# Tom Tobin: The Mountain Man Who Ended a Killing Spree
In 1863, fear had a name in Colorado Territory: the Bloody Espinozas. They struck, disappeared, and left the territory wondering who would be next. Soldiers could not find them.
Posses could not stop them. And every failed hunt only made the legend darker.
Then Fort Garland sent for Tom Tobin. He was not a polished lawman or a famous gunslinger. He was something far more dangerous in that country—a tracker.
And when Tobin rode into the mountains after Felipe Espinoza, he would return with proof that the terror was finally over.
This is the story of Tom Tobin, the forgotten mountain man who hunted the Bloody Espinozas.
—
In the spring of 1863, Colorado Territory was still young, still raw, and still deeply unstable. The Civil War was raging far to the east, but the violence that came to the mountain settlements that year was something different. It was personal, it was terrifying, and no one seemed able to stop it.
The men at the center of that terror would become known as the Bloody Espinozas. According to the Colorado Encyclopedia, Felipe Neri Espinoza was born in 1828, the son of Pedro Ignacio Espinoza and Maria Gertrudes Chavez, whose family lived in the hamlet of El Rito, about 35 miles west of Taos in New Mexico Territory. Jose Vivian Espinoza was born in 1831.
Some accounts describe the Espinozas as brothers, while others have suggested they may have been cousins.
Felipe had a reputation as a hothead even as a young man. Around 1854, he married 17-year-old Maria Secundida Hurtado. By 1858, the couple had moved with their children to San Rafael, near Conejos, at the western end of the San Luis Valley, and Vivian later joined him there.
According to the Colorado Encyclopedia, the brothers farmed, herded sheep, and rustled horses. At some point, they made a mistake that may have helped set the whole bloody chain of events in motion. They robbed a wagon carrying supplies to a priest who operated a trading post in northern New Mexico Territory.
The priest reported the robbery to General James H. Carleton in Santa Fe, who sent word to Fort Garland that the Espinozas should be arrested. U.
S. Marshal George Austin and 16 soldiers went to the Espinozas’ cabin near San Rafael. The lieutenant in charge attempted to avoid a direct confrontation by pretending to be on a recruiting trip.
He asked the Espinozas to join the army.
When they refused, a gunfight followed. A Mexican corporal was killed, with Felipe and Vivian escaping. The soldiers afterward looted their cabin.
After that, Felipe vowed revenge on the Anglos. This is important because Espinoza’s story is not always told as simple murder for murder’s sake. According to Daniel Sanchez Leonetti, writing for History.
net, Felipe later journaled about how he and his family had been victimized and left destitute by white Americans.
Sanchez Leonetti also writes that Felipe recorded in a journal that was later found a dream in which the Virgin Mary ordered him to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 600 gringos. Whether that was madness, vengeance, religious delusion, political grievance, or some mixture of it all, what followed was a wave of violence that terrified Colorado Territory.
—
The first known victim was Francis William Bruce. Bruce lived near Cañon City, and on either the 16th or 18th of March, 1863, he headed towards a sawmill on Hardscrabble Creek, but he never reached it. His horses and empty wagon returned without him, and when his body was found, he had been shot through the heart.
His gun was still in his holster.
Bruce had also been stripped and mutilated, with a large cross carved into his chest.
Almost immediately, another man was found dead. Henry Harkins had been working at or near a cabin in the region of present-day Colorado Springs. That evening, when friends approached the cabin, they noticed there was no lamplight showing through the cracks.
When they went inside, they found Harkins shot in the head. His skull had been split with an axe, and his chest had been gashed.
The killings continued from there. J. D.
Aldeman was found dead near the Ute Pass Road. Binkley and A. N.
Shoup were killed near the Kenosha House Way Station. Bill Carter was murdered near Alma. Fred Lehman and Saul Seger were found shot and beaten near Fairplay.
Some victims were even found with stick crucifixes pushed into bullet holes in their foreheads.
At first, the territory had no answers. The killers seemed to move through the mountains, strike without warning, and disappear again. With the Civil War still raging, some wondered if the murderers were Confederate sympathizers from Texas.
Others suspected an unknown band of raiders.
But whoever they were, the effect was the same. Fear spread across southern Colorado. Men who had once traveled alone now hesitated before leaving home.
Freighters watched every bend in the road. Ranchers and sawmill workers understood that if they were caught in the wrong place, help might be miles away.
