USA > Arizona > Arizona, prehistoric, aboriginal, pioneer, modern; the nation's youngest commonwealth within a land of ancient culture, Vol. II > Part 22
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DESPERATE DEEDS OF VARIOUS SORTS
Possibly the wildest time ever known to Saint Johns was San Juan's Day, June 24, 1882, when Nat Greer and a band of Texas cowpunchers thought to provide themselves a little entertainment by "shooting up" the sleepy Mexican town. On the border they had been accustomed to seeing Mexicans run when- ever the fusillade started. They were mistaken in the character of the popula- tion of Saint Johns, for the Mexicans there refused to be intimidated and returned the fire with interest, especially from an improvised fortress in the loft of Sol Barth's home. The defense was under the charge of Perez Tomas, a Mexican deputy sheriff, who, according to Charlie Banta, "was as fine a man as ever lived." Only one Mexican was wounded, Tafolla, whose son afterward was killed while serving in the Arizona rangers. "Father" Nathan C. Tenney, an elderly and beloved Mormon resident, accidentally was killed while trying to act as peacemaker. One of the attacking party named Vaughn was killed
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and Harris Greer was wounded. The Texans finally were repulsed and rode away. Later they were arrested and brought back to Saint Johns for trial. For a time there was serious danger of lynching and the Mexican population even organized to storm the jail. Summary action of this sort was avoided through the influence of Sheriff E. S. Stover and of Barth and the raiders in the end escaped with light punishment. It is notable that one of them was a negro only known as "Jeff," who had been brought by the Greers from Texas.
One of the most lurid dime novel bandits the Southwest ever knew was Augustine Chacon, captured near the international line by Ex-Captain Moss- man of the Arizona Rangers, who had a personal interest in landing the des- perado. Chacon murdered a Mexican in Morenci in 1895 and thereafter was sentenced to hang. He escaped from jail a few days before the date of his execution and later was charged with the murder of two prospectors on Eagle Creek and of an old miner, whose body was found in an abandoned shaft. He then joined Burt Alvord and other outlaws in Sonora and participated in at least one train robbery. Chacon, after his later arrest, was duly hanged at Solomonville in December, 1902.
In the list of desperadoes of the early days, a place undoubtedly should be reserved for a blacksmith named Rodgers, who, at the Santa Rita mines in 1861 boasted of having killed eighteen persons, and who then produced a string of human ears to prove his tale. At the time he promised that he would make the number twenty-five before he quit. In this ambition, according to Professor Pumpelly, he later killed six men at El Paso, where he was caught and, in a laudable endeavor to make the punishment fit the crime, he was hanged by the heels over a slow fire-and his own ears made the twenty-fifth pair.
The first legal execution in Yuma County occurred in 1873, and was that of Manuel Fernandez, hanged for the murder of D. A. McCarty, generally known as "Raw Hide." The crime was committed for loot, and, before it was dis- covered, the Mexican and his confederate had worked several nights carrying wagonloads of goods away from their victim's store.
A rather noted criminal was Joseph Casey, hanged in Tucson, April 15, 1884. He was a deserter from the regular army and had been charged with a num- ber of murders and with other criminalities along the border, finally being arrested in 1882 in the larceny of cattle. October 23, he, three men held on a charge of murder and five other prisoners broke jail at Tucson, but Casey, six months later, was rearrested at El Paso. April 29, 1883, again an inmate of the Tucson jail, in a second attempt to escape, he killed Jailer A. W. Holbrook. A mob tried to get him out to hang him, but there was swift retribution and he was soon sentenced by Judge Fitzgerald to capital punishment and was duly hanged.
A notable execution occurred at Tombstone late in 1900, in the hanging of the two Halderman brothers, found guilty of the murder of Constable Chester Ainsworth and Teddy Moore at the Halderman ranch in the Chiricahua Moun- tains. The brothers had been arrested on a charge of cattle stealing by Ains- worth and Moore and had been allowed to enter their home to secure clothing. Instead, they reappeared with rifles and shot the officers from their horses. The murderers fled, but were captured near Duncan by a sheriff's posse and returned for trial at Tombstone.
CHAPTER XXXIX CRIMES OF THE ROAD
The Great Wham Robbery and Its Political Complications-Gribble and Barney Martin Murders-A Female Bandit-Train Robberies that Proved Unprofitable-Jim Parker's Path to the Gallows-Burt Alvord and the Cochise Train Robbery.
