Reuben Hale

Ranch hand discovered at dawn on April 8, 1886, in a dry irrigation ditch on the Mesa Azul spread south of Walsenburg. He bore a single deep puncture wound through the upper left torso. No implement on the ranch matched the wound's dimensions. No socket or depression was found in the ditch floor. The case was formally closed as accidental on February 14, 1887. No suspect was ever named.

Reuben Hale arrived in the Huerfano Valley sometime in the spring of 1874, having come, by his own account to those who worked alongside him, from somewhere in Kansas. He mentioned Indiana and Ohio as well, depending on who asked and when, which the ranch's segundo Florencio Bustos later noted in his statement as a minor and unremarkable habit — "not the kind of inconsistency that meant anything, just a man who had lived in a few places and did not keep careful track." He hired on with Calvin P. Morse, owner of the Mesa Azul cattle operation, and remained there for twelve years without incident notable enough to enter the written record.

He was 47 years old, a competent hand by all accounts, known for steady work and an early rising habit that occasionally brought him outside well before the rest of the crew. It was this habit that made Bustos's discovery at 4:45 in the morning seem, initially, unremarkable.

The east pasture ditch was a dry irrigation lateral hand-dug in the early 1870s to route Cucharas River water to the grazing area. In April it carried nothing. It ran approximately three feet deep through a stretch of open ground between two fence lines. Bustos found Hale lying on his back in the ditch, arms at his sides, in a posture that Bustos later described as that of a man sleeping in his bed. He believed, for a moment, that Hale had gone to the ditch to rest in the cool earth — a thing he had reportedly done before in warm seasons.

“He was in the ditch as a man lies in his bed, on his back, with both arms along his sides. I thought at first he had gone there to sleep, as he sometimes did in warm weather when the bunkhouse was close. I did not see the wound until I reached down to shake him.” — Statement of Florencio Bustos, segundo, Mesa Azul Ranch; filed with Huerfano County sheriff's report, April 1886

Deputy J.E. Tarbell, acting in Sheriff Rowan's absence, arrived at the ranch by midmorning. His examination of the scene noted that the ditch floor around Hale's body showed no disturbance — no drag marks, no footprints in the loose sediment at the bottom, no sign that the body had been moved or that anyone else had been in the ditch. The wound itself entered below the left rib margin and tracked at approximately thirty-five degrees below horizontal, upward and across the torso. Tarbell held off on a formal cause-of-death finding until Dr. F.P. Avery of Walsenburg could make the ride out, which occurred the following morning.

Dr. Avery's examination was thorough. The wound cross-section was roughly elliptical, he noted — not circular — measuring approximately one and a half inches at its widest by nine-tenths of an inch at its narrowest. This suggested a tapered implement of non-circular profile. The angle of entry, combined with the depth of the wound, led Avery to state, with explicit qualification that the conclusion was speculative, that the wound was consistent with a man descending onto a fixed object rather than being struck by one in motion. He could not account for the absence of any such object, and he did not attempt to.

Deputy Tarbell spent most of June 1886 conducting a full inventory of the Mesa Azul ranch's equipment. The final catalogue ran to 312 items. No rod, stake, brace, or implement of dimensions matching Avery's wound measurements was among them. The closest candidate — a branding iron extension handle — was excluded: its diameter was too small by half an inch, and its cross-section was round rather than elliptical. Tarbell's report concluded with a line that has no explanation attached to it: "The ditch bottom was carefully examined and no socket or depression was found that would account for the position of an implement."

Reuben Hale had no next of kin who came forward. Calvin Morse wrote to his Denver attorney in May 1886 that he was attempting to "locate any family of R. Hale's" but the letter records no success. No birth record for Reuben Hale has been identified in Kansas, Indiana, or Ohio. His estate — the contents of a bunk, twelve dollars in wages owed, and a leather-bound almanac from 1879 — was assigned to the county in the absence of a claimant.

Thirteen days after Reuben Hale's death, on April 21, 1886, a man named Benjamin Hale died approximately sixty miles to the southwest in the Cimarron country. Benjamin Hale was a ranch foreman, older by some years, whose possessions at death included a hand-drawn map showing fence line placements in the Cucharas drainage that did not correspond to any structure built at that time. Whether the two Hales were related is not established in any document held by this archive. The coincidence of the name, the proximity of the dates, and the shared geography of the Cucharas watershed is noted here as a matter of record.

The Huerfano County coroner's office formally ruled the death of Reuben Hale accidental on February 14, 1887, without specifying the mechanism. The file was closed the same day. Deputy Tarbell resigned his position in the spring of that year and relocated to New Mexico. Dr. Avery continued his practice in Walsenburg until 1901.