Ep. 17 - Murder, Cards and Oysters

Georgetown is a picturesque small town in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. My family visited often when I was a kid because my dad enjoyed fishing in Georgetown Lake. He never failed to reel in a few rainbow trout. Unbeknownst to us, Georgetown was the scene of a murder over oysters and the lynching of the perpetrator back in the mid-1800s. That murderer was Edward Bainbridge and his spirit is believed to still haunt Georgetown.

Reconstruction America was a very difficult time for black people. Formerly enslaved people were trying to find their place in this new society and much of what they found was discrimination, even in the North. Some of these individuals looked to the West to start a new life and that is where Edward Bainbridge set his sights. His first stop West was St. Louis. He immediately ran into trouble here losing all of his traveling money to gambling and women. One positive experience he had in St. Louis was getting his first taste of Atlantic oysters here and he loved them. 

In the mid 1800s, America was in the middle of a great oyster craze. Americans ate oysters any way they could get them: fried, broiled, pickled, stewed, in soup, stuffed in turkey, made into pie and formed into patties. Oysters had been popular long before this, of course, in places local to oyster beds like Chesapeake Bay. Native Americans left behind shell mounds for hundreds of years and colonists harvested large quantities. But oysters didn't travel far from the coast because oysters don't preserve long out of their shells. However, by the 1840s, oyster canning was a booming business and ice technology and railroads made it possible to ship oysters across the country. St. Louis was one of the bigger cities that oysters were shipped to and now Edward Bainbridge was hooked. And that would lead to his downfall.

Somehow Bainbridge managed to make his way to Denver and he was looking for gold. Gold that he wouldn't find and he was soon penniless on the street. He eventually found himself a card game and won a man's horse and pocket watch. Bainbridge cashed in on his good fortune and headed for the Colorado mountain mines, stopping near Spanish Bar where he began a career in claim jumping. During the California Gold Rush, the United States government handled claims that people made on mines where they discovered precious metals. These mining claims gave certain individuals the rights to extract minerals from a tract of public land. This was also the Wild West and laws were fluid. Miners tended to make up their own laws and in small mountain towns, claim jumping became a common practice. An owner of a mine would have to protect his own claim from others who would basically squat on his tract. A claim jumper was someone attempting to seize the land another had already claimed. Bainbridge found this to be a lucrative practice, albeit a dangerous one. He was run out of Spanish Bar by four brothers after he tried to claim jump on them. His next stop was Black Hawk.

Bainbridge started spending most of his time drinking, gambling and visiting brothels. He gained a reputation for being boisterous and he liked to fight. There were very few saloons that he hadn't been tossed out of and a few Ladies of the Evening had also found themselves pulling on Bainbridge's hair and beard when he would run out of the brothel without paying for services. New started spreading that silver had been discovered in the upper Clear Creek area in the Spring of 1865 and Bainbridge decided to make yet another fresh start in a camp named Georgetown.

Brothers David and George Griffith had discovered gold near the head of Clear Creek in 1859 and the named the location Georgetown in honor of George. The brothers had also found silver, but at the time miners were ignoring silver. This would change and Georgetown would become one of Colorado's richest mining areas. The first silver rush occurred in 1865 and Georgetown not only had vast quantities of silver, but its location at a lower elevation made it more suitable for settlement, so it became a supply center as well. Bainbridge partnered with several men to work a silver vein on Griffith mountain. This wasn't a very prosperous vein and soon the claim dried up. Bainbridge's partners left, but he stayed and made trouble in town, gambling and cavorting once again.

April of 1867 would change Bainbridge's trajectory in life. His rabble rousing would come to an end. His foul temper had seen him thrown out of several saloons in recent days and on one particular day, April 23rd, he drew his pistol on a Mr. Osborn of Georgetown and threatened to blow the man's head off. Several men jumped up and got Bainbridge under control. Later that afternoon, Bainbridge threatened another man named James Martin, who just simply laughed at the threat. The next day it seemed things were okay between the men as they sat and played cards with each other in John Nickle's Saloon on the corner of Fourth and Rose Streets. The game wasn't going well for Bainbridge and he was getting agitated. Before the next hand was dealt, Bainbridge said he wanted to play for a can of oysters. These were worth a lot of money in landlocked Colorado, especially in a mountain mining camp. Bainbridge also added that if he lost, he would shoot Martin. So basically, he's telling Martin to give up the oysters or he's going to get shot. 