One of the most notorious crimes of the Southwest, possibly the only instance of an attack by white men upon American soldiery, since has been known as the Wham robbery. May 11, 1889, Maj. J. W. Wham, paymaster U. S. A., started from Fort Grant for Fort Thomas, taking with him in an army "Dougherty" wagon a box containing $26,000 in gold and some silver, for the pay of the troops at the latter post. As escort he had eleven colored soldiers, from the Twenty-fifth Infantry, led by a sergeant. The party had passed Cedar Springs, a point of sanguinary history in Indian wars, and had entered a small defile when the way was blocked by a large rock that seemed to have rolled down the hillside. A number of the soldiers were busying them- selves in removal of the rock, their rifles laid aside, when a fusillade of shots came from the brow of a nearby ridge. The soldiers acted well, deploying behind such cover as they could find, but the road was fully commanded by a foe that had constructed seven little rock shelters and who offered only the tar- get made by the smoke of their rifles. Five of the soldiers had been wounded, happily none of them seriously, when the major was found in full flight. Their only officer gone, the negroes followed and the field was left to the enemy and to the wounded. Three men were seen to come down to the road, pick up the chest and carry it over the ridge. Help soon came from Grant. The rock rifle pits were found deserted. Near by the contents of the box had been emptied into gunnysacks and the robbers had departed on horses and in all haste. At the time it was believed that thirteen men had shared in the robbery, but at the time only seven sets of tracks were found.
Within a few days the military authorities had secured evidence on which were arrested eight Gila Valley farmers and stockmen, including Lyman, Ed. and Wal. Follett, Gilbert and W. T. Webb, Dave Cunningham, Tom Lamb, and Dave Rogers. A number of witnesses were gathered up, one of them swearing that he had seen several of the accused hide their booty in his hay- stack and use his fireplace in which to burn the gunnysacks in which had been carried the loot.
Ed. and Wal. Follett and Tom Lamb were dismissed and no evidence was found against a Gila farmer who was popularly charged with having laid the plot and with having received his share of the golden booty. The others were
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bound over under very heavy bonds, which were supplied only in the case of one of the accused.
The case was brought up in November. Serious as was the crime, the main issues early were beclouded. Though President Harrison had assumed office the previous March, at Tucson were democratic "hold-overs," United States Marshal W. K. Meade and District Judge W. H. Barnes, incidentally bitter enemies. Barnes, an active partisan in politics, had at least one personal friend and political associate among the defendants and had arranged to have the case tried by Judge Hawkins, from Prescott. But the grand jury that found indict- ments against the prisoners had been told nothing of the proposed coming of Hawkins. So the next step was a telegram sent by the grand jury to the depart- ment of justice, recommending Barnes' removal, with the inference carried in the dispatch that the judge was in league with the attorneys for the defense.
Judge Barnes got a copy of the telegram. When court opened, the follow- ing morning, the grand jury was summoned before him and was discharged, after it had been called "a band of character assassins, unworthy to sit in any court of justice." Then followed a few days in which "the wires were kept hot." Barnes lost, though probably with little reference to the pending rob- bery case, and to the place was appointed a young Florence attorney, Richard E. Sloan, whose name was destined to even higher position in Arizona's hall of fame.
The trial began in November and lasted thirty-three days. The Government was represented by District Attorney Harry Jeffords, who was assisted by Wil- liam IIerring and S. M. Franklin. The attorneys for the defense were led by Marcus A. Smith and Ben. Goodrich. There were 165 witnesses, more than half of them at the cost of the defense. The five negroes who had been left on the field identified three of the accused, but were handicapped in the fact that, without exception, they had made the same identification at the preliminary examination according to their best "acknowledge and belief." Wham was as bad a witness as he was a soldier and by Mark Smith was led into a trap in trying to identify $1,000 in gold that had been seized by the Government after deposit by Gilbert Webb in a hotel safe. When the coins were spread out in the court room, the wily lawyer scrambled with them a handful of other twenty- dollar pieces and defied the paymaster to pick out his own. The defense brought testimony in quantity to show that they were far from the scene of the crime at the time of its perpetration. The man with the haystack declared he had lied in his first statements.
