Chaffee County’s first elected sheriff, who reportedly froze to death in 1881 after becoming stranded while trying to evict claim jumpers at a mine west of Buena Vista, will be honored next year when his name is added to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Lucien Morgan was 45 when he died in the line of duty due to weather exposure on Jones Mountain, a 13,218-foot peak, according to archives of the Rocky Mountain News and The Mountain Mail, Salida’s newspaper.
“It was a long time coming, to say the least,” said Chaffee County’s current Sheriff Andy Rohrich, who applied for Morgan to be honored. “He was up serving his county, enforcing law when he perished. So he died in the line of duty. It just fits 100%.”
Heavy snow blanketed the mountain when Morgan and two other men set out May 11, 1881, to serve papers to men armed with rifles trying to take over the mine. Morgan, a Mississippi native, was “unused to such hard work” and became “played out and sick,” The Mountain Mail reported three days later.
Morgan stopped at a miner’s cabin at a gulch below the mine and deputized the two men, who took the miners into custody. During the night, Morgan had “fits of delirium,” the newspaper reported, and left alone early the next morning, “hatless and with no shoes.”
“He stepped out and has never been seen since,” newspapers reported, describing his disappearance as “mysterious.”
“County Sheriff Insane and Lost in the Mountains,” a headline in a May 15, 1881, issue of the Rocky Mountain News read.
A search party was launched to find the sheriff lost in the deep snow drifts in the mountain gulches and a $250 reward was offered, but a snowstorm, bringing an additional 2 feet of snow, further thwarted the search.
Morgan’s body was found 11 days later, covered below 5 feet of snow in a gulch on South Cottonwood Creek, about 3 miles from the cabin where he was last seen.
“He was found on his hands and knees in the act of crawling under a bush,” reported the Weekly Register-Call, a newspaper in Central City.
Morgan, a Confederate Army veteran, was reportedly unmarried and had no children.
His name was added to the Colorado Law Enforcement Memorial in Golden last year.
“Being a police officer, you have to dig”
Rohrich, who was former Sheriff John Spezze’s undersheriff from 2019 to 2024, first became aware of Morgan’s ill-fated journey in the mountains by Jurgen Mohr, a retired Denver police sergeant who started researching Morgan after a request from a historian for the Colorado State Patrol.
Mohr, a Buena Vista resident, said he began compiling details of Morgan’s service at his local library, where he read about the state legislature’s process of creating Chaffee County and electing its first sheriff in 1879. He also searched through newspaper archives through the Colorado Historical Newspapers Collection, a free database, and on Ancestry.
“It wasn’t that hard at all, really,” Mohr said. “Being a police officer, you have to dig and keep digging for information.”
In the past year, Mohr has also helped research four other Colorado officers who died in the line of duty in the 1800s, including a constable in Durango who was shot and killed by a gambler who had previously threatened him and an El Moro marshal in Las Animas County who was fatally shot while trying to arrest a drunken cowboy.
Mohr wasn’t able to find any details as to where Morgan’s body was ultimately buried, but believes Morgans Gulch west of Buena Vista is named after the fallen sheriff.
“I’ve always been interested in history and it just seemed like the right thing to do,” Mohr said of researching Morgan. “Imagine not being recognized for doing something important and ultimately giving your life. He wasn’t shot and killed, he wasn’t stabbed, nothing like that. It certainly wasn’t glorious. But he died doing his duty and nobody knows who he is.”
Morgan’s name will be added to the memorial in D.C. on May 13 at the 37th annual Candlelit Vigil during National Police Week. The memorial honors more than 24,000 officers who died while on the job, dating back to 1786.
There are 1,743 officers who died in the line of duty in the 1800s on the memorial, including 48 from Colorado, said Carolie Heyliger, a senior research manager at the National Law Enforcement Memorial who researched Morgan before approving his name in October.