Women of the Pleasant Valley War

"Let me shoot him!" Mrs. Graham, widow of Tom Graham, suddenly put her hand in her dress pocket and, pulling out a revolver, sprang toward John Rhodes.

(OPPOSITE PAGE) Mary Ann Tewksbury crept out in the darkness with the best quilts and tarpaulins in her possession to protect the men's remains from swine and wild beasts.

With few exceptions to establish the rule, human history depicts war as man's work. The land now called Arizona has staged its own violent share of masculine combat, of Tewa versus Athabaskan, of imported cavalryman versus native brave, even a Far West skirmish or two of Blue versus Gray. Those contests were often brutal, but none was more hellish than the long-drawn-out Pleasant Valley War, which reached its most intense phase a century ago this year. By contrast, Appala-chia's Hatfield-McCoy feud was not much more than a family spat, and the Lincoln County War in New Mexico boasted more bravura than bloodshed.

Today Pleasant Valley is one of Arizona's most peaceful retreats, a bowl of pines and pastures below the Mogollon Rim, about a hundred miles, as the eagle flies, northeast of Phoenix.

But Pleasant Valley was not so pleasant in the closing years of the 19th century. Pioneers who had been fast friends first exchanged hard words, then engaged in open duels, and finally resorted to ambush shooting and vigilante hanging. Before retaliations ran their course, the vendetta took between 30 and 50 lives. The violence spread over a reach of wilderness and settlement 200 miles across. The negative publicity undoubtedly delayed statehood for a territory seemingly trapped in the grip of decades of lawlessness. To the Last Man, Zane Grey titled his novel based on the Graham-Tewksbury feud. As far as history tells, no woman died as a direct result of some 30 years of warfare. But as always, wives and mothers, daughters and friends were victims too, and their desperate reactions and poignant moments document a dimension common to all wars. For both sexes and all ages, there is more than enough misery, horror, loss, and suffering to go around.

Mary Ann Tewksbury. At age 22, Mary Ann Crigger married one of the Tewksbury boys, John, and accompanied him to Pleasant Valley. Their house was of squared logs on a bank of Cherry Creek, not far from the Tewksbury clan's headquarters compound.

For years the Graham and Tewksbury menfolk had been bushwhacking one another, and most of the fighters eventually hid out in the hills. But in the terrible summer of 1887, Mary Ann was far along in the pregnancy of their second child at the unprotected homestead, and John Tewksbury decided to risk a visit. At daybreak on September 2, Tewksbury and his fast friend William Jacobs stealthily slipped away from the house to catch saddle horses left free to graze overnight. The pair was traversing the bottom of Graveyard Canyon when shots rang from ambush. Jacobs died in a hail of bullets. Tewksbury, with a wound in the back of his neck, collapsed in severe pain. One of his assailants applied the coup de grace— a boulder crushed his skull. Mary Ann's agony had just begun. Night after night, she crept out in darkness with the best quilts and tarpaulins in her possession to protect the men's remains from swine and wild beasts. Not until 11 days went by could the nearest justice, John Meadows of Payson, be summoned for an inquest and burial.

In another 10 days, Sheriff William Mulvenon and a posse rode up to Mary Ann's doorstep and recommended that she accept safe escort to a more civilized confinement. "No. This is my home my husband built for me, and I intend to remain, and there is nobody that is going to run me out."

Ten days later, in her own home, Mary Ann Tewksbury gave birth to a son and named him John.

Mary Blevins. In the space of 60 days, Mary's husband was listed as missing (his body was never found), four sons were mortally wounded, and her only remaining son was severely injured.

Member of a respected Texas ranch family, Mary had come west in the mid1880s and assisted her husband, Martin, in developing Canyon Creek Ranch on the main trail between Pleasant Valley and Holbrook. Surviving Blevins letters of that day tell of an Eden of vegetables and fruit and lush ranges for raising horses. But Mary's feisty husband and rambunctious boys were heading for big trouble.It apparently was Mary's outlaw son, Andy Blevins (alias Cooper), who waylaid John Tewksbury. At least Andy Cooper

boasted of the deed two days later in Holbrook.

