THE TWO WORLDS OF CESARIO LUCERO

Cesario Lucero, one of the separated there and so did the best lawmen of the lawmen, with Daniels going borderlands, lived in a after Dowd and Lucero taking world of shadows. His territory Delaney. was the border between Mexico It was perilous work. and Arizona, and his time was Delaney was a hot-tempered the 1880s. 27-year-old from Pennsylvania, In this violent border world, considered the most dangerous a place of two languages, two man in the gang. Writer Harriet cultures and serpentine Hankin, in a typescript about allegiances, Lucero performed the massacre on file at the brilliantly and anonymously. He was never quoted, never featured and rarely credited. Only toward the end of his life was he praised as the best Mexican detective in the Southwest. But by then, the criminals he hunted, his own countrymen, had marked him as a traitor deserving assassination. Lucero was called upon by Cochise County Sheriff Jerome L. Ward after the Bisbee Massacre of 1883. The trouble started on a cold December day when five gunmen botched their attempt to rob the Goldwater and Castaneda Mercantile on Main Street. Five bystanders, including a pregnant woman and her unborn baby, died as a result of the shooting that accompanied the bandits' getaway. Two of the bandits-W.E. "Bill" Delaney and Dan Dowd-rode toward John Slaughter's ranch near Douglas, then picked up the smuggler's route south into Mexico. Deputy Billy Daniels and Lucero reportedly trailed them to the old Spanish town of Bavispe, Sonora. The fugitives Arizona Historical Society, described him as "a dark, agile man of medium height, vicious and aggressive in disposition, reputed to be a dead shot with a rifle." Delaney was on the run from a murder charge in Graham County at the time. He'd shot a man through the heart for interfering in his quarrel with a Mexican woman. After separating from Dowd, Hankin wrote, Delaney "simply disappeared, and for a while no trace of him could be found." But Lucero never lost the scent. He dogged his prey deep into Sonora over several hundred miles. He passed out handbills containing a description of Delaney in the villages and to Mexican police. His diligence paid off when, according to Hankin, Delaney's "ugly temper overcame his discretion," and he got involved in a saloon brawl in Minas Prietas, near Hermosillo. Mexican police thought they recognized him from the handbills and took him in. He was the last of the robbers arrested, and all of them died at the end of a rope. Even though Delaney's capture might never have occurred without Lucero's knowledge of Mexico, the deputy was largely absent from the congratulatory press accounts of the day. He remained in the background on other occasions as well. On May 11, 1888, several masked men held up a train at Agua Zarca, Mexico, 12 miles south of Nogales. They coldly killed the conductor and brakeman and wounded several others before fleeing into Arizona. One of them, an Anglo named J.J. Taylor, was arrested within hours after investigators found his hat at the scene. The remaining four, all Mexicans, vanished somewhere in southern Arizona. Over the next month, Cochise County Sheriff John Slaughter pursued the murderers from Fairbank to Willcox, Clifton and Tombstone. It was an arduous and frustrating chase. The men kept moving, taking and shedding names like clothing, and using friends, family and their knowledge of the terrain to stay ahead of the law. Early in June, after spending a night in Tombstone, two of the robbers, Manuel Robles and another known in some accounts as Nievas Deron, left for the Whetstone Mountains, west of town. Robles' brother, Guadalupe, worked there as a woodcutter. Lucero, along with Slaughter and Deputy Burt Alvord, followed close behind, and came upon the fugitives at Mescal Springs at dawn the morning of June 6. "When within some 80 yards of the camp," reported the (Tucson) Arizona Daily Star, "they all removed their shoes and proceeded in their stocking feet. When they came to the men they found them lying by a fire wrapped in their blankets. The sheriff ordered them to throw up their hands and surrender." But the fugitives woke up firing. So did Guadalupe Robles,

The Two Worlds of Cesario Lucero

whose only crime was his blood relation to Manuel. The Star reported that Guadalupe was killed almost instantly, "with a Colt .45 in his hand, full cocked, ready to shoot." Nievas Deron fled some 40 feet up a nearby hill, dodging behind trees and firing as he ran. But Slaughter brought him down with a fatal charge of buckshot. Manuel Robles ran down French Joe Canyon with Lucero, Alvord and Slaughter at his back.