Governor John Evans posted a bounty, hoping money would bring men into the mountains willing to hunt the killers down. Troops were sent into the field, and the First Colorado Cavalry searched the country where the murders had taken place. But the soldiers failed to catch even a glimpse of the men responsible.
That failure only made panic worse. If trained cavalrymen could not find them, what chance did an ordinary traveler have? Every rumor made the killers seem larger.
Every fresh body made them harder to ignore. And every failed search made it feel as if the Espinozas knew the land better than the men sent to stop them.
One soldier summed up the mood in a single line: “The people are scared nearly to death here. None but the bravest dare go out at all.”
—
For a while, the Espinozas had one great advantage. They left no one alive who could describe them. Then one man survived.
The first real break came from Edward Metcalf. He was driving a wagon between Alma and Fair Play when the Espinozas struck. A rifle ball slammed into his chest and knocked him back into the wagon box.
By all rights, it should have killed him.
But Metcalf had a folded copy of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation tucked inside his breast pocket. Somehow, those papers stopped the bullet. His oxen bolted, carrying the wagon away from the ambush, and as Metcalf was pulled down the road, he saw two Mexican men emerge from the timber.
That glimpse became crucial. When he later described the attackers, the description matched the two men who had recently escaped from soldiers sent out from Fort Garland. For the first time, authorities had more than rumors and bodies.
They had suspects.
By then, the killings had struck close to the California Gulch mining district. Fred Laiman and Soledad had friends there, and those men were not willing to wait for the army. They gathered, raised money, and formed a volunteer posse under John McCannon.
Seventeen men set out, following the trail through cold, wet country, across Weston Pass, and into South Park. For several days, they tracked through soft ground and found campsites where the ashes were still warm—proof that they were close.
On the morning of the 8th of May, near Fourmile Creek, the posse spotted two hobbled horses below them. There was no sign of the riders, so McCanles divided his men and moved in from different directions. Before long, Vivian Espinosa appeared walking towards the horses.
The first shot came from posse man Joseph Lamb, who hit Vivian and dropped him to the ground. The Colorado Encyclopedia says Vivian managed to raise himself on one elbow and fire back. Then another posse man, identified as either Fred or Charles Carter depending on the account, fired the killing shot, striking him between the eyes.
Vivian Espinosa lay dead near the horses.
The gunfire brought Felipe out of the brush. He saw his brother on the ground and ran. For a moment, the posse had the more dangerous of the two Espinozas in sight, but confusion saved him.
McCanles ordered his men not to fire because he mistook Felipe for one of the posse. By the time they realized the mistake, Felipe had disappeared into the brush and over the canyon rim.
The posse had stopped one of the Bloody Espinozas, but the man most driven by revenge had escaped.
What they found on Vivian’s body only deepened the horror. Sanchez Leonetti says the men discovered personal papers in a buckskin pouch, finally giving authorities names to attach to the killers. Another note reportedly claimed Vivian was bound to commit 50 more murders to quiet the restless soul of his father.
The posse then cut off Vivian’s head and hauled it back as proof. The local doctor kept the bleached skull for years, while his rifle passed into private hands.
—
For a short time, it seemed possible the terror had ended. Vivian was dead, Felipe had vanished, and some hoped he had fled into New Mexico, died in the mountains, or disappeared for good.
But according to the Colorado Encyclopedia, Felipe returned to Fourmile Creek, buried Vivian’s body, and took one dried foot back to San Rafael as a keepsake. Soon, he was back to killing.
Felipe killed two more men near Cañon City as he made his way south, though their names are unknown. Then he returned home and recruited his nephew, Jose Vicente Espinosa, who was either 14 or 16 depending on the source. Either way, he was still a teenager when Felipe drew him into the violence.
On the 30th of June, Felipe and Jose killed a fisherman named William Smith near Conejos, and once again, fear spread across southern Colorado. Traders hesitated to travel. Mail did not move through South Park without a guard.
Ranchers abandoned 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 homes.
Travel and trade slowed unless people had military protection. The Espinozas were no longer just murderers hiding in the mountains. They were disrupting the life of the territory itself.
That fall, Governor John Evans, Colonel John Chivington, and John George Nicolay, President Lincoln’s chief secretary, traveled to Conejos for treaty talks with the Utes. While there, Evans and Chivington tried to calm public fear over the Espinosa murders, but Felipe and Jose knew they were nearby.
