A Trail of Money and Death: Matteson and the Morris Murders

A pioneering family in Michigan is subjected to a decade of litigation in the 1870´s. Lawsuit after lawsuit is struck down as fraud or forgery, only to end after the youngest son, Charles Henry Morris, and his wife are found shot to death in the family homestead, leaving money and jewelry untouched. Although the murderer is spotted several times fleeing throughout the night on Morris´s best horse, the double murder remained a mystery.

The murderer disappears the following morning in Indiana, but the trail laid out in this book does not go cold there, but includes another unsolved, but related, "assassination" of Marshall Pritchard in Rockford, Illinois. The trail leads to the frontier mining town of Gunnison, Colorado, where outlaws such as Wyatt Earp could avoid extradition . When the Gunnison boom is over a decade later, the trail of money leads back to the building boom of post-fire Chicago,
to the first Ferris Wheel at the World Exposition, the first Chicago automobile shows, and the first skyscrapers.

The search for the Morris´s killer takes the reader through almost a century of American progress and expansion and examines the Matteson family, the initiators of the forgery lawsuits against the Morrises. Although Milo D. Matteson was the prime suspect in the community´s eyes, he had a rock-solid alibi the day of the murders. This book includes an intensive look at his brother James and the trail of volatile behavior he left behind in Texas, Iowa, and New York before he vanished following the Morris murders.