At the time lawyers rather generally observed that the case had been "over prosecuted." There was prejudice in Arizona communities over prosecutions by the Government, for the Government then had little standing except as a source of income in many communities. There was a disinclination to accept the testimony of the negroes and Wham had made a mess of his own evidence. So the verdict was for the defendants. There was a general disposition at the time to criticise the jury, but there was no aftermath, except a conviction for perjury of a witness who had done the defendants no particular good. What- ever became of the money, the defendants emerged from the trial destitute of what they had had. Wham was debited with the money he had lost and not till several years thereafter was he released of responsibility by the passage of a
DEFENDANTS AND COUNSEL IN THE WHAM ROBBERY CASE
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special act in Congress. He died in Washington in 1908, after another "bad luck" episode in his official career that happened in the Northwest and in which the Southwest would have little interest.
THE BRAZLETON ROBBERY
In July, 1883, on a road to the northwest of Tucson, there were a couple of stage robberies, something not uncommon in the least in that locality ; but added interest was given from the fact that in the second robbery, the highwayman had pretended to lead a considerable number of other, though unseen, bandits, and from behind a clump of sage brush had protruded the muzzle of a shot gun. The passengers were rather irritated when it was found that the robber was alone, a fact demonstrated by none other than the famous Pete Kitchen, who, with some Papago trailers, tracked the robber about thirty miles into the Santa Cruz Valley, south of Tucson, where the trail had to be abandoned. Soon thereafter into town came a healthseeker, who had a milk ranch four miles from Tucson, with a tale that he was harboring in his house a desperado who had threatened him with death if he failed to return that night with provisions and ammunition. The rendezvous was kept in the mesquite thicket, where also was Sheriff Charles Shibell with a posse, and in the resultant melee the robber was killed. He proved none other than Jim Brazleton, who had been employed in the livery stable of R. N. Leatherwood, next to the courthouse in Tucson, and there was later evidence that the same man, within nine months, had robbed seven mail coaches around Albuquerque, from which point he had come.
OPERATIONS OF THE VALENZUELA GANG
In 1887, Superintendent Josiah Gribble of the Vulture mines and two guards, Johnson and Littlefield, were murdered a few miles from Vulture, as they were starting for Phoenix with a bar of gold bullion, valued at $7,000, the product of the Vulture mill. Gribble had been warned at Vulture by T. E. Farish of the risk he was taking, but replied that he had fought robbers in Australia and South Africa and was willing to meet any thieves in Arizona. The murderers, Inocente and Francisco Valenzuela and a younger Mexican, probably saw from afar the arrangement of the guards and killed the three at the first fire. The murderers fled southward, headed for Mexico. At the Gila River they separated. They tried to cut the bar with an axe, but failed, so buried the bullion in a cache near Powers' camp. The chase after the murderers was one of the most spectacular ever known in the Southwest, in it participating Sheriff Bud Gray, Hi McDonald, Henry Garfias and Jim Murphy, all hardy and determined men and hard riders. They followed the trail across the blazing desert and the Mexicans narrowly escaped capture. Francisco got safely into Mexico, escaped extradition, and in the course of time died at Altar. Inocente, from Phoenix, later stole back to the cache on the Gila. His absence was marked, however, and a posse descended upon him. Impeded by his golden burden he was unable to travel with any speed. He showed fight and was killed and the bar was recovered. The third Mexican claimed that he was compelled to take part in the robbery and his story was accepted, inasmuch as he had turned state's evi- dence.
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The same Valenzuela gang for years terrorized the section along the Has- sayampa River, robbing placer miners and killing wherever they were opposed. They also are charged with the murder of Barney Martin and his family in the summer of 1886. Martin had kept a little store and had acted as stage agent at Stanton, in the Antelope Hill section of Southern Yavapai County, where he had incurred the enmity of the local gang of cutthroats and thieves. Martin finally sold out and, with the money for the sale of his property in his pocket and with his wife and several children, he loaded his few remaining effects into a covered wagon and started for Phoenix. Few men were more popu- lar than he and his departure was generally regretted, so his way southward was one of welcome and good cheer. Capt. M. H. Calderwood, at Coldwater Station on the Agua Fria, had been notified of the impending arrival of the Martin family and prepared a royal reception. But several days passed after the stage had reported Martin's departure from the Brill Ranch, on the Has- sayampa, and Calderwood became alarmed. Not far from the present Hot Springs Junction was found the track of a wagon, leading off into little hills. This track was followed a few miles, and the trailers came upon the remains of a wagon that had been burned and in the ashes the charred bodies of Barney Martin and the members of his family. The murders had been committed on the highway and the wagon had been driven away from the road to try to hide the evidences of the crime. Though revenge is supposed to have been a cause of the crime, as well as cupidity, nothing more than suspicion of the assassin could be fastened upon anyone, though Governor Zulick offered a reward of $1,000. The bodies of the murdered ones were brought back to the Brill ranch and there interred, the headstone a perpetual reminder to those who thereafter passed of the dangers of pioneer days.