On the 4th of September, the Espinozas sent Evans a message asking for pardons and demanding that property be restored to their family. If their request was ignored, they warned, they would 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 the governor at the first opportunity.
The warning was ignored.
—
On the 10th of October, 1863, the Espinozas struck again, and this attack brought the story directly to Fort Garland. A storekeeper named Leander Filbrook was traveling near Sangre de Cristo Pass with Dolores or Lola Sanchez on the road between Trinidad and Costilla. They were in a buggy when the Espinozas opened fire and missed.
Filbrook fled up the steep mountainside with Felipe and Jose chasing him, while Sanchez hid behind a boulder. A wagon soon appeared driven by Pedro Garcia, who tried to protect her by hiding her in the wagon box, but the Espinozas returned and demanded that she be turned over.
The Colorado Encyclopedia tells the scene differently. In that account, the attack happened northeast of Fort Garland. The Espinozas killed the mules pulling the wagon, and after Filbrook and Sanchez fled in opposite directions, they burned the wagon.
But both versions agree on the essential horror of what happened next. Sanchez was captured and bound. Filbrook escaped and reached Fort Garland.
Sanchez also survived and was brought to the fort after flagging down soldiers the next morning.
Now the army had fresh witnesses, clear descriptions, and proof that Felipe Espinosa had not disappeared after Vivian’s death. The military had failed to catch him. Posses had only partly succeeded.
Roads were unsafe, ranchers were fleeing, commerce had been disrupted, a governor had been threatened, and the Espinozas had just struck within reach of Fort Garland.
So Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Tappan, commander at Fort Garland, decided it was time to call in a different kind of man. Not another patrol, not another ordinary posse. He needed someone who could read the country, follow a faint trail, and find men who had already vanished from everyone else.
He needed a tracker, and the man he summoned was Tom Tobin.
—
To understand why Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Tappan turned to Tom Tobin, we have to step away from the Espinozas for a moment and go back to the beginning of Tobin’s own story.
Thomas Tate Tobin was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1823. He was born into a family already connected to the borderlands and the world that would shape him.
His father, Bartholomew Tobin, sometimes called Bartlett, was an Irish immigrant. His mother, Sarah Autobees, was of mixed heritage, white and possibly Delaware.
Before marrying Tobin’s father, Sarah had already had a son named Charles Autobees, who later used the spelling Autobee. Charles would become one of the best-known frontiersmen in the family. And for young Tom, he would become the link that pulled him west.
Charles Autobees had left St. Louis for the mountains in 1828 when he was only 16 years old to work as a beaver trapper. He returned to St.
Louis in 1837, but he did not stay long. That same year, he headed west again, and this time 14-year-old Tom Tobin went with him.
According to the Santa Fe Trail Association, Tobin left St. Louis with Charles Autobees and Ceran St. Vrain, traveling along the Santa Fe Trail with supplies bound for Simon Turley’s whiskey distillery out of Rio Hondo near Taos.
Taos was still part of Mexico then, and the country around it was a meeting ground of cultures, commerce, violence, and survival. It was a world of trappers, traders, soldiers, Pueblo communities, Mexican settlements, American merchants, and mountain men moving between them all.
Tobin learned that world young. He worked at Turley’s mill and distillery, hauled supplies, made trips along the Taos and Santa Fe trails, trapped, traded, scouted, and traveled between places like Bent’s Fort, El Pueblo, Fort Lupton, Fort Jackson, and St. Louis.
Sanchez Leonetti writes that Tobin and Autobee carried Turley’s whiskey and flour to posts like Bent’s Fort and El Pueblo, traded with native people for beaver pelts and buffalo robes, then carried those goods back east to St. Louis.
And Turley’s distillery was not exactly producing ordinary whiskey. They were producing Taos Lightning. History.
net describes the famous Taos Lightning as an extremely strong liquor said to be flavored with chili powder, gunpowder, and tobacco.
This was the world Tobin came of age in: freight trails, trading posts, mountain camps, and dangerous distances. He was not learning from books or from military manuals. He was learning from the land, from his half-brother Charles, from men like Ceran St.
Vrain, and from the hard practical experience of surviving in country where a mistake could cost a man his life.
—
By 1846, Tobin had married Maria Pasquela Bernal. She was 17 years old, and she was actually a distant cousin of Felipe Espinosa. That small connection is one of the stranger details in the story.
Years before Tobin was called to hunt Felipe Espinosa, he had married into a family distantly connected to him.
