Showdown at the Tunnel Saloon

A LONG-STANDING FLORENCE FEUD ENDED IN FATAL GUNFIRE TEXT BY SAM NEGRI ILLUSTRATION BY EZRA TUCKER JOE PHY WAS AMBIDEXTROUS. HE wore a Colt revolver on one hip and a Bowie knife on the other and was proud of his ability to use either weapon with either hand. Perhaps equally important, Joe Phy didn't drink. In Territorial Arizona, a man like Phy should have lived forever. But Joe Phy barely made it to his 43rd birthday. He had, in addition to his knife and gun, a short temper - a very bad combination. As a result, a week after his birthday, Phy had neither knife, gun nor temper.

Phy, one of Territorial Arizona's earliest disgruntled employees, worked for Pinal County's sheriff, J. Pete Gabriel. Formed in 1875, the county measured roughly 6,000 square miles, but Florence ranked as its only "metropolis." In 1880 the town had about 1,000 residents, and 28 businesses owned liquor licenses.

According to town historian John Swearengin, Florence was "Tombstone without Wyatt Earp." It was a raucous burg where people worked hard, drank hard and died young. A sheriff needed an assistant. Gabriel hired Phy as his deputy because he had a reputation as a fearless lawman. Phy had lived in Florence as a young man before moving to Tucson. When Gabriel recruited him, he was working on a ranch in the vicinity of Willcox.

Had Gabriel checked Phy's references more closely, he might have detected a vicious nature not so readily apparent. The sheriff found out about this violent tendency when he sent Phy over to Casa Grande to arrest someone. In the course of the arrest, Phy reportedly beat the suspect so severely that the man nearly died.

That put an end to his brief career as a deputy in Pinal County. Gabriel told Phy he was just doing his job by firing him, but Phy swore to anyone who would listen that someday he'd get Pete Gabriel. On one occasion, he reportedly stood two silver dollars on a bar counter and, with his razorsharp Bowie knife, sliced both in half with a lightning-swift flick of his wrist. That, he said, is what he'd like to do to Pete Gabriel.

But Gabriel was not exactly a pushover. In his middle 50s when he hired Phy, he had a well-earned reputation as a crack shot. Those who knew Gabriel said he behaved like a man who had absolutely no fear of death. He was a hard drinker and hanging out in bars and gambling were his favorite pastimes. That could have been why he and his young wife had separated. And the fact of their separation could have been why Phy was so friendly to her.

Phy may merely have been a chivalrous individual looking after Mrs. Gabriel's wellbeing in the absence of her husband. Ample evidence, however, indicates that Mr. Gabriel didn't see it that way.

Contemporaries of both men speculate on why the two ended up in a fatal shoot-out. Some say itwas because Gabriel fired Phy, while others say it was because Phy resented Gabriel having a sweet young wife who-poor thing - was obviously being neglected. At least one observer also suggested that Gabriel hated Phy because Phy had gone out of town once and, without asking permission, had borrowed Gabriel's new suitcase. On first reading, that sounds patently ridiculous, and yet during the same era a man was shot to death in Tombstone simply for wearing a plaid shirt.

And so, despite the speculation of various authorities, the truth remains that no one fully knows beyond a doubt whether the enmity between Phy and Gabriel had its roots in jealousy, politics or a new suitcase. What-ever the cause, the disagreement did not end well.

Early in the day on May 30, 1888, Gabriel and his friend Mike Rice left Riverside, near the Gila River some 30 miles west of Florence, in a horse-drawn buggy. Rice held the reins, while Gabriel settled back in his seat and set about anesthetizing him-self with a bottle of Old Taylor. Rice later wrote that by the time he turned the wagon down Main Street in Florence, Gabriel was "three sheets in the wind."

Phy happened to be sitting on the sidewalk with some friends as Rice and Gabriel drove by. Phy made an obscene remark about Gabriel-a rhythmic and colorful phrase unprintable here. Rice heard the comment clearly, but Gabriel was evidently too blitzed to hear much. At least that's what Rice thought, but he wasn't so sure. Rice, and everybody else around Florence, knew there was bad blood between Gabriel and Phy, and that Phy had threatened to kill his former boss. Had Gabriel heard the insult and ignored it? Not likely, said Rice, and yet Phy's bravado did not bode well.

Gabriel went into the Brewery Saloon and invited everybody present to have a drink with him. Rice refused because he figured Gabriel needed no encouragement. From his writing it also seems that he smelled trouble brewing with Phy. After a round or two, he and another friend persuaded Gabriel to leave. They bundled him into the buggy and took him back to the Porter House where Rice and Gabriel had rooms. Gabriel collapsed on his bed and Rice left to return the team and buggy to a nearby ranch, where he was invited to remain for supper. After dinner, he headed back to town on foot. Some years later, he recalled that fateful -ful evening. In Rice's handwritten report, filed with the Arizona Historical Society, he said: "It was quite dark when I arrived back at the Brewery Saloon, where I learned that Gabriel had returned and was then in Jack Keating's saloon filling up on booze and acting in a belligerent manner. I immediately, as fast as I could, started for Keating's. I got as far as the barbershop, about 30 feet from the saloon, when I heard two shots in rapid succession, followed by two or three more. These came from the inside of the saloon. I hesitated a moment before advancing another step and in a few seconds saw the two men back out into the sidewalk, saw three pistol flashes and then they both dropped in a clinch to the sidewalk."

