The Man in Muggins Gulch

What's a front door worth? A man found out in the eighteen seventies, and it took him three months to finish paying. Estes Park then was a high green bowl with one main way in, and square on it, at the head of Muggins Gulch, sat the cabin of James Nugent. Rocky Mountain Jim, they called him. A grizzly had taken one eye and torn up half his face. Isabella Bird, an Englishwoman who rode these mountains with him, said desperado was written all over him, and then wrote her sister that he was a man any woman might love but no sane woman would marry. The stage that carried her away brought in a dandy named Haigh, who asked to ride up with Jim and hunt. The Earl of Dunraven meant to own it all. His agents worked the Homestead Law, paying more than thirty-five men to stake a hundred and sixty acres apiece, and his English Company bought the claims at about five dollars an acre. All that ground, and one scarred man sitting in the doorway of it. Bad feeling rose between Jim and a neighbor, Griff Evans. Over land going to the Earl, probably. Over Evans's daughter, possibly. Over liquor, perhaps, in both of them. In June of eighteen seventy-four Jim came toward the Evans ranch. The Earl's own physician told it this way. Somebody hollered, "Jim's on the shoot!" Evans came up out of a nap, snatched up a double-barreled shotgun full of blue whistlers, ran out, fired, and missed him clean. That same Haigh, the Earl's associate, cried, "Give him another barrel!" Evans gave it. The horse dropped dead, and Jim went down with five pellets in his head. That's one telling. There are at least five, none of them unbiased. Evans likely pulled the trigger. Jim lived. Three more months, with a pellet in his brain. While the doctor tended him, the story goes, Evans rode thirty miles to swear out a complaint against him for assault. Jim died in Fort Collins that September. The case against Evans was dismissed for lack of witnesses. The Earl's view was that it was a pity he hadn't done it sooner. The man who wrote this park's history says that to the Earl, Jim was a minor annoyance. I'd have liked to see the Earl say that to Jim's one good eye.