L.H. Musgrove

Who is L.H. Musgrove?

L. H. Musgrove was an outlaw of the American West who was sprung from jail in Denver, Colorado, and hanged by a vigilante mob. Over a number of years, he was charged with several murders and the theft of horses.

Musgrove was born in Como in Panola County in northwestern Mississippi. He left the American South to join the California Gold Rush, perhaps in the early 1850s. He killed several men in Wyoming, Nevada, and California. He is known to have traveled on the Overland Trail during the Civil War, when in 1863, he was arrested for murder at Fort Halleck, Wyoming. He was then taken to Denver, where he was freed on a legal technicality. Musgrove then directed a network of horse and cattle thieves who raided government posts and wagon trains along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and followed the Cherokee Trail into Wyoming. Many of the thefts were blamed on Native Americans, and Musgrove was known on occasion to disguise himself as an Indian to thwart law enforcement officers. Profits were particularly large, compared to wages that rarely exceeded $2 per day at that time. Musgrove established his headquarters in the previously abandoned Bonner Street stagecoach station, a natural rock fortress which provided easy access to northern Colorado and southern Wyoming.