WAS WILLIAM EASTMAN FULL OF IT?

ven if he engaged in the grand art of embellishment, and even if he put one of heaven's own angels under hot lights and made him tell a book of lies, then spoke them as his own, William Eastman's story should be told. He possesses, if his story holds, firsthand information on one of frontier Arizona's grandest and grubbiest spectacles - the lynching. He wasn't merely a witness to the rope play. That would make him one of thousands. No, Eastman was the victim, or as he put it, "I played the leading role as a corpse." Supposedly, a friend sawed the choking rope just in time to bring Eastman back to earth, both literally and figuratively, and the two made their getaway into the blackness of an Arizona night. Eastman's tale, including the hair-stiffening specifics of the pickle he found himself in, goes under the catchy title, "Hanged, But Still Lives." But before describing as truth what Eastman claimed Arizona has its share of colorful history, and most of the stories have been well documented. The Legend of Skull Valley isn't among them. In fact, the tale of William Eastman's miraculous escape from a hanging rope sounds a little far-fetched. Nonetheless, The New York Times bought into it in 1899, and so did The Arizona Republican. No one knows for sure, but 110 years later, it's still a story worth telling.

it was like to nearly die under a creaking mesquite branch at the hands of steel-eyed vigilantes, a few questions about authenticity must be examined. Eastman's only account of his ordeal was recorded by a newspaper reporter and published more than 35 years after the fact - always an iffy proposition for historians, considering the tricks that memory and age can play. Another problem is the time period during which the incident was to have occurred. Eastman said he'd headed for the Pacific Coast in the spring of 1851 to join the great California gold rush, and listed his near-hanging as one of the many Western adventures he engaged in thereafter. But he doesn't name a year. By the sound of it, William Eastman was a gadabout who lived a wild life. "I was twice made captive by Indians," he said, "but managed to escape the second time, however, receiving wounds that came near making an angel of me, and the scars of which I shall carry to my grave. "But when I look at the topknots that ornament the collar of my coat, I always feel a sense of grim satisfaction in the thought that, badly as [they] treated me, I quit a winner three times when the stakes were human life."

The ornaments he mentions weren't ornaments at all: "From the collar of his coat hung three tufts of long, wiry hair that looked like portions of a horse's mane or tail, but were in reality the scalp locks of Indians trophies of ... valor and bravery."

Would a man said to be in his late 60s or early 70s still wear the grim accessories of a violent youth so many decades later? Another aspect of his appearance raises eyebrows. He wore a full suit of buckskin. As students of the frontier can attest, it's the uniform of the tale-teller, the man who prefers grinning in front of a city photographer to drinking at a freezing mountain stream. In other words, a fraud.

It would be nice to check other aspects of Eastman's background for a con man's footprints, but his name doesn't register with sources in New York, Chicago or Oregon, places he was known to have spent time. However, that isn't unusual when researching a person with a name being the only hard information available.

But if Eastman's hanging never happened, it ranks as one of Arizona's biggest hoaxes, and among the most noteworthy ever perpetrated on The New York Times, which published his lengthy story on July 23, 1899. The Arizona Republican of Phoenix repeated it some months later, and neither newspaper returned in later issues to say that the muscular and weather-beaten frontiersman with a gray beard had taken them for a long ride.

Eastman was returning from visiting relatives in the east when a Times correspondent caught up with him in the reading room of a hotel in Sandusky, Ohio. From a comfortable, high-backed chair, he laid out the fantastic story of what he called "the closest call I ever had." It happened in Yavapai County, Arizona. Eastman was wandering the West with Robert Wilson, a one-time New York vessel broker he'd befriended in Crook County, Oregon. Wilson typified the troubled vagabond who "lived in his saddle by day and rolled himself up in his blanket at night ... wherever darkness overtook him."

On most days, Wilson was an engaging soul and a fine companion. But some undisclosed family torment weighed on him, and eventually forced him to the bottle for sprees that sometimes lasted two weeks.

"Drink changed his whole nature," Eastman said. "In all my experience among lawless characters in the West, I do not think I ever met one who could compare with Robert Wilson for pure and unadulterated devilishness when he was drunk."

The two men heard of a Skull Valley rancher in need of hands and rode off to seek work. This was probably some time in the early 1860s, when ranching began in that region. Although Eastman didn't mention the rancher's name, he described him as a coarse brute with bushy hair, black, piercing eyes and a sullen expression. Desperation overcame Eastman's instant dislike for his new boss, which proved prophetic.