Tobin and Pasquela settled near Turley’s Mill at Arroyo Hondo, and by all accounts, they built a long life together. They would have many children, and Pasquela remained with him until her death in 1887.
According to the Millicent Rogers Museum, Tobin also delivered dispatches to Fort Leavenworth for General Stephen Kearny. That matters because 1846 was the year the Mexican-American War began, and American power moved into New Mexico.
The U. S. occupation of New Mexico was mostly unopposed at first, and for a brief moment, life around Taos continued with something like normal routine.
But that did not last.
On the 19th of January, 1847, the Taos Revolt broke out. The uprising was led by Mexican rebel Pablo Montoya and Taos Pueblo leader Tomas Romero, also known as Tomasito. The revolt was directed against American rule, and its first victims included some of the most important officials in the new territorial government.
The most famous killing was that of Governor Charles Bent. Insurrectionists went to Bent’s home in Taos, broke down the door, and killed him in front of his wife and children. According to the Millicent Rogers Museum, Bent was shot with arrows and scalped.
Other officials were also murdered, including Stephen Lee, Cornelio Vigil, and J. W. Leal.
The next day, the violence reached Simeon Turley’s Mill at Arroyo Hondo, where Tobin and Charles Autobees were working. A large force, described in the sources as roughly 500 Mexicans and Pueblo Indians, attacked the mill.
Autobees saw the crowd coming and rode toward Santa Fe to warn the American forces and bring help. That left Tobin and a small group of mountain men to defend the place. They were badly outnumbered.
For hours, the defenders held out against impossible odds. The fight lasted into the night, and eventually the attackers set the mill on fire. In the confusion, only two men escaped alive: Tom Tobin and another defender, usually identified as Johnny Albert.
They escaped separately on foot through the darkness and the smoke.
It was one of the most defining moments of Tobin’s early life. He was not yet the old tracker of legend. He was still only in his early 20s.
But by the time he walked away from the burning ruins of Turley’s Mill, he had survived a siege that killed nearly every man trapped inside.
—
Afterward, Tobin did not retreat from the conflict. He and his half-brother Charles joined a company of volunteers led by Ceran St. Vrain, serving as scouts in the campaign to hunt down and defeat the revolt’s leaders and fighters.
The aftermath was harsh. Those who were not killed in the battle were tried, and several were put to death.
For Tobin, the Taos Revolt was not just another frontier episode. It tied him even more closely to the American military presence in the region and to the dangerous work of scouting, tracking, and moving through hostile country.
After the revolt, Tobin and Pasquela began farming along the San Carlos River near El Pueblo in southeastern Colorado. According to the Santa Fe Trail Association, they sold crops to Lieutenant Colonel William Gilpin’s troops, who were camped near Bent’s Fort.
But farming did not mean Tobin had left the frontier life behind. In 1848, Gilpin hired him as a scout and courier, and Tobin carried dispatches from the Canadian River country back toward Bent’s Fort.
Over the next several years, Tobin farmed, ranched, trapped, guided, scouted for the army, and worked trails across enormous distances. His reputation grew with experience.
Just before the Civil War, Major Benjamin Lloyd Beall hired Tobin as a scout to guide an expedition looking for a railroad route to California. According to the Bent’s Museum, Beall described Tobin as having “a reputation almost equal to Kit Carson’s for bravery, dexterity with his rifle, and skill in mountain life.”
That comparison matters. Kit Carson was already one of the great names of the frontier. To say Tobin’s reputation was almost equal to Carson’s was no small compliment.
Sanchez Leonetti goes even further, writing that Tobin became such a gifted tracker that people claimed he could track a grasshopper through sagebrush. Some contemporary reports even considered him the one man who could surpass Carson in shooting, scouting, and tracking.
Of course, that kind of language borders on legend. But if we strip away the exaggeration, the point remains. By the 1850s and early 1860s, Tobin was known as a man who could fight his way through the mountains, read sign, handle a rifle, and survive in places where most men could not.
There was another important connection to Fort Garland itself. In 1858, according to Sanchez Leonetti, Charles Autobees was hired to supervise the adobe construction of the fort. When Autobees was wounded in a stabbing, Tobin stepped in to complete the work.
So when Fort Garland later became the center of the Espinosa manhunt, Tobin was no stranger to the place. He knew the country, he knew the military, and he knew the fort.
