While one might suppose that the plague of school shootings is a strictly recent phenomenon for our degenerated times, Benjamin Ratcliff hanged in Canon City, Colorado on this date in 1896 for gunning down the entire school board of Jefferson district, Park County.
An “aged and eccentric ranchman,” Ratcliff had his homestead in the Tarryall Creek area which he maintained with a son and two daughters — motherless ever since his wife Elizabeth passed away in 1882.
One of the daughters had suffered a crippling injury that left one leg shorter than the other. She walked with a permanent limp.
Among the many woes this imposed upon her was an extreme difficulty reaching the Michigan Creek school, which sat on another ranch seven miles away from the Ratcliff home. Ratcliff petitioned unsuccessfully for some manner of accommodation but so far was the school board from consenting that he caught wind of a rumor allegedly being circulated by one of its number to the effect that Ratcliff pere had incestuously impregnated his own 18-year-old daughter.
Spitting mad, Ratcliff stopped by the schoolhouse on election day — May 6, 1895 — to air his grievances. When the school board arrived to open the polls he picked a fight that ended with Ratcliff gunning down all three members of the board with his Winchester rifle: Samuel Taylor, Lincoln McCurdy, and George Wyatt.
Four years before Ratcliff hanged, another settler who lived about 30 miles from the Ratcliff ranch had disappeared. Gottlieb Fluhmann was never accounted for in his own time, but his apparent remains were accidentally discovered in 1944; Ratcliff has sometimes been speculatively credited with that murder, too — though Ratcliff descendants reject that imputation as so much rehashed gossip.
On this day..
- 1935: David Maskill Blake, wedding's eve murderer
- 1391: Agnese Visconti and Antonio da Scandiano, adulterous lovers?
- 1885: August Reinsdorf and Emil Kuchler, Kaiser Wilhelm I bombers
- 1940: Peter Barnes and James McCormack, the last IRA men hanged
- 1545: Cornelis Appelman and Willem Zeylmaker, Batenburgers
- 1931: The Longhua Martyrs and the Five Martyrs of the League of Left-Wing Writers
- 1902: Privates Edmond Dubose and Lewis Russell, deserters to the Philippine Resistance
- 1579: Thomas Sherwood, Catholic martyr
- 1714: Various rebel slaves in the Cape Colony
- 1852: Martin Merino, Jesuit assassin
- 1920: The White Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak
- 1868: Susan, a 13-year-old
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Benjamin did not kill Fluhmann. Prior to Fluhmann’s disappearance, newspapers report that witnesses saw him with his rifle, “the stock being broken”. In 1944, when his skeleton was discovered, he had taken to living in a cave, and the rifle was found to have misfired backwards on him.