History

THE DEADLIEST GUNFIGHTERS OF

Acrid gunsmoke permeated the air that September day in 1887, as the grimfaced sheriff his business finished lowered his Winchester, turned, strode across the dusty street, mounted his horse, and rode out of Holbrook. In his wake lay four men, hearts pumping the lifeblood from their bodies. Only one would live. Commodore Perry Owens, sheriff of Apache County in the northeastern part of the Territory of Arizona, had come from the county seat of St. Johns to arrest a horse thief who called himself Andy Cooper. (See Arizona Highways, Aug. '84) Other lawmen had declined the job, but Owens had a reputation to protect. The voters elected him in 1886 because of the fame he had garnered by single-handedly charging into a band of renegade Indians intent on stealing a herd of horses Owens had been hired to protect. He nurtured that dramatic image with his long flowing hair, dashing manners, and flamboyant dress.

Cooper, who openly boasted of killing two men, on this occasion had borrowed three-dozen Navajo horses without permission.

Owens found him holed up in his mother's house along with two brothers and a brother-in-law. The sheriff pounded on the door. Cooper, armed with a Colt .45, cracked the door and then tried to slam it. By reflex, Owens blocked the door with his foot and shot from the hip. The bullet ripped into Cooper's gut.

The sheriff sprang from the porch as another of the clan fired through the doorway and missed. Owens squeezed the trigger again, this bullet splintering the door and tearing into the flesh of his assailant's shoulder. John Blevins, the brother-in-law, would be the only one of the four men to live. (He later became a deputy sheriff himself, not under Owens, though.) The sheriff swung back around in time to see Cooper, still clutching his revolver, pass a window. Owens' Winchester spoke again, and Cooper fell dying into his mother's arms.

One brother, a teenager, grabbed Cooper's .45 and ran onto the porch.

Owens was ready. Hot lead cut through the young man's hips.

The other brother jumped out of a side window, and Owens shot him through the chest.

Silence. It was over. Retrieving his horse from the livery stable, Owens was asked by a bystander if he had finished the job.

"I think I have," he replied.

According to historian Dan L. Thrapp, Owens went on to become the first sheriff of Navajo County, and later still a United States deputy marshal. But around 1900 he hung up his guns and became a businessman in Seligman, a community about halfway between Flagstaff and Kingman. He died there of natural causes in 1919.

There were many men like Commodore Perry Owens who lived by the gun in Arizona Territory. Some good, some bad.

Part art of the country's last free-wheeling, anything-goes frontier, Arizona Territory attracted a motley collection of gamblers, con men, layabouts, prostitutes, drunks, and men "on the lam."

THE SOUTHWEST HAD TO BE TOUGHER THAN THE TIMES IN WHICH THEY LIVED

When townspeople needed a marshal to cope with this element, they wanted one “badder” than the bad guys, and they didn't always ask — or care — about a badge wearer's background.

“From 1865 to 1900, many of the lawmen were actually ex-outlaws,” says Ben Traywick, Tombstone's resident historian. James G. Wolf, who lived in the raucous milling town of Charleston in the early 1880s, noted the same thing in a 1937 interview: “At times we had some fine law officers, but you acquired a funny feeling toward the law when you knew that some of the deputies had a different name last year and were 'wanted' in some other state.” Then there were those so-called lawmen who used their positions to further their own criminal activities.

In the fall of 1899, masked gunmen held up a Southern Pacific passenger train at Cochise. The conspirators included Burt Alvord, a tough-as-leather constable in Willcox; William F. (Bill) Downing, constable at the mining camp of Pearce; and William L. (Billy) Stiles, who would serve Briefly as an Arizona Ranger in 1902.

When news of the robbery reached Willcox, Alvord himself assembled a posse. Not surprisingly, his men straggled back empty-handed.

The gang members ultimately were outsmarted by a Wells Fargo detective, who turned them in. But that didn't end their checkered careers.

After Downing's release from Yuma Territorial Prison seven years later, he had another brush with the law — a fatal one. Downing, who gulped breakfast from a whiskey bottle, drifted back to Willcox to set up the Free and Easy Saloon. Residents despised and feared the new saloonkeeper, whose bad temper often flared.

On August 5, 1908, Arizona Ranger Billy Speed went to arrest Downing for beating up one of the saloon women. At 8:00 A.M., Speed approached the Free and Easy, cradling a 30-40 Winchester rifle. Downing quickly slipped out a back door. Speed gave chase, caught up to his prey, and hollered, “Hands up!” Downing's hand moved toward his hip. Speed fired one bullet, which struck with crushing impact.

“They say he hit the ground before his hat did,” longtime Willcox resident B.A. Gardner recalled.

While Downing religiously avoided the straight and narrow, cohort Billy Stiles diligently straddled the line. He agreed to testify for the prosecution in the train-robbery trial and wheedled a commission as a special officer for Wells Fargo. This stint as a “white hat” proved shortlived. The badge gave Stiles access to the Tombstone jail, and he used that privilege to help fellow robber Alvord escape to Mexico.

Three years later, the pair, still living south of the border, worked a deal with the Arizona Rangers and helped capture an escaped murderer they had befriended. Charges against Stiles were dropped, and he was named to the ranger force. Again, it didn't take him long to admire

WITH TWO

the wrong side of the law. He stole a mine payroll.

QUICK BLOWS

The chameleonlike Stiles continued to change colors throughout his life. A few years later, when a deputy carrying another name died in Nevada, the man's widow said he was, in fact, Billy Stiles.

