Turner pens ‘Notorious San Juans’

Add Carol Turner’s “Notorious San Juans” to your summer reading list. You won’t be disappointed.

It’s the fourth book by the Broomfield author and history columnist for the Broomfield Enterprise; she’s also published “Forgotten Heroes & Villains of Sand Creek,” “Notorious Jefferson County and Notorious Telluride.” It was during her research for the latter that Turner was inspired to add the San Juans to the list.

“I was working on the Telluride book, and I kept stumbling on all these great stories from Durango. You definitely had a wild history, even more so than Telluride,” Turner said.

Depending on the thickness of the reader’s skin, the 14 stories about treachery in Ouray, La Plata and San Juan counties range from the amusingly macabre to downright tragic. Turner singled out the story of Mary Rose Cuddigan, a 10-year-old girl who died in 1883 in Ouray under mysterious circumstances, as her choice for most horrific tale. A local mob, convinced the girl had been beaten and left to freeze to death by her adopted parents, lynched the couple, earning Mary Cuddigan the ignominious distinction of being the first woman to be lynched in Colorado.

Others finally receiving their long-delayed notoriety because of Turner’s efforts:

William Mason and Joseph Venderweide, implicated in the murder of Secret Service agent Joseph Walker in 1907 near Hesperus. (The story also was chronicled in 2010 by Herald staff writer John Peel.)

Durango’s gun-slinging, cattle-rustling brothers Porter and Ike Stockton, who lived and died by the gun.

Jack Roberts, who was accused of killing popular Silverton resident Thomas Greatorex on the streets of Durango with a shot to the back of the head. A posse formed to bring Roberts to justice but returned without the outlaw’s body. The Dolores News provided a tongue-in-cheek dispatch of his demise, stating that “Rev. Drs. Buzzard and Coyote” officiated his funeral, exact whereabouts unknown.

Turner’s style is engaging, concise and, at times, humorously ironic. Each story is well-set and followed through to its end; of particular note is the remarkably short sentences many of the killers received.

Silverton’s Rosa Dallaville likely conspired with her lover, Austrian immigrant Victor Pangranzi, to murder her husband Max. Both confessed to the killing, but Rosa was acquitted and Pangranzi served three years before the pair lived out their years in common-law marriage.

“I think how people felt about the victims back then had a lot to do with the sentence the killers got,” Turner said.

“Notorious San Juans” is no textbook. It is published by The History Press of South Carolina, which puts out short, readable books with plenty of appealing photos. The length requirements (35,000 words) presented a challenge to Turner, who said she had to cut about half of her material for “Notorious San Juans,” but the finished product is exactly what she was hoping for.

“I’m a writer, and I come at this from a less academic angle,” Turner said.

“I’m trying to get regular citizens who never read history to say ‘This is part of our past,’ like running the Chinese out of Silverton. All the stories are fun, even if the facts weren’t, and I consider this really interesting history.”