Mary was present in a little frame house on Sunday afternoon, September 4, when Sheriff Commodore Perry Owens stomped onto the porch. Cradling his Winchester at the front door, Owens called for Cooper to submit to arrest on a horse-theft warrant. The next 60 seconds must rank as the most action-filled minute ever precipitated and concluded by a lone lawman in the frontier West. Firing repeatedly through the house, Owens put three men out of commission before Sam Houston Blevins, 14 years of age, swept up his brother's six-shooter and charged onto the porch.Clinging to the lad, Mary tried desperately to drag hin back inside. But in the heat of the battle, Owens responded to the threat with an accurate shot, and Sam Houston, a rifle slug in his heart, fell through his mother's arms.

The slayings, particularly that of an impulsive youth, haunted the mother and Sheriff Owens the rest of their days.

Duette Ellison. Miss Duette was not directly linked to any tragic episode of the Pleasant Valley War, yet she may have known more of the participants than almost anyone else. Daughter of a Confederate soldier, educated in a Waco, Texas, convent, gifted guitarist, Miss Duette refused to compromise her maidenly grace while helping Jesse Ellison and his large family establish a ranching dynasty not far from today's Kohls Ranch, on State Route 260 northeast of Payson. Duette refused to wear trousers, and heaven help an uncouth cowboy who wore spurs or chaps in her house. Yet she could hunt a grizzly bear, rope and brand a steer, and steadfastly stand by her father when he once went broke. "I helped you spend it when you had it," she said, "and I'll stay with you till you get it back."

Duette and her handsome sisters were cause enough for Hashknife cowhands, city businessmen, and wealthy sheepmen to detour 50 miles to court them. Into Miss Duette's autograph book the gunfighters of the Pleasant Valley War inscribed: "In a chain of friendship pray consider me a link.

Will Colcord."

"May your life be long and happy is the wish of your friend, C. H. Blevins."

"Remember your intended, J. W. Voris."

But with the Pleasant Valley War swirling around the Ellison Ranch, with hundreds of lives disrupted and dozens brought to an untimely end, with her father deeply involved as a vigilante, Miss Duette eventually accepted the proposal

of marriage from a politician who signed her book:

"In kind remembrance of a most pleasant bit of Southern hospitality.

G. W. P. Hunt."

In time, George Hunt, portly, bald, unflaggingly ambitious, scarcely a dashing cowboy, was elected the State of Arizona's first governor, and Duette served as the state's first "first lady." The assignment extended through seven terms. It is said she never spent a day in Phoenix that she didn't yearn for the life of a rancher, far from the sounds of the city and wonder about those horsemen of the mountains.

Hannah Stott. The pride of her life was her son, Jamie. All boy, Jamie excelled in New England schools and played trapeze artist atop the woolen mills superintendented by his father near Boston.

In 1883 Hanna acquiesced to Jamie's wish to go west, learn about horses, and establish a ranch. The Stotts were financing their 25-year-old son at the Circle Dot spread, 60 miles south of Holbrook, when in 1888 like a thunderbolt came the telegram informing them that a vigilante committee had hanged Jamie and two acquaintances on the Verde Road between Heber and Pleasant Valley.

A traumatic time awaited Hannah in Arizona. She traveled by train to Holbrook with her crippled husband and talked to numerous residents, who told her not a shred of evidence implicated her son as a rustler. In her grief, Hannah wrote home to Massachusetts: "Dear, Dear Child, his hopes and expectations, so suddenly deDestroyed, and be cut down by cruel, wicked outlaws. A man pretending to be an officer with a false warrant, and did not even have the warrant with him, arresting him falsely, a band of 28 men got there about daylight. He gave them all breakfast, they pretending to take him to Prescott. Took the three to a place between 20 and 30 miles, there killed them." The Stotts spent a fortune attempting to bring their son's killers to justice, to no avail. Witnesses, intimidated, would not testify. Politically powerful figures in Arizona ultimately advised them to abandon their futile quest for the culprits. Hannah Stott lived on for nearly three decades with only the memory of a special son, lost.