PHY CUT EACH DOLLAR IN TWO WITHOUT

In the early days, lawmen like Stiles could be found everywhere in the West - as could iron-willed characters whose stubbornness helped them carry the day when the odds were stacked in the criminal's favor. But sometimes the trait backfired and led to epic duels among the lawmen themselves. It happened once in Pinal County.

LEAVING A NICK OR BLEMISH ON

Southern Arizonans knew Joe Phy as a tough individual. That reputation prompted Pinal County Sheriff Pete Gabriel to hire him as a deputy in Florence in the mid-1880s.

THE KNIFE.

Gabriel's friends described the sheriff as the most fearless man they had ever known, always in the right. Twice he held off mobs intent on taking a prisoner from him.

Phy was ambidextrous and a crack pistol shot. He spent hours practicing with his six-gun. He also was proud of his skill with a custom-made Bowie knife.

"On one occasion, Phy placed two new silver dollars on the bar at Jack Keating's Tunnel Saloon and with two quick blows cut each dollar in two without leaving a nick or blemish on the knife," said a man who witnessed the event.

Both Gabriel and Phy were stubborn, and they argued frequently. The sheriff eventually dismissed Phy for beating a prisoner, and the furious deputy challenged Gabriel on the spot to have it out "as men fight."

Gabriel declined the offer, laughing as he replied: "Joe, this is only part of my job."

The sheriff later lost a bid for reelection and took up gold mining, returning to town only for supplies and to sip a few with the boys.

On one such evening in May of '88, he was in Keating's saloon, a tiny basement hangout. Phy, still harboring a grudge, had heard Gabriel was in town and sent word to his former boss to meet him in the street. Again, Gabriel refused.

Tired of waiting, Phygun in hand barged through the saloon door. Both men fired simultaneously. Concussion from the gunshots was said to have snuffed the kerosene lamps, leaving the contestants to grope about in the darkness. Badly shot up, they staggered outside and finished their fray in the street.

Testified one witness: "[Gabriel] was standing midway between the door and the edge of the sidewalk with his feet spread, arms hanging down, his gun in his right hand. Just as I got to him he began to sag and sink, slowly, like a half-filled sack of grain. I reached and took his gun from his hand, not knowing what a man in his condition might do."

Phy, who collapsed in the street, had raised up on one elbow.

"Are you hurt much, Joe?" inquired one witness.

"Go away from me, you murdering SOB," muttered Phy, in shock, slashing at the man with his Bowie knife, cutting him to the bone above the knee.

Gabriel recovered from his wounds. Phy died a few hours after the shoot-out.

Although staffing problems were a constant headache, the lawman of old often had greater difficulties with the legal system itself. But in Arizona Territory, they sometimes found their own ways of dealing with the ponderous turning of the wheels of justice.

John Slaughter, Cochise County sheriff from 1887 to 1890, who regularly headed out alone on the trail of wanted men, was one such.

"Slaughter had wonderful eyes and could follow a trail while riding fast that many others could not see at all," said James G. Wolf of Charleston.

Diminutive in stature but not lacking in grit, Slaughter would take out after a lawbreaker and then return a few days later without a prisoner but with the man's horse, saddle, and guns. He would then announce that he had chased the culprit clean out of the country.

"Finally it was noticed these killers never again showed up, either here or elsewhere," Wolf added.

Slaughter was not the only peace officer to use his ingenuity to "uphold" the law. One afternoon in 1889, Jack O'Neil, a deputy sheriff, was passing through the town of Pima with a prisoner. They were bound for Solomonville and a legal hanging. O'Neil stopped at a saloon to wash the trail dust from his throat and got involved in a poker game. He began to win, but duty called.

O'Neil reluctantly rejoined his prisoner and started up the road toward Solomonville, but he stopped the wagon after a mile and a half. The beckoning of the cards was too much to resist. After all, he rationalized, the prisoner was going to be hanged anyway.

Pulling the rig under a tree, O'Neil stood the unfortunate man in the bed of the wagon, looped a rope around his neck, threw the other end over a limb, and tied it in place. Then he headed the wagon back to town and the card game - leaving his prisoner dangling.

They were hard men in a hard land, these lawmen of the Arizona Territory, and they lived and sometimes died by their own code of justice. But what may be acceptable on one side of the border doesn't mean it will be so on the other.

The date was April 4, 1908, and Jeff Kidder, an Arizona Ranger, had ridden to Naco to "re-up." The burly ranger was still in his early 20s but had already faced down his share of the territory's seamier element. Kidder was not without a soft side, though, and often carried a small dog with him in the saddle.

While in Naco, he crossed the border to partake of a watering place in Mexico.

Kidder, a man with a violent temper, threatened one of the girls who stole money from him, and she summoned the Rurales.

Three police officers arrived, an argument ensued, and gunfire erupted. All four men fell wounded, Kidder shot in the belly. The ranger struggled to his feet and instinctively made for the border, some 300 yards distant. Several mounted men gave chase. Kidder turned and fired as they closed in.

The ranger stumbled and fell but managed to reload his revolver as he rolled along the ground. He made it halfway to the border before he ran out of ammunition and was captured.

Kidder was dragged to a Mexican jail, suffered brutal treatment, according to author Joseph Miller, and died the next day.

His body was shipped to his mother in California. Fellow rangers intended to adopt his pet dog, but the animal, apparently mourning its master's passing, sickened. The rangers passed the hat, and shipped the dog to California where it spent its final days lying on Kidder's grave.

Good or bad or in between, these territorial officers of the law lived and passed on in an age of freedom and violence we could never understand.

The justification for their deeds lies in a simple code expressed best by longtime Arizona lawman Jeff Milton: "I never killed a man that didn't need killing; I never shot an animal except for meat."