On a wintry day in November 1892, young Anton Woode went rabbit hunting with his ancient musket near Brighton. He encountered another hunter, Joseph Smith, who had something Woode very much wanted – a gold pocket watch. Taking careful aim, Woode killed Smith with a single shot in the back, took his watch and his shotgun and ran home to his parents’ farm a short distance away. He was arrested the next day, tried for murder and sentenced to 25 years at hard labor at the state penitentiary in Cañon City. He was 11 years old, making him the youngest prisoner ever incarcerated there.
An imposing sight greeted Anton Woode’s young eyes when he made the short trip from the Cañon City train station out Main Street to the Colorado State Penitentiary.
The prison is straight out of a Hollywood set director’s imagination. Twenty-foot-high, four-foot-thick stone walls, quarried and built by the inmates themselves, loom over the western edge of the town 125 miles south of Denver.
When he entered his new world, known officially today as the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility and unofficially as “Old Max,” Woode, like every prisoner, was frisked, disrobed, sprayed for bugs, given a uniform and bedding, fingerprinted, and photographed. Except for his extremely young age, he was no different from any of the other 513 convicted criminals at the penitentiary in 1893 94.
His “entrance” mug shot, preserved with thousands of others at the Museum of Colorado Prisons, was taken the day he arrived from Denver, April 8, 1893, to begin serving a 25-year sentence of hard labor. It shows a small boy with his head shaved, wearing a striped shirt, a checkered necktie, suspenders, and the number “3199”- by which he would be known for the remainder of his stay-pinned to his shirt.
The penitentiary was built in 1871 on the model of Auburn Prison in New York state, part of the prison-reform movement of the early 19th century. Here, prisoners were kept in an environment designed to teach moral habits of order through severe discipline.
Overcrowding was a constant almost from the day the prison received its first inmates. As fast as new cell houses were built, they filled up. A third cell house opened in 1900. A separate cell house for women wasn’t built until 1895.
As grim as young Anton Woode’s surroundings were, he made good use of his time behind bars. His life at home in Brighton had been far from idyllic. He had drunk alcohol and coffee in copious quantities and attended school only sporadically. In his 12 years behind bars, he worked hard to educate himself, laboring to gain the education that eluded him as a boy. Far younger than his peers, he generally avoided contact with other prisoners, preferring to spend his spare time in the prison library and practice his interest in music and art. Near the end of his sentence, he became conductor of the prison band for a time. Many of the men arrived with skills, including carpentry, blacksmithing, and farming, and were put to work to help with the day-to-day operation of the prison. Because of his youth and small size, Woode, who brought no skills to prison other than his outside occupation, listed as “farmer,” was not put to work breaking stones. His inclinations were more artistic.
The tragic confluence of mismanagement, inept personnel, and a shortage of funding came together on the night of Jan. 22, 1900, when one of the penitentiary’s most famous breakouts exploded. Anton Woode, who had celebrated his 18th birthday only a week earlier, was in the middle of it.
The knife, honed to a razor’s edge, gleamed in the light. Swiftly, again and again, the homemade 6-inch blade plunged into William C. Rooney, the 28-year-old night captain of the guards. Rooney was grabbed suddenly from behind shortly after 10 p.m. and had no chance to cry out.
Fire bells in the town began ringing wildly. Warden C. P. Hoyt, wearing a nightshirt and barefoot, ran from his house just outside the walls to the prison gates, periodically firing his pistol into the air. Steam billowed into the frigid January night, casting an eerie pall over the turmoil when the escaping prisoners released hot water from two 100-horsepower boilers into the irrigation ditch that passes through the prison grounds. It was a dreamlike atmosphere.
By the time [“Kid”] Wallace and Woode breached the wall, [Charles] Wagoner and [Thomas] Reynolds were long gone into the dark. Wallace and Woode headed toward the row of lime kilns behind the prison, paused to get a drink from a spring, then took off up Four Mile Creek toward the mining town of Cripple Creek while Wagoner and Reynolds lit out in the direction of Florence, 10 miles southeast of Cañon City.
Tired, hungry, and cold, Wallace and Woode three days later surrendered meekly to their captors, Charles Canterbury and Will Higgins, who tracked them down between the upper and lower tollgates on the stage road still drivable today as Shelf Road.