Annie and Estella Graham. The lively daughter of a Baptist minister, Annie Melton met one of the Graham brothers, Thomas H., apparently in 1885 or 1886. Tom was a Midwesterner of middle years who with his brothers had tried his luck as prospector, gambler, and stockman from Alaska to Mexico. By the mid-'80s, his ranch (near today's Young ranger station on State Route 288) was well established, and by his family's estimate was worth at least $50,000. Tom and Annie were married at the height of the battles of mid1887, and almost immediately Tom was jailed in Prescott, accused of homicide. In time the charges were dismissed and, with the war apparently over, Tom and Annie cleared a farm a few miles southwest of the then tiny river town of Tempe. Blessed with a bounteous harvest of barley, Tom, on August 2, 1892, was driving his grain wagon to Tempe's Hayden mill when he was shot in the back by a waiting rifleman. It took Tom most of the day to die. Four-year-old Estella, the Grahams' second daughter, was held up time and again to kiss her beloved father farewell.

On August 9, Annie attended the preliminary hearing for John Rhodes, charged as her husband's assassin. Outwardly cool, she bided her time in the crowded Phoenix courtroom. Reported the Phoenix Daily Herald: "Mrs. Graham, widow of Tom Graham, was sitting beside her father near the reporters' table when she suddenly put her hand in her dress pocket and, pulling out a .44-calibre revolver, sprang toward the prisoner with the intention of putting out his light." "And she would have been successful had not her father caught her arm before she could do the deed that would have avenged the death of her husband....She cried out, "Let me shoot him! Let me shoot him...!"

Rhodes was released, and later became famous as a rodeo roper. Annie Graham spent most of her long remaining life under mental care. Braulia Tewksbury. Braulia also thought the long war was over, and that she and Ed Tewksbury might finally enjoy a normal life in Pleasant Valley or in their favored towns of Globe and Miami. But threatening letters addressed to Ed arrived from Tempe. Then Ed's best friend, in suspicious circumstances, vanished at a crossing of the Salt River in flood stage. Threats intensified, and whether they originated with Tom Graham or not, Ed became convinced that his life and the lives of his family were in danger once more.

He talked with Braulia about his plan. Mounted on his stallion Sockwod, he would circle around the Superstition Mountains, hide himself near Tempe's Double Buttes, and eliminate the man he blamed for the deaths of his brothers and his friends. For luck Braulia tied her scarlet apron string around Ed's sombrero. After the shooting of Tom Graham, Ed Tewksbury knew he would be the prime suspect and voluntarily surrendered at Cherry Creek, east of Pleasant Valley. Waiting out two lengthy trials, he won his freedom with a convincing alibi: numerous friends swore he was seen 100, 150, 160 miles from the scene of the crime. Freed after four years in jail, the two long trials, and related proceedings, Ed returned to Globe and was promptly named constable. He and Braulia had a large family. In 1904 Ed died of tuberculosis contracted in jail. He was the Last Man.

But Braulia was the last man's woman, and she knew how Ed had established his alibi how he had used relays of fast horses staked out at intervals from Tempe to far east of Pleasant Valley Valley. Only in 1980 was her statement, sealed as she directed for 25 years in the files of the Arizona Historical Society, released to answer the most sensational question in territorial legal history.

A Little War of Our Own: The Pleasant Valley Feud Revisited is available from Arizona Highways for $15.95, postage included. Mail orders to 2039 W. Lewis Ave., Phoenix, AZ 85009; or telephone (602) 258-1000; toll-free in Arizona, 1-800-543-5432. Don Dedera, a former editor of Arizona Highways, is now a free-lance writer in Phoenix.