—
By October of 1863, Tom Tobin was about 40 years old. He was no longer the 14-year-old boy who had followed his half-brother west from St. Louis.
He had survived the fur trade world, the Taos Revolt, military scouting, long-distance courier work, and years of farming and ranching along the edge of dangerous country.
Sanchez Leonetti places him near Fort Garland at the moment he was called upon, raising horses and cattle on his ranch and waiting with Pasquela for the birth of a child when a soldier rode out to summon him to the fort.
The description of Tobin at this point feels almost made for legend, but it is worth including because it shows how he was remembered. He was around 5’7″, no more than 140 pounds soaking wet, bow-legged, with jet black hair. He liked to dress in black from head to boots and ride with a black saddle on a black horse.
He carried a large hunting knife, an 1851 Navy Colt in a buffalo hide holster, and a heavy .53-caliber Hawken rifle that stood nearly shoulder high beside him.
He may not have looked physically imposing in the usual sense, but by then his reputation did the talking for him. And when the army needed someone to find Felipe Espinosa—a man who had already escaped soldiers, posses, and patrols—it was not another ordinary detachment they sent for.
It was Tom Tobin.
—
On the morning of the 12th of October, 1863, Tom Tobin rode out from Fort Garland to find Felipe Espinosa. He did not go alone, as much as he may have preferred it.
Tobin left with Lieutenant Horace W. Baldwin and 15 troopers, along with scout Timothy G. Graham, a civilian named Loren or Lorin Jenks, and a young teenager named Juan Montoya, whom Tobin had brought to lead his horse whenever he dismounted to read the ground.
They began near the place where the Espinozas had attacked Leander Filbrook and Dolores Sanchez. Tobin worked outward from there, circling wider and wider until he finally cut sign and found the tracks of two ponies.
For a moment, the hunt nearly ended early. Tobin had ridden ahead when young Montoya spotted two mounted men in the distance and called out in Spanish, “Ahi van dos hombres a caballo”—”There goes two men on horseback.”
But Lieutenant Baldwin did not speak Spanish, and by the time he understood and pushed forward, the riders had disappeared over a ridge.
It was a missed chance, but it proved they were close.
The next day, the country worked against them. Tracks crossed and tangled through the mountains, many of them left by mule ponies, and the party became separated while trying to follow the different trails. Sanchez Leonetti says Jenks and most of the troopers were separated from the main group for the rest of the hunt, leaving Tobin with Baldwin, Montoya, Graham, and only four troopers.
Another version comes from the Metis Museum, in which Tappan had originally given Tobin 15 soldiers, but Tobin left them behind because they made too much noise on the trail. That version simplifies the events, but the point is the same. Tobin did not believe numbers mattered as much as quiet movement and careful tracking.
—
For the next two days, the smaller party searched the rough country around La Veta Mountain. Then, on the morning of the 15th of October, Tobin came down La Veta Creek, near present-day South La Veta Creek, and found the tracks of two oxen.
When he later found one ox wandering loose, he reasoned that the Espinozas must be driving the other as a source of food.
The trail was faint. In his later account, Tobin said, “It was only by the broken twigs that I could follow them.” At times, he had to crawl under fallen timber just to keep the direction they had gone.
Then he saw birds circling ahead. To Tobin, that meant the Espinozas had likely killed the ox and were camped nearby.
The timber was too thick for horses, so he told the others to wait while he crawled ahead with Montoya. Three troopers volunteered to follow, and Tobin allowed them to come, warning them not to speak and not to fire until he gave the order.
After crawling about 100 yards, Tobin realized the birds were magpies—better known as feathered camp robbers, the kind that gathered around scraps. That confirmed it. They had found the Espinozas.
Tobin moved forward alone and settled beyond a fallen log. From there, he could see Felipe Espinoza near the fire, described with a bushy beard and a deep scar running down his left cheek. The carcass of the ox hung from a willow nearby, and Felipe was carving meat from its roast over the flames.
Jose was not visible at first. He was down in a ravine tending the horses.
Then Tobin stepped on a stick, and it forced the action. Felipe heard the crack, saw him, and grabbed for his gun.
Tobin fired first with his Hawken rifle, hitting Felipe in the side. According to Tobin, Felipe cried out, “Jesus favor me,” then shouted to Jose, “Escape, I am killed.”
Felipe fell forward into the fire, singeing his beard before he managed to roll away.
