by Dick Kreck
As his testimony dragged on, Henwood began to lose control. Elliott’s constant objections and Judge Whitford’s sustaining them had the defendant so frustrated that he finally complained to the judge, “Let me ask you something. Am I not here to tell what happened? Why can’t I tell? I only know one story.” Judge Whitford reminded Henwood, and his attorneys, “The law prescribes a certain order of testimony in order to make the evidence that is introduced competent.”
When Henwood came to the point in his testimony where he related pleading on bended knee with von Phul to release the letters and save Mr. Springer humiliation, he broke down in tears. His face went pale and he suddenly became unable to speak coherently. Plaintively, he turned to Judge Whitford and asked, “May I rest just a minute, your honor?” Judge Whitford replied, “Yes. Give him a glass of water.” Henwood took two sips, then turned again to the judge. “May it please your honor to allow a recess. I am laboring under such a strain that I cannot go on.’’ He told his attorney that he needed “to rest for a little while. I have sat in the court room so long this morning I have gotten dizzy.” The court gave him an hour to compose himself.
Despite Henwood’s insistence that he fired in self-defense, nearly every other witness didn’t see it that way. A string of witnesses took the stand to testify that after he one-punched Henwood, von Phul turned back to the bar and placed his hands on the rail. The prosecution was quick to point out that, according to doctors, one bullet struck von Phul behind the right shoulder, although no one could say for certain which bullet it was.
Judge Whitford was speeding the trial along. By the fifth day, the prosecution had presented all its witnesses. Bottom incurred the judge’s wrath when, caught by the haste with which the trial was progressing, he failed to have two of his witnesses in court. A sharp exchange between the two men unfolded before the jury.
“If we can’t have testimony in this case, perhaps we can have books,” chided Judge Whitford in reference to Bottom’s attempts to read rules of testimony into the record. “I see you have some there.”
“Yes, your honor. I would like to be heard upon that point. Can the jury be excused from the courtroom during the arguments?’’
“No, Mr. Bottom. That is not necessary.” Bottom made an exception, saying that the jurors should not hear discussions about the law. Moving on, he offered to read legal decisions about laying foundations for testimony. Judge Whitford cut him off.
“The law must be as it is, Mr. Bottom. Otherwise any man could kill any other man at any time without fear of the consequences.” Before the judge finished speaking, Bottom was on his feet and said, “I take exception to the remarks of the court in the presence of the jury.”
“And the court takes exception to the remarks of the attorney,” the judge retorted.
“I must record my exception to the additional remarks of the court.”
“The court is greatly displeased with the counsel for the defense in this case. You may proceed, Mr. Bottom, with the defense.”
Clearly peeved when Bottom revealed that his witnesses were unavailable, Judge Whitford turned to the jury and said,
We have endeavored to expedite matters, but it appears that the defense is unable to get its witnesses before this jury and, as the defendant has a right to be heard, the court can do nothing but order you confined and kept together. The court will instruct the bailiffs to permit you to go upon the lawn of the court house but you must remain together and must observe the order of the court in all respects and must permit none of your acquaintances or other persons to converse with you.
While he was in the business of chastising, Judge Whitford took a swipe at the newspaper coverage of the trial. “You must know, Mr. Jurors, that newspaper articles are not printed for the purpose of enforcing the law. They are conducted for other purposes to their own ends. It is not proper that you should read such comment on this case.”
Having taken to task everyone who had annoyed him, Judge Whitford excused the jury and adjourned the trial until the following Monday.