They fared much better than Thomas Reynolds. The burglar known as “Slim” was captured by local lawmen in Florence on Friday, four days after the breakout. Back in Cañon City, the buggy was surrounded by perhaps 100 men at 10:45 p.m. In less than 10 minutes, he was pulled from the buggy by the mob, a noose thrown over his head, and the rope flung over the crossbar of a light pole at First and Main, in front of the prison. But the mob realized the rope was too short. A second rope appeared, and the two were spliced. “Pull away!” someone shouted, and twenty men yanked Reynolds ten feet into the air, but, at the last moment, he was lowered to the ground and asked if he had anything to say. He declined a chance to pray but said, calmly, “Give me a cigarette and let me smoke.”
Wallace and Woode were tried for the murder of Rooney in the district court at Buena Vista in January 1901. Woode was discharged by the judge for lack of evidence that he took part in the stabbing. Wallace, on the other hand, was identified by several witnesses as one of three men who killed the night captain. Judge M.S. Bailey gave Wallace 25 to 45 additional years in the state penitentiary.
By attempting escape, Woode lost any “good time” he accumulated and was required by law to finish out his 25-year sentence, meaning he would not be released until April 8, 1918. “It is safe to say that the boy will spend the remainder of his life in prison,” The Post forecast.
Anton Woode, his family, and many influential friends campaigned without rest for his release from the Colorado State Penitentiary almost from the time of his arrival in April 1893.
Woode was finally granted parole on September 2, 1905. Since he walked through the gates into the Colorado State Penitentiary on April 8, 1893, Anton Woode had grown into a man, physically and intellectually. He was no ordinary prisoner, beyond the fact that he was only 11 years old when he entered the penitentiary. During his confinement, he learned to speak fluent French and German, read almost every book in the prison library, became a better-than-average violinist and a competent if not outstanding artist.
In many ways, society’s attitude toward juvenile crime and criminals has come full circle. Incarceration, not rehabilitation, is in vogue, as it was at the turn of the 20th century. Today’s youthful offenders are sometimes more violent than their 19th-century predecessors, but the root causes of their crimes are remarkably similar – poverty, drugs and alcohol, abusive home lives, lack of education and parental neglect.
When Anton Woode entered Colorado’s legal system as a 10-year-old child in 1892, there was no legal procedure for dealing with juvenile criminals. In the eyes of the law, a criminal was a criminal, whatever his age. Change came too late for Woode, but for other young criminals, 1903 marked a completely new attitude about juvenile crime, thanks to the influence of Denver judge Benjamin Barr Lindsey, a diminutive man dubbed “the Bull Mouse” by his friend Theodore Roosevelt.
Ben Lindsey, who stood only 5-foot-5, barely more than some of his charges, devoted 27 years of his life to the betterment and protection of young people. Not content to sit surrounded by his legal books in his chambers and try to convince young criminals to go straight, Lindsey hit the streets. He visited the pool rooms, saloons, and wine rooms on Curtis Street. What he saw shocked him.
The nation’s first juvenile court was established in Cook County (Chicago), Illinois, in 1899. At that same time, Lindsey already was dealing with juvenile offenders in Denver as public guardian and administrator in the Arapahoe County (Denver) Court. Two months before the Illinois court was created, the Colorado General Assembly passed the School Law, mandating compulsory education for children 7 to 16 years old.
On March 7, 1903, the Colorado General Assembly formally created a separate docket, record, and name for the juvenile court by passing An Act Concerning Delinquent Children. The law virtually allowed the court to become the child’s parent, a process known in legal terms as parens patriae. The law did something else: It made the parent or any other adult who led a child astray responsible for the child’s behavior.
Ten states had juvenile-court law in 1910, and by 1915 there were juvenile systems in 46 states, three territories, and the District of Columbia. Thanks to Lindsey and others like him, every state had a juvenile-court system by 1945.
The tale of Anton Woode-his bizarre trip through the 19th-century legal system, his incarceration at a tender age, and his ultimate rehabilitation-resonates more than a century later as much for what it says about modern society as for what it tells us about his crime and young life. Children too young to vote or drive are given life sentences in prison instead of diversion to a more humane system, based on their psychological, emotional and developmental immaturity, where rehabilitation is still possible. In his wisdom with young people, Judge Lindsey looked both backward and forward when he said, “Our aim is to make an individual boy strong enough in himself and in his own character to avoid the wrong and do the right because it is right and best for him.”
Reprinted with permission from “Anton Woode: The Boy Murderer,” by Dick Kreck, 2006 Fulcrum Publishing Inc., Golden, Colo. All rights
