twenty to thirty year sentence), both serving time for armed robbery, go awry as the men attempt to take dining room Crow's Nest guard, Elmer Erwin, hostage. A death instead results and the convicts' plans fall apart from there and in the next two days, rioting felons will destroy a sizable chunk of the prison and twelve more people will lose their lives.
The Royal Gorge & Bridge
The Prison
Now a destination for sightseeing tourists, whitewater rafting enthusiasts, and gravity defying rock climbers, the small town of Canon City, Colorado (Pueblo is 39 miles to the east, Colorado Springs is 45 miles to the northeast, and Poncha Springs is 62 miles to the west) is officially laid out on January 17, 1858 to provide a commercial center for the mining taking place in South Park and the upper Arkansas River as part of the region's Pike's Peak Gold Rush (a three year event that begins with gold being discovered near the mouth of Little Dry Creek by William Greeneberry "Green" Russell and Samuel Bates in July of 1858, and ending with Colorado becoming a state in 1861). Wild West days of Colorado still thriving, in 1867 the United States Congress authorizes $40,000 to the territory to build a prison to hold a host of desperadoes and killers. Canon City selected as the site of the penitentiary, on January 13, 1871 the prison begins business as a three-story stone building across from the Arkansas River built on 25 acres of ground off the town's First and Main streets, an institution consisting of fifty prisoner cells, personnel offices, a kitchen, and a large dining hall. Joined soon by other miscreants, the prisons first resident is a larcenist named John Shelper. In 1881, a second cellhouse of forty-two double cells and one hundred and twenty single cells, built by inmate labor, is added to the facility, followed by a third cellhouse in 1899, with stone guard towers to keep an eye (several in fact on the twenty-four foot high and four feet wide stone walls surrounding the prison) on things, and a fourth cellhouse and other service facilities open up shortly after the turn of the century (convict labor is used to create sandstone blocks, canning of an assortment of food products, manufacture leather goods out of a tailor shop, build local roads and irrigation ditches, help on farms during harvest times, produce soap, mattresses, and pillows, and run a group of lime kilns..
First Cellblock
The Prison
Despite building a library that will eventually house over 110,000 books and having the prison band perform weekly concerts, the prison is a hard place for serving hard time and will become infamous for making its over-crowded criminal residents wear striped garb, walk in lockstep with other cons, eat less than nutritious meals, get paid thirty cents a day or working on projects outside the prison, and receive punishments of beatings with broomsticks, solitary confinement in a dungeon, and being tied up by the thumbs and shackled to canon ball weights. The first escape from the prison takes place in December of 1871 when a convict simply walks off the grounds. It will not be the last breakout that takes place at the prison, and on October 3, 1929, Pardue and Daniels take their turn at vacating the premises before their sentences have been completed.
Butt Beating With Mallet
Put together over the previous year with the help of a transit convict bound for Oklahoma named Jerry Jarrett, the escape plan is relatively simple with guns being smuggled into the prison to take guards hostage so that a group of convicts can simply walk out of the prison behind their human shields and past a West Tower guard the men have given a bribe of $200 to to look the other way when the break takes place (but it is a payment made for nothing because the guard that took the money doesn't show up for work on Thursday and is replaced by a guard quite willing to fire on the cons, James Pate). The end of lunch, with hundreds of men moving back to their cells or to work within the prison is chosen for when the escape will take, and October is selected as the month of the break because the state has emptied out of tourists and the winter snows have not yet hit. Following their plan, Pardue and Daniels slip away from the convicts about to eat lunch, arm themselves with two smuggled pistols, put civilian clothes on under their prison garb, then go into trustees' dormitory where they wait quietly for the meal to conclude. Meal done, following procedure, sixty-two-year-old, five-foot-five-inch-tall, guard Elmer George Erwin, manning the dormitory's locked crow's nest, removes the rounds from his rifle, leaves the weapon and ammunition behind, locks the trap door entrance/exit to the watch station, and descends and set of stairs to the floor of the lunchroom. At the bottom, Erwin finds Pardue and Daniels waiting for him. Guns displayed, the two felons demand the guard give up his prison keys, Erwin in turn demands the two men surrender their weapons and call off their escape attempt, and when he reaches for Pardue's gun, the convict shoots him ... and for all intent and purposes the breakout is over as the killing comes with an automatic death penalty attached and the authorities will almost certainly not let any prisoners walk beyond the walls, especially if the pair are holding even more hostages. But they try anyway, adjusting their failed plan into a doomed tragedy as they round up eleven other guards and take them to Cellhouse One, where other inmates involved in the escape plot are armed by Pardue and Daniels with additional hidden weapons for guarding the guards.