There was an understanding at the time that these Mexican outlaws had a secret leader in S. P. Stanton, who was assassinated by a young Mexican about 1886, in revenge for an insult of several years before to the boy's sister. Stanton long was a resident among the very worst Mexican population of the Southwest, ostensibly a storekeeper, supplying goods to the Mexican placeros. He was charged with complicity in the Barney Martin murder, but nothing could be shown against him. There was a general belief that Stanton had been a Catholic priest, but this was denied in 1901 by Hector Riggs, who told that "Stanton was never a Catholic priest, though he went far upon the road toward priesthood. He was expelled from Maynooth College for immoral conduct, and, though he took his case in person to Pope Pius IX, he failed to get himself reinstated."
A FEMININE ROAD AGENT
In 1889 Arizona rejoiced in the possession of a female bandit, Pearl Hart, who carried shooting irons and who robbed stages. She was a woman of the half-world, with an insatiable craving for morphine, cigarettes and notoriety. According to Sheriff Bill Truman of Pinal County, she was a very tiger-cat for nerve and endurance and would have killed him if she could. When the sheriff came upon the woman and her male companion, Joe Boot, as they were sleeping on the ground in camp in the San Pedro Valley, a couple of days after they had robbed a stage in Kane Springs Cañon, she was attired for the road in rough shirt and blue overalls. Pearl for a while was held in the county jail at Tucson
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where, in October, she succeeded in escaping by cutting through a light parti- tion. She was recaptured in Deming, New Mexico, with a hobo companion, about the time, it is understood, she was preparing to depart with a bandit gang, wherein she was to rank as queen. She was tried in Florence in November, 1898. A sympathetic jury found her not guilty of stage robbery. Judge Doan thereupon "roasted" the jurors and dismissed them from the panel for tlie bal- ance of the term. The woman was then again tried on the charge of robbing the stage driver of a revolver. She was promptly convicted and was sentenced for a term of five years to the penitentiary of Yuma, where she was the sole female prisoner. Her companion, Boot, was given a sentence of three years. The woman was paroled by Governor Brodie in December, 1902, upon the condition that she at once establish her residence at some point outside of Arizona. Her real name was Taylor and her home had been in Toledo, Ohio.
TRAIN ROBBERS AND THEIR PURSUIT
March 21, 1889, an Atlantic & Pacific train was stopped at the Cañon Diablo station by four robbers, who, after searching the contents of the express strong box, fled northward. The scene of the robbery was in Yavapai County and so the trail was taken by Sheriff Wm. O. O'Neill, with three deputies. The posse, after a chase of 300 miles, consuming two weeks, finally sighted their men in Southeastern Utah, forty miles east of Cañonville. Then came a pitched battle, in which over fifty shots were fired, though the only effect was the wounding of one of the robbers' horses. The fugitives, leaving their horses behind, plunged into the mountains on foot, soon to be run down by the Arizonans. The capture included Wm. D. Stirin, "Long John" Halford, John J. Smith and D. M. Haverick. Upon them was found about one thousand dollars. A rather amusing incident was the attempt of citizens of Cañonville to arrest the des- peradoes, but the attempt failed, for the large citizens' posse was held up by the' robbers and made to stack arms and retreat. The return to Arizona was made around by Salt Lake. On the homeward journey Smith escaped through a car window.
