From the archives: A dive into the pages of La Plata County history (2024)

‘Miners consumption’ and ‘female disturbance’ listed among conditions in early coroner records

On July 4, 1918, a miner was killed in an explosion while working in La Plata Canyon.

“Deceased came to his death by being hit in head with rock while blasting in Ten Brook (sic) mine. Waited in mine too long after lighting fuses. No inquest,” the coroner’s report read.

On May 12, 1893, Coroner Y.E. Peterson did hold an inquest – an official investigation – with a jury in Durango into the death of a man who had died in the home of a prostitute. No cause or manner of death was recorded.

Such reports would not exactly hold up by modern standards, said present-day La Plata County Coroner Jann Smith.

The same goes for numerous other explanations of deaths in La Plata County that occurred in the late 1800s and through the early 1900s.

On May 7, 1934, La Plata County Coroner Dr. O.B. Rensch headed to Bayfield to investigate the death of one Mr. Pierce, 60.

“He had a cerebral hemorrhage – fell over face downward onto a pillow and smothered to death,” Rensch’s terse conclusion read.

Four days later, on May 11, the coroner traveled to the Florida Mesa to determine that Dotty Mullin, 55, “Was suffering from female disturbance, and mental imbalance.” The only other listed factor in her death was “Accidental drowning.”

No inquest was held into either death.

Those explanations are woefully insufficient, Smith said.

“It doesn’t really say much about the case,” she said.

Turning back the page

These coroner records are among reams of documentation that provide a picture of life – a comically incomplete one at times, according to Smith – in La Plata County dating back to the mid-1880s.

Some records are kept in log books, bound in stiff red leather that bear the words “La Plata County” embossed in gold lettering; others have marbled covers. The brittle pages and glued spines of some records have deteriorated to the point of disintegration, while others maintain an impressive degree of structural integrity.

In a former evidence room attached to the La Plata County Detention Center, County Clerk and Recorder Tiffany Lee gets excited as she slips on a pair of white gloves before handling the delicate record books.

Statutorily speaking, she does not have to keep many of these records. But she wants to. Some are useful for people tracing their family genealogy (one of Lee’s own relatives appears in the first county census). Other records are just amusing.

“It’s the history of our county,” she said.

All of the records are public in some fashion, although those containing personally identifying information such as Social Security numbers are only made public to people who can prove relation to the person in question.

What coroners records tell us – and what they leave out

Smith said she and her deputies laughed when they reviewed records created and kept by her predecessors.

Coroners are charged with investigating deaths that occur under suspicious circ*mstances, without the attendance of a physician and otherwise uncommon or unexplained deaths, among a variety of other circ*mstances.

Those responsibilities include determining the cause and manner of death.

Although autopsies occurred in North America as early as 1662, Smith said the reports gave the impression that La Plata County coroners were not always doing autopsies around the turn of the century.

Carol Huser, Smith’s immediate predecessor, wondered if the records were incomplete.

“These are descriptions of events – not determinations of cause or manner of death,” she said, noting that they do not fulfill the statutory duties of a coroner.

In 1906, Durango Marshall Jesse C. Stansel shot and killed La Plata County Sheriff William J. Thompson in a famed incident that took place outside El Moro Saloon, where El Moro Spirits & Tavern now sits.

The report of the coroner on that incident leaves out critical details, Smith said, while venturing into territory where she wouldn’t dare go.

“W.J. Thompson came to his death on Main Avenue on the side walk near El Moro Saloon in Durango as the result of gunshot wounds received from a gun in the hands of Jesse C. Stansel,” the report reads.

Documenting who was responsible for an injury – another entry notes that a man received fatal wounds from broken glass thrown by a man named Fred Meyers – is not a liberty Smith would take.

But the report leaves the exact location of bullet wounds out and the subsequent cause of death undetermined. (Stansel was acquitted on murder charges because of a lack of evidence.)

“OK, so he was shot, so now what? What did you do” Smith wondered. “It doesn’t look like they did anything.”

Take the death of Mullin, the woman who suffered from “female disturbance, and mental imbalance” when she drowned.

“That’s the cause of death, would be the drowning, but the manner? Who knows,” Smith said.

Still, the records can provide snapshots of broader trends.

In the first 20 years of the 20th Century, numerous miners died of a vaguer and ill-defined malady identified as “miners consumption.” And in summer 1934, after the peak of the Great Depression, there were at least six suicides.

Even something as rote as recording becomes important, Lee said.

“Today, the records that we recorded yesterday are history,” she reminds her staff.

And as for Smith’s broad conclusion?

“I’m glad I didn’t live back then,” she said.

rschafir@durangoherald.com