Two days after their hire, the rancher lashed into Wilson for allowing some cows to wander off. Eastman watched the confrontation, expecting Wilson to explode. He held his volcanic temper, but that night told Eastman that if such a thing happened again, the ranch would see a funeral, and he, Wilson, would supply the corpse.

Just days later, Wilson acquired a bottle of bug juice from some passing prospectors, and in his drunkenness, again allowed cattle to wander off. Eastman knew trouble was coming when he saw the rancher galloping toward Wilson, gesticulating wildly with his heavy whip.

I can remember that I suffered excruciating pains in my neck and back and my head seemed to be absolutely bursting.

After a few minutes of shouting, the rancher raised the implement to strike Wilson, and almost simultaneously, a pistol shot echoed across the valley. A puff of smoke rose above the boss' horse, and he fell from the saddle.

"He was dead as a doornail when two of the other herders and myself reached him," Eastman recounted. "The instant the shot was fired, Wilson put spurs to his horse and was off like the wind. A couple of the herders gave chase, but he had too much the start of them, and they soon abandoned the pursuit."

In the aftermath of the shooting, Eastman noted scowling stares from some of the other hands, but gave the matter no further thought as he returned to his bunk for the night. He'd been sleeping three hours when several hands, described as halfbreed favorites of the dead boss, roused Eastman from a deep sleep. The men gripped his arms and pinned them at his back, stuck a gag in his mouth and a revolver against his temple.

At first, Eastman had no idea what was happening. But his grogginess quickly lifted and he realized that the men planned to wreak vengeance on him for the actions of his partner.

"I felt it was pretty tough to be murdered that way, on account of what Wilson had done... but there appeared to be no help for it," he told the Times. "It was no use to struggle, and no appeal for mercy that I might have been tempted to make, had I not been gagged, would have availed anything ... I just simply made up my mind that there were going to be two funerals on that ranch instead of one, as Wilson had planned."

The unnamed vigilantes tied Eastman's legs at the knees and ankles, carried him from the bunkhouse and tossed him over the back of a horse for the short procession to his expected death.

If Eastman entertained any profound philosophical insights on what it's like to suddenly find yourself with minutes to live, he didn't share them. But the thoughts of others in a similar fix have been preserved in the form of quotes in Territorial newspapers, and they range from defiance at what was about to happen, to tearful contrition, to pleas to the sheriff, lawyers and God, not always in that order.

Mothers rated high in the final thoughts of the condemned, as did prostitutes, which makes it tough to draw any firm conclusions. So does the presence of booze. It was used liberally by the soon-to-be-dead, of course, but also by jelly-legged sheriffs and executioners, many of whom were too weak to even hatchet the rope fastening the trap-door.

In Eastman's case, his lack of recorded final thoughts could be due to the passing of so many years between the incident and his telling the tale. Time might have dulled the epiphanies he surely experienced. Another factor could be the speed at which he was hauled from sleep. He hardly had time to wake up, much less ponder his past.

It's also possible that a man capable of tying decades-old scalps to his jacket simply had become so cozy with death, even his own, that he was weighed down by no particular insights. Hard as it is now to fathom it, the frontier might have made death an ordinary matter.

At any rate, the ride Eastman took to the hanging mesquite was little more than 100 rods. He told the Times what happened next: "One end of the lariat was then fastened around my neck and the other thrown over a limb, and the scoundrels then pulled me up and made the lower end of the lariat fast to the tree.

"I can remember that I suffered excruciating pains in my neck and back, and my head seemed to be absolutely bursting. Then I began to lose consciousness and experienced a sensation of floating. I knew nothing after that until I found myself at the side of a small stream in a thicket, with Wilson bending over me.

"My throat was so sore I could not utter a sound. My eyes seemed to be bursting from their sockets, and my head ached fearfully. Wilson was bathing my face and neck, and when I began realizing a sense of what had happened, he told me that when he dashed across the prairie after shooting the boss, he had a presentiment that harm would come to me.

"He had, thereafter, ridden back to the ranch under cover of darkness, and gone to my hut, found it empty, and, while leaving, had heard voices in the direction of the tree where I was strung up. He lay low until the scoundrels left the scene and then he cut me down."

After Eastman's miraculous return to this realm, the two fled as quickly as their horses could run. The Times reported that Wilson later met his end in a more traditional fashion, at least by dime novel standards - he was killed in a pistol duel in south Texas.

But Eastman lived to tell the drama of his hanging. Even with the many questions surrounding the incident, he deserves to be remembered as a man who added a unique and sensational page to Arizona's history of the rope.