At the same time, Jose bolted from the ravine and ran toward an aspen grove. Tobin reloaded as fast as he could, later saying he poured powder into the rifle, dropped a bullet from his mouth into the muzzle, and capped the gun as Jose ran.
Tobin shouted in Spanish for Jose to stop. The teenager turned and fired at him but missed. When Jose kept running, Tobin fired and struck him in the lower back, breaking his spine and killing him.
The Colorado Encyclopedia gives a slightly different version, saying three soldiers also fired at Jose and missed before Tobin’s shot brought him down. Either way, both accounts agree that Tobin fired the fatal shot.
—
Felipe was still alive. He had crawled away from the fire and was reaching for his revolver when Tobin reached him. Tobin later said he asked Felipe if he knew him, and he told him who he was.
As the soldiers came up, Felipe cursed him, reportedly hissing “brutos,” meaning “brutes” in Spanish. Then Tobin warned the men, “Look out, he will shoot you.”
Felipe fired wildly but missed. Tobin disarmed him, grabbed him by his scorched hair, pulled his neck across a fallen log, drew his knife, and cut off his head.
It is one of the most brutal details in the entire story, but it was done for identification. Tobin then had Juan Manuel Montoya behead Jose as well. The bodies were left where they fell.
In the camp, the party found several personal items belonging to Dolores Sanchez, along with Felipe’s diary and several letters. According to the Colorado Encyclopedia, his diary recorded 32 killings.
Sanchez Leonetti says the papers also contained Felipe’s own self-justifying writings about killing Americans, including a strange religious passage later published in Denver’s Weekly Commonwealth, where Felipe claimed divine protection and wrote that his enemies had hands but could not touch him, feet but could not catch him, eyes but could not see him, and ears but could not hear him.
Those writings helped explain why the Espinozas had become something more frightening than ordinary outlaws. Felipe seemed to see himself as a man protected by heaven, driven by revenge, and chosen for violence.
—
Tobin put the heads into a gunny sack, tied it to his saddle, and started back toward Fort Garland. The party camped that night on the slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and on the 16th of October, they reached the fort.
When Tobin arrived, Colonel Tappan was out riding with his officers and their wives. Tobin sent for him and waited in the commander’s office.
When Tappan returned, he asked, “Tom, did you have any luck?”
Tobin opened the sack and rolled the heads onto the floor. “So-so,” he said.
According to Sanchez Leonetti, several of the officers’ wives screamed and some fainted. Tappan himself turned pale and quickly ordered the heads taken away and buried.
And with that, the Bloody Espinozas were no more.
But Tobin’s reward was never so simple. There’d reportedly been a bounty as much as $2,500—about $66,000 today—but Tobin did not receive it in full. Sanchez Leonetti says Governor John Evans never paid him, and Tobin later claimed he had not even known about the bounty when he rode out.
Gregory Lelieur from History.net describes an interview with Kit Carson III, Tobin’s grandson, who said Tobin went after the Espinozas not as a bounty hunter but, quote, “For humanity’s sake and to protect mankind that these fellows were killing all over the valley, all over the place.”
Recognition came slowly. In 1866, Governor Alexander Cummings gave Tobin an elaborately decorated buckskin coat, and the army presented him with a limited edition Henry rifle. Years later, Governor Edward McCook gave him $500.
Then in 1893, three decades after the hunt, Governor Davis Hanson Waite gave him $1,000.
For the terrified people of southern Colorado, the reign of terror was over. For Tom Tobin, the hunt became the story that tied his name forever to the legend of the old frontier.
—
The hunt for the Bloody Espinozas became the story most often attached to Tom Tobin’s name, but it was not the end of his life. In many ways, the years after the manhunt show a different side of the old tracker. Not the silent figure crawling through mountain timber with his rifle in his hands, but a father, rancher, aging frontiersman, and a forgotten veteran of a world that was quickly passing away.
Just one week after Tobin returned to Fort Garland with the heads of Felipe and Jose Espinoza, his wife Maria Pasqueal gave birth to a daughter. They named her Maria Pasquealita Tobin.
Years later, in 1878, Pasquealita married William “Billy” Carson, the son of Kit Carson. Tom Tobin had long been connected to Kit Carson’s world through scouting, trapping, military service, and frontier society. Now the families were joined by marriage.
But the connection would eventually take a violent turn. Tobin learned that a drunken Billy had mistreated Pasquealita and went after him with a knife. Tobin tried to stab Carson for abusing his daughter, and Carson struck Tobin in the head with a sledgehammer before shooting him in the side or the groin—sources differ.
