Danny Daniels' Party

(See drawing p. 11); An unholy light filled the wide courtyard of Colorado's State Penitentiary at Canon City, the glare of floodlights and searchlights playing on Cellhouse No. 3. Two other cellhouses, the prison chapel and the messhall, were blazing ruins. In the prison "bull pen"--a sunken space at one side of the yard--some 400 convicts cowered in sullen terror, their shadows moving nightmarishly on the stone walls of the enclosure. From Cellhouse No. 3 where Danny Daniels, burglar-murderer, and five desperate comrades were inducting the worst prison revolt in Colorado's history, came sporadic shrieks, bullets and curses. They were holding 16 guards as hostages. About 175 convicts, refusing to join "Danny Daniels' party," were huddled in the rear of the cellhouse. At 7 p.m., the bullet-torn body of J. J. Elles, the prison hangman, was hurled out of a window in Cellhouse No. 3. Rescuers rushed him to a hospital but he soon died. At 7:15 p.m. another punctured body was hurled out. It was Guard R. A. Williams, already dead. At 9:00 p.m. the hundreds of soldiers and citizens surrounding the prison yard saw a third dead hostage crash to the ground outside Cellhouse No. 3. At 10 p.m. Guard John Shea staggered out bearing the body of Guard Abe Wiggins. Shea said that Danny Daniels had walked up to Wiggins at an appointed hour, grinned and shot him through the temple with his 48 calibre pistol. Then he had turned to Marvin Duncan, another captured guard, and said: "Prepare yourself. You're next." They let Shea go because he had been "a pretty good old plug." Daniels had offered the guards' lives as the price of free exit for himself and his four followers in the revolt which began at noon. Daniels had also demanded in repeated messages and shouted parleys that Warden Francis Eugene Crawford supply them with automobiles to drive away in. "Go to hell!" was Warden Crawford's reply each time, approved by Governor William H. Adams over the telephone from Denver. About 10 p.m., Cellhouse No. 4 caught fire, heightening the glare in the courtyard. The convicts in Cellhouse No. 3 still held ten hostages. Father Patrick O'Neil, the burly prison priest, cried: "I can stand this no longer!" He started across the open yard with a lumberman's coat over his clericals, bearing not peace and absolution but Death--a 50 Ib. box of dynamite. Rifles and machine guns on the prison wall and in the warden's darkened house kept up a blistering barrage into the cellhouse windows as the priest went to the building's very entrance and laid the charge to blast an entrance. The ignition battery did not work. Father O'Neil returned for another heavy load of dynamite, ran in, laid it, ran back. Danny Daniels was seen at the cellhouse window trying to shoot the priest just before the explosion shattered all remaining windows in the neighborhood, blew men's hats off and buried the cellhouse in a heavy pall of smoke. A company of militia charged in, expecting to find a great breach in the convicts' fortress. But the masonry had held. The militia had to retreat and wait for a 75-millimeter field piece, an armored tank. When these weapons arrived, the cellhouse was stormed again. But this time there came no answering fire. Inside, five dead bodies on the blood-sopped floor told the end of the story. Danny Daniels had lined up his four comrades, executed them one by one, then committed suicide. Most of the last hostage guards escaped unhurt. Total casualties: 5 dead convicts, 7 dead guards, 3 badly wounded guards, 7 other wounded including Warden Crawford whose head was grazed by a slug. Eight inquiries were started into the origin of the revolt. In 1924 the National Association for Penal Information pronounced the Canon City Penitentiary "the worst in the country" for brutality and repression.