Nattily attired Frank Henwood walks from the courtroom, followed by his
attorney John T. Bottom. (The Denver Times, June 1, 1911. Courtesy of the Colorado Historical Society)
Judge Greeley W. Whitford, circa 1930. (The Denver Post. Courtesy of the Colorado Historical Society)
Defendant Frank Henwood and his lawyers shared a table with the prosecution in the West Side Court during his 1911 trial. Reporters were allowed to sit next to the jury. (Rocky Mountain News, June 23, 1911. Courtesy of the Colorado Historical Society)
Mrs. John W. Springer and her brother, Arthur Patterson. (The Denver Post, June 26, 1911. Courtesy of the Colorado Historical Society)
Spectators were quick to note that when Isabel Patterson Springer testified in the Henwood trial, her outfit was almost identical to that worn by Evelyn Nesbit in the sensational trial of Harry K. Thaw in New York City in 1907. (The Denver Post, June 24, 1911. Courtesy of the Colorado Historical Society)
Chapter Five
John Springer: “A Booster, Not a Boss”
Born on July 16, 1859, in Jacksonville, Illinois, the son of attorney John T. Springer and a nephew of Congressman William M. Springer, John Wallace Springer discovered while a student at Asbury (now DePauw) University in Greencastle, Indiana, that he had extraordinary oratorical abilities, skills that would make him a popular speaker on patriotic holidays and would help him enormously in his political ambitions. He was an adept debater and was chosen to deliver the university’s graduation speech in 1878.
After practicing law in Illinois for ten years, he moved to Texas where he married Eliza Clifton Hughes, the only daughter of wealthy Dallas banker and cattleman Col. William E. Hughes, on June 17, 1891. It was a marriage that would stand Springer in good stead, politically and financially. He took charge of Hughes’s cattle interests, became a director of the Texas Cattle Raisers Association, and was involved in a number of other enterprises. The Springers had two daughters—Annie Clifton, born in 1892, and Sarah Elizabeth, who was born on November 10, 1898, and died nine months later. John and Eliza Springer, with daughter Annie, moved to Denver in 1896,
hoping to improve Mrs. Springer’s health. She had suffered with tuberculosis for years.
A year after their arrival in Denver, Springer became vice president of the Chamber of Commerce and two years later was named to the planning committee of the 1899 Festival of Mountain and Plain, a weeklong Mardi Gras-style event that featured parades, masked balls, and general frivolity. It was begun by the business community in 1895 to destroy the “Silver Serpent” and chase away the economic depression brought on by the Crash of 1893, which followed repeal
of the Silver Act that supported the federal government’s purchase of huge amounts of silver. The repeal devastated Colorado’s already shaky economy, heavily dependent on
silver mining.
An avid breeder of horses, Springer convinced other members of the committee, including Wolfe Londoner, Otto P. Baur, John M. Kuykendall, David H. Moffat, and Charles Reynolds, that the festival needed to include a horse show and displays of Colorado’s agricultural bounty. On Friday night of the festival “the finest horse show ever given in the West” took place under lights in the arena at Colfax and Broadway. The winners were given five thousand dollars in cash and premiums. It came off better than anyone dared hope. The horse show was one of the high points of the festival.
Springer was passionate about horses. With his father-in-law’s financial backing, Springer bought up small ranches in an area south of Denver. Lenna May Cleveland, whose family homesteaded in the area, recalled in 1982, “Mr. Springer was a man of great wealth and fast action. In
no time at all, he had bought up 12,000 acres of prairie grassland.” His Cross Country Ranch became home to prize-winning Oldenburg horses, huge beauties popular in Germany as coach horses, that pulled his elaborate coach around town to the admiring gazes of the citizenry. Taken together, t
he rig and his four fine horses, each of which stood sixteen hands high, were estimated to be worth almost fifteen thousand dollars.
But his favorite was an animal imported from Germany. “He paid several thousand dollars for a beautiful animal he called The Colonel,” remembered Cleveland, who, as a child visited the Springer spread frequently and saw the animal many times. “Colonel was Springer’s pride and joy and he became a sort of a big pet at the ranch.” In 1901, Springer ran afoul of a Colorado law that prohibited docking—cutting off the end of a horse’s tail to keep it from becoming tangled in the harness. He was arrested, accused of bringing thirteen docked horses into the state, including the four that pulled his magnificent coach. The Humane Society declined to prosecute and turned the case over to the Denver District Court, but the charges were dropped.