Anatomy Of The Escape
Deaths just beginning, using the rifle taken from Erwin's station after the guard's death, Pardue attempts to take out all the men in the guard towers, still deluded in thinking he can walk out of the prison. The first guard to be targeted is Iowa born, Walter Rinker. Firing from inside the prison chapel, the 52-year-old is cleared from the top of the prison's administration building. Then Pardue takes out Tower Nine by shooting down fifty-seven-year-old Ray Brown of Cripple Creek. Realizing Tower One could still block an escape, Pardue then takes up a position between Cellhouse Two and Cellhouse Three to better shoot at eleven-year Canon City veteran, sixty-three-year-old Myron H. Goodwin. Goodwin however spots Pardue and fires first, hitting the convict in the hip with a round from his rifle. Pardue is taken back to Cellhouse One in immense pain and A. H. Davis (#14847, a former waiter serving a twenty to thirty year sentence for an armed robbery in Denver) inherits the rifle. Making his way to Cellhouse Four, Davis finds an upper window to snipe from and mortally wounds Goodwin. About five hundred convicts on the prison grounds as lunch ends, it takes the killers and their supporters a little over fifteen minutes to take control of the interior of the penitentiary.
Canon City Prison
Davis
In the same fifteen minutes that the convicts gain control of the prison, word goes out from Warden Francis E. Crawford about conditions at the prison and help begins arriving in the form of the Colorado State National Guard, local volunteers, and trained police officers from Pueblo and Colorado Springs, forces that come armed with a French 75 cannon, dynamite, tear gas, and a variety of firing weapons that includes several machine guns (amazingly, in subduing the situation over the next twenty-four hours, the authorities will fire between two thousand and seven thousand rounds of ammunition into the prison, killing NO ONE!). The show of force persuades many of the convicts to obey the guards and find shelter within the yard while the mayhem of roughly one hundred and seventy-five rioters destroys the prison ... compliments of a kerosene fire set in the prison chapel by George "Red" Reilly (#12720, serving a thirty year to life sentence for armed robbery) that first burns down the Central Building where the chapel is located and then spreads to and destroys both Cellhouses One and Two.
Reilly
Machine Gun Nest
On Fire
Impasse, with most of the rioters and their hostages holed up in Cellhouse Three, Daniels sends a note to the warden demanding three fully fueled cars be placed at the prison's West Gate to facilitate the escape of the convicts, with their hostages to be released once they have traveled a safe distance from the institution. The note also includes the warning that Daniels will start executing the hostages he has if his demands are not met, one guard every thirty minutes. The warden is given two chances to agree to Daniels' terms, and he refuses both times. And at around 7:00 in the evening, Daniels begins doing what he said he'd do (but not to all the guards he could have killed, lack of ammo keeps a couple of men alive, others feign death, one guard, Jack O'Shea has his fate commuted because he had given a sandwich to a convict that had been denied a meal, and a couple of other guards survive because their wounds appear fatal to the convicts) ... first to go is veteran guard (he has been at the prison for over twenty-five years and also serves as the institutions executioner), former Alamosa, Colorado blacksmith, John J. "Jack" Eeles, a married seventy-year-old with a wife and three grown children. Telling Eeles that he wants to send a message to the warden, Daniels shoots the guard in the head and then has the body thrown out of a window. Following his ghastly schedule, over the next couple of hours, seventy-year-old former police officer Robert A, Wiggins (after Daniels gives the man time for a last prayer), married forty-five-year-old Charles Shepard, and tailor shop overseer John W.McClelland (both Shepard and McClelland are found bound at their hands and feet) all get the same treatment as Eeles.