Another train robbery, September 30, 1894, occurred near Maricopa, where the through express was boarded by Frank Armer, a Tonto Basin cowboy, only 20 years old, who climbed over the coal of the engine tender and, at the muzzle of a pistol, stopped the train where a confederate, Rodgers, was in waiting. Lit- tle booty was secured. The two men, before this, had ridden in circles around the desert in order to throw pursuers off of their track, but Indians, taking a broad radius, soon picked up the trail. Rodgers was caught far down the Gila, and Armer was taken at the home of a friend, near Phænix, after a battle with Sheriff Murphy and officers in which he was desperately wounded. At Yuma penitentiary, under a thirty-year sentence, he made three attempts to escape. He dug a tunnel that was discovered when it had nearly connected his cell with the world beyond the great wall. A second time, when he broke for freedom from a rock gang, he had to lie down under a stream of bullets from a Gatling gun on the wall. A third time he secreted himself while at outside work and eluded the guards, but was run down in the Gila River bottom by Indian trailers. Finally, prostrated by consumption, he was released, barely in time to die at
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home in the arms of his mother. Rodgers, sentenced to a forty-year term, served only eleven, then being discharged for exemplary conduct.
SILVER DOLLARS STREWED THE DESERT
Grant Wheeler and Joe George on January 30, 1895, held up a Southern Pacific train near Willcox and robbed the through safe of $1,500 in paper money. The safe was broken open by dynamite, upon the explosive piled sacks of Mexican dollars, of which in the car there were about 8,000. The result was eminently satisfactory, the safe not only being cracked open, but the ex- press car nearly wrecked as well, the silver pieces acting upon it like shrapnel, sowing the desert around with bent and twisted Mexican money, which also was found deeply embedded in telegraph poles and in the larger timbers of the car. Sections of the telegraph poles and of the car, stuck full of silver dollars, like plums in a pie, were valued souvenirs for years thereafter in railroad and express offices along the coast. Yet only $600 was lost from the silver shipment. The robbers escaped into the hills. They returned for more on February 26, when they stopped a train at Stein's Pass, but made the mistake of discon- necting the mail car instead of the express car, so got no booty. The trail was taken up by W. M. Breakenridge, then in charge of the peace of the Southern Pacific line in Southern Arizona, who trailed Wheeler into Colorado and ran him down near Mancos April 25. The next morning the outlaw, surrounded and appreciating the hopelessness of his position, after a brief exchange of shots with the pursuing posse, committed suicide.
JIM PARKER'S CRIMINAL CAREER AND SORRY END
One of the sensational crimes in the first few days of 1897 was an attempted robbery of the Santa Fé express train at Rock Cut in Mohave County by out- laws headed by Jim Parker, a Northern Arizona cowboy. The gang is believed to have had six members, but only Parker and one other participated in the holdup. While Parker covered the engineer and fireman, his partner cut off one car of the train, mistakenly thinking it the express car, but it was only mail that was found when Parker ordered a stop a few miles up the line. There lie also found that he was acting alone, for his associate in crime had been shot by the overlooked express messenger. Parker took some of the registered mail and started into the wilderness with it. The fourth morning thereafter Sheriff Ralph Cameron tracked him down in the snows of the Grand Cañon region, where Cameron knew about all the rocks and assuredly all the trails there were. After conviction at Prescott, Parker in May headed a jail break. The jailer was felled and Lee Norris, assistant district attorney, a young lawyer of brightest prospects, was killed as he was encountered in the corridor of the courthouse. One of the three who escaped was soon captured. Another, a Mexican, is supposed to have perished from wounds received in a skirmish with a pursuing posse. Parker himself got away on Sheriff Ruffner's best horse, "Sure Shot," and evaded a hundred men for nearly a month. He was finally caught, still with "Sure Shot," by an Indian trader and a dozen Navajo Indians on the very northern edge of the territory as he was making good his escape into Utah. Returned to Pres- cott. he was convicted of the murder of Norris and thereafter was hanged.
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THE COCHISE TRAIN ROBBERY
For a while train robbery had popularity in Arizona, despite a statute passed, though never enforced, making the crime one punishable by death. One of the most daring train robberies of the Southwest occurred about midnight, September 9, 1899. Express Messenger Charles Adair, who had killed an over- adventurous train robber on the same run the year before, stepped to the door as a westbound Southern Pacific express reached the small station of Cochise. As he looked out it was into the muzzle of a revolver and he and the train force soon were lined on the platform with their hands in the air. The express car was detached and run a couple of miles westward. The messenger was known to be ignorant of the safe combination, so the safe was opened with dynamite The loot was rich, comprising a bag full of gold and currency, with value of at least $10,000. The four men involved struck into the Chiricahuas, unsuccessfully followed by posses headed by Sheriff Scott White and George Scarborough.
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