Whatever the exact details, the result was serious. Tobin was badly wounded and was expected by some to die. But like so many times before, he survived, though it would affect him for the rest of his life.
Tobin and Billy Carson apparently ironed out their problems a few days later. That may sound hard to believe after such a violent encounter, but frontier family life could be complicated, and the sources suggest they did reconcile in some form.
Tobin also outlived Billy Carson. Billy died in 1889 of lockjaw after accidentally shooting himself in the leg.
—
By then, Tobin himself was becoming an old man, and the frontier that had shaped him was disappearing.
In November of 1868, Tobin was appointed by General Penrose as chief scout on an Indian hunting campaign, working alongside other scouts including his half-brother Charles Autobees and one of the most famous characters of the Wild West, Wild Bill Hickok.
But as the decades passed, Tobin’s life became less about campaigning and more about survival.
Tobin spent his final years in near poverty on his ranch near Fort Garland, trying to collect pensions and old government debts for services he had performed. That included the killing of the Espinozas, for which he had never received the full reward.
For all the danger he had faced and for all the work he had done for military officers, governors, and frontier settlements, very little money seems to have reached him when he needed it most.
There is something almost familiar in that ending. The old frontier produced legends, but it did not always take care of the men who became those legends.
Tobin could reportedly do little more than sign his own name, yet Sanchez Leonetti notes that he still served two years on the Costilla County School Board from 1893 to 1895.
One story from those years captures the rough humor people remembered. On the opening day of class, Tobin visited the schoolhouse and addressed the teacher, Nettie Calkins, and her students. Looking over the room, the old tracker reportedly said, “If any of these brats disobey or are mean, just let me know and I will cut out their hearts.”
It was a 𝓈𝒽𝓸𝒸𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔 line, but it was almost certainly delivered as dark frontier humor. By then, Tobin was an old man whose reputation had become larger than life.
—
Still, the final years were not easy. Tobin was remembered, but not widely celebrated. He was respected by those who knew his story, but he never became a household frontier name in the way Kit Carson did.
By the end, much of that world was already passing into memory.
Tom Tobin died on the 15th or 16th of May, 1904. His obituary in the Rio Rattler, published on the 27th of May, 1904, read: “Thomas Tobin, a noted scout and Indian fighter of the early days of Colorado, died at Fort Garland a few days ago at the age of 87. He spent the declining years of his life on his farm, 4 miles from Fort Garland, where his children were born.
They are Mrs. Breen of Silverton, Mrs. William Carson of Fort Garland, who married Kit Carson’s eldest son, Mrs.
Newton of Alamosa, and John Tobin of San Luis Valley, who has been blind for some time.”
Tobin was buried near Fort Garland with his wife, Pascuala, who had died in 1887. They are interred in the private McMullen Cemetery in Blanca, near Fort Garland.
Even in death, there is a strange little reminder of how imperfectly history remembers him. Sanchez Leonetti notes that Tobin’s tombstone gives a birthday different from much of the historical literature and even misspells his name as “Toben.”
That feels almost symbolic. Tom Tobin had lived one of the most dramatic frontier lives of the 19th century. He had gone west as a boy, worked the Santa Fe and Taos trails, survived the Taos Revolt, scouted for the army, knew men like Kit Carson and Ceran St.
Vrain, helped build Fort Garland, and ended the Bloody Espinozas’ reign of terror.
And yet today, his name is rarely mentioned outside of regional history.
—
Maybe that is because Tobin did not fit neatly into the polished legend of the Old West. He was not a dime novel gunslinger. He was not a famous lawman with a badge.
He was not a general, politician, or national celebrity.
He was something rougher and harder to define. A tracker, scout, rancher, survivor, and mountain man who belonged to the borderlands between cultures, between empires, and between history and legend.
Colonel Henry Inman, writing in the older, more romantic style of frontier storytelling, described Tobin as dying “gray, chiseled, and venerable, with his memory respected by all who had known him.”
That may be more legend than straight history, but in this case, it feels fitting.
Because whether remembered as a scout, a trapper, a farmer, a father, or the man who hunted down Felipe Espinoza, Tom Tobin represents the type of frontier figure who rarely became famous enough for the history books, but whose life ran straight through the most dangerous and defining moments of the American Southwest.
He was not just a man who ended the Bloody Espinozas. He was one of the last hard survivors of an older West.