Waiting For The Riot To End
Cells Where Guards Are Killed
Not killed by Daniels, guard Marvin Duncan is profoundly damaged by his evening in the prison with the killer convict and his friends. Taken hostage when the uprising at the prison begins, Duncan witnesses the execution of Wiggins, hears Daniels state that Duncan will be the next guard to die, and spends the night anticipating his death at any moment ... a situation his mind can't take and by morning the guard is stark, raving mad from the unremitting tension. Locked in a cell with dead bodies all about, the next morning the door to the cell Duncan is being kept in must be removed, before the comatose guard can be carried to the hospital for treatment. Additionally, nine other guards and police officers are wounded in the takeover and the authorities attempts to crush the rioting, suffering various bodily ills from bullets and beatings at the hands of the convicts.
Inside After
In the tales told afterwards, two heroes emerge on the law-and-order side in the authorities retaking of the prison. Seeing the blatant malevolence with which the convicts have executed Eeles and Wiggins, forty-two-year-old Father Patrick O'Neal exclaims, "That's enough!" (apparently forgetting "peace on earth" notions of the trade, he is a priest from Manchester, Ohio that has been at Canon City for only three weeks) and then volunteers to help pacify the prisoners, by planting enough dynamite, to the tune of one hundred and fifty pounds of the material, against one of the walls of Cellhouse Three to blow a breach in the structure the guards can enter ... twice (the explosion will be heard ten miles away and will blow out windows in town)! And twice with detonation, the dynamite is not sufficient enough to blow a hole in the structure (for his efforts, O'Neal will be awarded the Carnegie Medal for Bravery, he will die a reverend in Alabama in 1971 at the age of 84). The other hero is a naval veteran of WWI turned Pueblo police officer, Marion Keating. Seeing that no one yet has put into play the gas grenades that have been provided, Marion Keating grabs several of the bombs, moves forward, climbs up on the roof and begins pitching them through the broken windows of the cellhouse.
Inside After
While the tear gas in the cellhouse does not cause the prisoners to abandon their last fortress, it does contribute massively to ending the uprising. Eyes watering and coughing from the gas, the convict meets with Davis, Reilly, and Pardue, and the doomed group decides to end their lives rather than risk being captured alive, going on trial, and one day being hung. Wounded and in extreme pain, Pardue is the first to be shot in the head, with Davis and Reilly quickly following (already dead is Albert Morgareidge, #150000, who has been shot down by a guard while serving as a guard outside where the hostages were being held ... foolishly as he is only serving a two-year beef for grand larceny). Leaving a single round for himself, Daniels fires his pistol into the guard bodies in his hiding hole and then fires his weapon's last round into his temple for an over and out to the break. But not quite all over, despite the last deaths taking place at about 4:00 in the morning, afraid he will be mistaken for convict and shot, hostage guard O. E. Earl crawls outside and lets the authorities know that all the ringleaders of the uprising are dead ... news that sends armed officers sweeping into the cellhouse where the information is soon verified. Over, the failed prison break of less than twenty-four hours is the worst in Colorado history (and remains so), has cost thirteen men their lives (eight guards and five convicts), wounded nine other guards, caused almost $500,000 in damages to the prison, and sets in motion additional years being in added to some prisoners' sentences, costs the warden his job, and leads to changes at the institution for both guards and felons that keep Canon City relatively quiet until twelve inmates escape the prison on December 30, 1947 (all will be recaptured or killed within twenty-four hours of leaving the penitentiary).
Headlines
Headlines
10/3/1929 ... Colorado's state prison at Canon City erupts in violence that will kill thirteen people!
Hearses Awaiting Moving The Dead
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Gruesome they were certainly wild back in the day.
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