In approximately two minutes, one of Territorial Arizona's most famous duels had played itself out. Two men were filled with bullet holes, and in a few hours Joe Phy would be dead.

The part of the confrontation that Rice did not witness came out in the coroner's inquest.

Gabriel, who had been drinking all day, revived enough to realize he needed more. He left the boardinghouse and ended up in Jack Keating's Tunnel Saloon on Main Street. The original Tunnel Saloon was an under-ground establishment located behind the Main Street bar, and when it closed, Keating transferred the name to the street-level bar.

While Gabriel sat at the bar, his hand never far from his pistol, Phy paced up and down and for a while sat on a bench across the street, waiting for him to come out. Gabriel kept glancing outside. Around 8 P.M. Phy's patience ran out. He walked across the street to the bar and entered. The bartender said Phy got within 4 feet of Gabriel before the lead started to fly.

The first two shots were fired so close together that no one could say beyond a doubt who fired first. Some said it was Gabriel, some said it was Phy.

In his book, Good Men, Bad Men, Law Men, Swearengin had a slightly different version:

"All of the witnesses were in agreement

that the fight had been in the dark after it started, the lights having been blown out after the first exchange. After that it was short and violent. It ended when Phy fell out backward through the door onto the walkway in front of the saloon. Gabriel had walked out of the front door, stepping over Joe as he exited. From there he walked down the street, trailing blood, until he fell in the street in front of the OK Livery Stable."

The doctor who examined Phy said he'd been hit at close range by three bullets from Gabriel's 45. Shortly after midnight, Phy died.

Gabriel's stamina was legendary, and Rice's account of his behavior after the fight suggests that he must have had the strength of a bull. Gabriel had been hit by four bullets. One entered his left lung, one hit the groin, one glanced off a rib and the fourth grazed his hand.

These injuries evidently did not impair his particular sense of right and wrong.

Rice described Gabriel's reactions after the shooting: "A cot was secured and we carried Gabriel to an adobe room adjacent to the old courthouse there to await the doctor. Gabriel was capable of clear conversation all this time. Here Gabriel exhibited one of his peculiar-ities. Mrs. Fryer asked if anybody had notified Doctor Harvey. Someone present said he was now attending to Phy at Lowman's Barbershop and he would be here in a few minutes. When Gabriel heard this he flew into a rage and exclaimed, 'What? Doctor Harvey, my family physician, attending to my enemy first. Tell him I won't have his services. I'd die first."

When Harvey arrived, Gabriel wouldn't allow him to treat him. A man named Frank Williams hitched up the same team Rice and Gabriel had used earlier in the day and rode over to the Sacaton Indian Agency and at 4 A.M. brought back a Dr. Sabin. The doc-tor told Gabriel to take care of any personal business he had pending because he would surely be dead within 24 hours. His left lung was destroyed, the doctor said. That was the only lung Gabriel had. Many years earlier he'd been shot in the right lung by a man he'd been sent to arrest.

Hearing the doctor's gloomy prediction, Gabriel responded, "Well doctor, let me tell you that I will pull through this and live without a lung and then be a better man than any of my present enemies."

He must have known something the doctor didn't because a month later he was back on his feet.

Justice of the Peace John Miller, who presided over the coroner's inquest, ruled that on the basis of testimony from various witnesses, "J. Phy came to his death by the hands of J.P. Gabriel and was done in self defense."

Judge Richard E. Sloane, a Florence lawyer who would later serve as Arizona's last Territorial governor, knew Gabriel and sometimes feared his temper. Gabriel, he said, had become a legend in his own time, a well-worn phrase but one that hardly anyone would dispute. Ten years after Gabriel had been told he had 24 hours to live, he died at his mine in the Dripping Springs Mountains. AH

In approximately two minutes, one of Territorial Arizona's most famous duels had played itself out. Two men were filled with bullet holes, and in a few hours Joe Phy would be dead. WILD BURRO ROUNDUP Ride along on a government-approved tactic for thinning herds and making the beasts available for adoption

The wild burros burst out of a thicket of arrowweed and tamarisk toward where I crouch behind a flimsy veil of jute netting. Four cowboys and a hovering helicopter follow the burros closely, pushing hard. Frantic 400-pound burros, looking for an escape, race past, just a couple of feet from me, hooves clattering wildly across the desert cobble. Then the burros and cowboys become a tangle inside an explosion of dust at the mouth of the trap.

Cowboy Greg Cook of Vernal, Utah, hurls a loop quick as a snake around a balking jack. The momentum of horse and rider propels the roped burro into the trap, the last one through. In a single fluid motion, Cook slides from the saddle to the ground and runs to shut the trap, straw hat still anchored on his head. Smiles all around. Seven burros make a good catch at about $250 a head, and the federally authorized roundup has barely been under way an hour in the Imperial Wildlife Refuge about 50 miles upstream on the Colorado River from Yuma. We plan to catch a total of 130 burros. It's late July, and the temperature by mid-morning reaches 105 degrees. The trap lies set in a barren place called "Paradise"