"It was a running fight," the Star reported, "and as Alvord was without shoes, the Mexican escaped." But not before he'd been hit by two rounds from Slaughter's shotgun and a third from Alvord's Winchester rifle. Robles fell after each wound, but kept getting back up and running. The lawmen trailed him for more than two miles by the blood that flowed from his wounds, but he got away. The sheriff boasted that Robles wouldn't live long.

Much of the credit for the successful routing of the murderers went to Slaughter.

"It is not every county that has a sheriff brave enough to walk over the mountains in his bare feet to capture desperate criminals," reported the Tombstone Prospector.

But Lucero, whose knowledge of the back alleys of Mexican Tombstone was key to the pursuit, finally got some recognition, too, when the Prospector paid tribute to his "coolness, bravery and shrewdness" in the shoot-out.

Unfortunately for Lucero, Slaughter was wrong in predicting Manuel Robles' death. The killer survived his wounds, reunited with two more of the gang-Fredrico Acuna and Geronimo Miranda (or Baldon, depending on the account)-and swore revenge against Lucero. With his ability to read the whispers and rumors that ran through the Mexican neighborhoods and towns on both sides of the border, Lucero surely knew he was a marked man. But he pushed the threats aside and stayed on the trail of the Agua Zarca killers. It turned watching. The Citizen gave the following account of what happened on Sunday, August 12, 1888: "Manuel was seen on Saturday night near the Mescal Ranch. On Sunday morning, Out that they were tracking him, too.

Early in August, Lucero departed Tombstone for the Mescal Ranch in the San Jose Mountains, a short distance south of the Arizona border. The Arizona Weekly Citizen reported that he went "with the idea of entering into the business of buying and selling mescal [a liquor made from agaves]."

Lucero was unaware that Manuel, in company with Acuna and Miranda, was Lucero went to the creek which runs through the ranch about two hundred yards distant from the house. He went unarmed, leaving his rifle at the house, not expecting any danger. "After washing himself he sauntered back, but had proceeded but a few yards when the crack of a rifle shot was heard, quickly followed by a second report, and Lucero was seen to fall in his tracks.

"Two men were seen to run away after convincing themselves that their victim Was dead. They were recognized as Fredrico [Acuna] and Geronimo [Miranda], two of the train robbers, for which a large reward is offered, but up to the present time have evaded arrest or a more merited death.

"On examination of the body of the murdered man, it was found that he had received two bullet wounds, both in the head. Death must have been instantaneous."

A somewhat different version was told in The Southwest of John H. Slaughter, by Allen A. Erwin. He wrote that Lucero was tracking Geronimo Miranda that day, on orders from Slaughter.

Erwin also recounted, in what might be more folklore than fact, that when Miranda approached Lucero at the stream, the outlaw was "smiling as if greeting a brother" when he said, "I understand you are after me." Lucero was shot dead before he could reply.

In death, Lucero received the full acclaim that eluded him in life. The Tombstone Epitaph for August 25 wrote that "few better, and no braver, men than Cesario Lucero ever met death at the hands of cowardly assassins."

Public demands for retribution against Miranda became intense, even though it was never firmly established that he was the actual triggerman. He proved a formidable adversary for Slaughter, who chased him for two more years without success. Geronimo Miranda finally met his end, in June 1891, when he was gunned down by ranchers near Benson after stealing some horses. Fredrico Acuna and Manuel Robles escaped and were never heard from again.

Adapted from the book Manhunts & Massacres, volume 2 in the Wild West Collection published by Arizona Highways Books.