Springer and his father-in-law, Colonel Hughes, were linked by marriage and also by their mutual love of show horses. In 1900 the two men figured prominently in the Denver Athletic Club show, a highlight of the society season that featured “plumes and flags and bunting [that] waved from the fence and the two long grandstands banking the arena. Society felt that the horse show was its very own, and society, in this particular, was not very far wrong.” Entries belonging to Hughes and Springer won several ribbons, including classes for four-in-hand, turnouts, and saddle mares. Hughes was called “a great lover of coaching, the chase, dogs and horses and won many coaching prizes at horse shows.”
Both men loved the finery and pomp of highly bred
livestock, but both fell in love with the new plaything of the rich, the automobile. There were only 8,000 automobiles in the country at the turn of the century. Between 1900 and 1910, 460,000 of the new mode of transportation were sold, launching a national love affair that continues to this day. “Almost everyone was fascinated by the frail, costly, balky contraptions that, as one owner described them, ‘shook and trembled and clattered, spat oil, fire, smoke and smell.’” The rich, who could most afford it first, began motoring the landscape in great numbers. In 1908, Colonel Hughes succumbed to the lure of the auto with his purchase of an eight-thousand-dollar, six-cylinder Pierce limousine. Springer, though he loved his horses and staged elaborate carriage parties at Overland Park racetrack for friends, also fell hard for the motorized carriage, which was not without its perils. In 1910, while driving back from the ranch with two passengers in his vehicle, Springer was involved in an accident with a Tramway streetcar. He immediately assured all that he was not going more than ten miles an hour and “we were on the right side of the road with no thought of accident when suddenly the Tramway car coming up from behind collided with us. It was entirely the motorman’s fault” [The Post, May 9, 1910].
His admiration of horses remained undiminished. In a bylined article in The Horse Show Monthly, Springer predicted,
It is only day dreamers who venture to make the assertion that the manufacture and use of the automobile will eliminate entirely from America the horse in its various classes; such as these rush boldly into print and announce that a Utopian age will arrive with the dawn of the twentieth century in which no horses will be seen on the streets, no saddle horses in the parks and no four-in-hand coaches in the mountains. This is all a wild vagary. It is the idlest talk to even intimate that the day of the horse has passed.
Beginning in 1901, he had built on a high point of the ranch property a baronial stone mansion, a castle, with turrets and a bright orange pennant with a large white S emblazoned on it. When it was completed, a large sign over the entrance proudly proclaimed: john w. springer/cross country
cattle & ranch/littleton, colorado. It became a center of weekend entertainments for the state’s political leaders. A man for whom connections were critical, Springer revealed years later that he kept a daily diary in which he noted the names of those who visited his spread.
He also found himself attracted to politics, where his oration abilities and outgoing personality were put to good use. In 1903, he gained fame for his Fourth of July speech at the Chautauqua auditorium in Boulder, Colorado. He was a powerful speaker. Even onetime newspaper reporter Polly Pry, who was not an admirer, said of Springer’s speechmaking, “I never hear him speak without thinking of the Coney Island midway—what a ‘barker’ he would make! Well, we can’t have everything—Coney’s loss is Colorado’s gain.”
His Boulder speech began in the florid style of the day, “On the dial of the ages liberty cast its first shadow across the pathway of despots with the American Declaration of Independence...” and went on for two hours. His speech attracted the attention of those in the Republican Party, and they began to take notice of his effect on crowds. He was a devout civic booster and much in demand as an after-dinner speaker, which helped launch his political career.
The high-water mark of Springer’s political ambitions was the Denver mayoral election of 1904. The state’s Republican Party was badly split between supporters of Senator Edward O. Wolcott and those who opposed him. A tumultuous convention held in April 1904 at Denver’s Coliseum to select the party’s candidate for mayor concluded with unanimous support for Springer. Beaming before the cheering throng that filled the hall, the nominee, wearing a long-tailed Prince Albert coat, mounted the speaker’s platform. “Springer for mayor!” yelled a supporter from the back of the hall. The crowd seconded the emotion. The chairman rapped his gavel for order as Professor Sigel’s band pounded out a patriotic tune, “Uncle Sammy.”