Well, Bainbridge didn't win that next hand and he followed through with his threat, pulling his pistol and shooting James Martin in the face. The bullet went through his nostril and lodged in his brain. martin fell to the floor and the saloon fell silent. A doctor rushed to care for Martin, while Bainbridge was hauled away to a second floor room of a nearby house. The citizens of Georgetown were incensed. A black man had just killed a white man for no reason and they were going to have justice. Lynching was a very real thing in the country at this time and in small towns, citizen justice was the rule. About ten o'clock that evening, a large mob of men had gathered outside the house where Bainbridge was being held. Several men entered, overpowered the couple of guards and tossed Bainbridge out the window and the rest of the mob bound him with rope.  

Bainbridge screamed that he was supposed to have a trial first and the mob assured him that this was his trial. So Bainbridge yelled, "You can't hang me! Should you dare, I'll haunt you the rest of your bloody lives. By thunder you can't hang me!" The crowd didn't listen and put a noose around his neck and dragged him to a large pine tree. Bainbridge threatened to haunt them again and then he was hoisted up with his feet kicking like mad and hanged there until he strangled to death. 

The Rocky Mountain News reported on April 25, 1867 (and may I just point out in a bit of synchronicity that this episode dropped on April 25, 2023), "We learn from Mr. J. P. Waterman, who has just arrived from Georgetown, that a man named Ed. Bainbridge shot another by the name of Martin, yesterday evening. A dispute arose over a game of cards, when Bainbridge drew his pistol and deliberately shot Martin through the head, the ball penetrating his forehead. Martin died instantly. It was reported in Central that the murderer would be lynched, and our informant thinks he has been strung up ore [sic] this." 

A woman named Ella Stout was tending to business for William Byers in Georgetown and she wrote the following dispatch about witnessing what happened to Edward Bainbridge, "I have been up tending to William’s business interests and was disrupted by a most disagreeable sight. Thank God John did not witness it, he was [in] bed with the grippe (old term for flu), tended to by his governess. From the version I have heard, the dispute was over a card game, as many of these things go; a half-Negro named Edward Bainbridge shot and wounded a white man with no provocation whatsoever. Bainbridge was arrested and placed in prison to await his legally appointed fate. Uncontent to let the law impose its just order, a mob dragged the poor man out a second-story window and pitched him headlong not caring whither he hit the ground. He was beaten about the head, then with no objection from the so-called officer of the law here, was hung from a tree until dead. This shamefull display was witnessed by myself, having rooms near the prisons and hearing the agitation of the rabble of the outside, I went to my window and saw the whole affair. I cannot speak as to the character of the deceased, but in Denver we have long since dispensed with the need for these terrible occurrences."

 Bainbridge was left in the tree until morning and then cut down and buried in the cemetery. Someone later robbed the grave and legend claims that a Central City doctor ended up with the skeleton and had in on display at his office for years. Now here's the thing. James Martin didn't die. He was disfigured for the rest of his life, but the doctor managed to save him. So Bainbridge was hanged for a murder that didn't happen. Edward Bainbridge was not done with this world. His spirit was apparently at unrest. The Rocky Mountain News featured the headline "Georgetown has a haunted house" on December 26, 1868. The article stated, "The Ghost of Bainbridge, who was hung by a vigilance committee, has returned to earth to vex and worry the people who lived in a house hard by the fatal tree. It opens doors that are locked and slams them in a way supposed to be natural to a house breaker. One citizen of keen perception has seen him with the rope still around his neck. The family has moved away. The Miner tells all about it." 

Several businesses have been located at 511 Rose Street. There was John Nickle's Saloon, which eventually became the Full Circle Cafe and Cafe Prague and an Italian restaurant called “Troias.” This location was featured on Unexplained Mysteries. Patrons and staff shared experiences of lights turning on and off by themselves and the plumbing and water heating refusing to work. Repairmen would never find any issues and everything would work fine for them and then later stop working again. Some people claimed to be pushed by someone they couldn't see. Psychic Peter James investigated and identified an entity that claimed to be Edward Bainbridge haunted the establishment.  

Georgetown would be the scene of another lynching in 1877. This time an Austrian named Robert Schramley was lynched. He had murdered his boss, the Georgetown butcher named Henry Thedie, for $80 that he was carrying. When the citizens of Georgetown heard that he was also wanted for a rape in Missouri, they decided to take justice into their own hands. A group of vigilantes busted him out and hanged him from the frame of a dilapidated building a few hundred feet away and left there for the rest of the day with a note attached. That note read, "Vigilantes around! No more murders! Behold the fate of this man, the same terrible end awaits all murderers. Life and the public security is too sacred not to keep protected, even by resort of the unpleasant means of lynch law. Take warning, take warning. Else ye murderers the fate this brute Schramley has met awaits you." According to “Ghost Stories of Colorado” author Dan Asfar, there have been “countless sightings of an emaciated [Schramley] reported around town, appearing one moment and gone the next.”