Finally the crowd fell silent. Springer spoke. “Now the band will give us ‘A Hot Time in the Old Town’ and then we’ll be ready for it.” The delegates roared with laughter as the band played. After paying tribute to the party’s leaders, President Theodore Roosevelt and Governor James H. Peabody, Springer launched into his first, impassioned campaign speech:
The great, united Republican party is once again alive to its duty and its magnificent opportunity. It stands for decency in politics and for the maintenance of the standards of good citizenship and, I want to say, that, if you have never been in a fight before, you are going to see one during the next thirty days. You will see meetings at the crossroads of the honest and
liberty-loving citizens of all classes and they will demonstrate that they and only such as they will run this town during the next four years.
Denver politics were a corruptive pit at the dawn of the twentieth century. The 1904 campaign was one of the nastiest and most crooked in the city’s history. George Creel, a former newspaper reporter, observed in Rebel at Large, “The tramway company, the water company, the telephone company, the coal companies, the smelters—all operating as a unit—controlled
both parties and named both tickets in every election. The Supreme Court, members of the legislature, mayors, county officials, and councils were ‘hired hands,’ taking their orders from the Big Mitt.” Muckraking writer David Graham Phillips, writing about a similar situation in the U.S. Senate, called them “the unblushing corruptionists.”
Springer ran as a progressive Republican, determined to reform the city’s corrupt political system that allowed “the combine,” providers of the city’s public utilities, to determine who would sit in the mayor’s office. In accepting his party’s nomination, Springer told the gathered officials, “From this city the wires will tell on election night that Denver has repudiated the election outrages that has debauched her in the past. The record of corruption of Democratic officials will eternally damn that party.”
His opponent, Robert W. Speer, was backed by the vast financial and political support of the utilities, especially from William G. Evans and the Denver Tramway Company, who were determined to orchestrate the outcome of the 1904 election. An ardent Republican, Evans nevertheless backed Speer, a Democrat, to maintain the status quo that allowed the utilities to reap huge financial returns with little regulation from the city.
The mayoral election drew five candidates—John Hipp, Prohibitionist; J. W. Martin, Socialist; George E. Randolph
, Anti-Wolcott Republican; John W. Springer, Civic-Republican; and Robert W. Speer, Democrat. Only Springer and Speer were serious contenders, and some observers dismissed Springer as little more than a sacrificial lamb for the Evans machine. But Springer ran a spirited campaign. In a fiery speech before the Young Men’s Republican Club, he launched a blistering attack on “ballot box stuffers,” “thugs,” and “the machine.” He recounted how a friend had been knocked down at a polling place during a previous election while a policeman watched passively. “Had a Democratic policeman laid his hand on me there would have been more dead Democrats at that polling place than could have been conveniently buried in one day.” The crowd “hurrahed for several minutes...while the speaker stood and smiled and beamed upon his audience.”
Springer had the avid support of The Denver Post, which vigorously opposed Speer and his corporate backers during the campaign but, after his election, supported Speer just as vigorously. The day before the election, The Post editorialized on the differences between the two candidates. “Mr. Speer’s
character is well known. As [a] member of the board of fire and police he put political rustlers on the police and detective force. He has been responsible for the doings of the election commission because he could have stopped the game, in which they were puppets, with a word. The shameless padding of the registration would not have gone on had he set himself against it.”
On the other hand, The Post regarded Springer as “a booster, not a boss. Mr. Springer is young [he was 45 at the time], energetic and ambitious.” The paper almost daily ran an anti-Speer cartoon on page one, including one in which Speer, dressed as a knight and carrying a shield that read “I Do Things for the Corporations,” timidly enters a spooky forest where every tree has Springer’s face staring sternly at him.