Maricopa County AZ Archives History .....Phoenix As A "Wild West Town" 1916 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/az/azfiles.html ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: D. Joshua Taylor http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00006.html#0001358 June 27, 2005, 11:30 pm Book Title: Arizona The Youngest State McClintock, 1916, pg. 458 In 1879 Phoenix had 1500 inhabitants and a semi-organized vigilance committee composed principally of farmers. Men were wounded and killed until "a man for breakfast" no longer was interesting. Stage coaches were held up by road agents about twice a week; even "old man" Stewart and the famous messenger Gilson were obliged to throw up their hands on several occasions. Billy Blankenship tried to hold down the robbers once and had his hands full of duck shot for his pains. Sunday horse races on the main street were an important event. One May about half the population was stretched along Washington Street in two long lines, pressing toward the street center, looking westward to see the start of two racing ponies. Down the course a horseman came galloping, apparently to clear the way. But the fellow was running amuck. In his hand was a long cavalry saber with which he was savagely slashing right and left as he yelled, "Death to the Americans." He dashed down the line and escaped before the crowd had fully comprehended his mission. Half a dozen people were wounded, two of them seriously. The "Saber-Slasher", was followed far down into Sonora by a courageous officer, captured and brought back and lodged in jail in Phoenix. He made a break for liberty, with the assistance of a mesquite club and was killed by Attorney Stephenson and jailer H. McDonald in pure self defense. Luke Monihon, brother of a late mayor, was a farmer living a few miles to the west. He was driving home in the dusk of the evening when a wretch named Keller, with whom he had had trouble, shot him in the back, from behind the screen of the roadside sagebrush. The steady farm horses trotted home, and the wife, as the team stopped at the door, came out to find the lifeless body of her husband in the wagon bed. It didn't take long to run Keller down. Indian trailers followed his footsteps to the house where he lodged and the little iron cage of the county jail received him forthwith. A stoutly built, bluff, jovial man was Johnny LeBarr, who kept a saloon on Washington Street. On the evening of August 21 he was treating some friends in an adjoining saloon, but refused to provide liquor for a rough named McCloskey. The latter left the saloon, returned a few minutes later with a long butcher knife, with which he slashed LeBarr across the body. His victim died a few hours later. Next morning a group assembled on the Plaza armed with rifles and revolvers. The gathering place was on Jefferson Street. Marion Slankard, since deceased, was the captain. Around Montezuma Street, into Washington, swung the column of over a hundred determined men. Up to the little adobe courthouse the men marched and filed in. The officers knew what was coming and had discreetly found occupation elsewhere. The jailer was the only one on guard. He demurred to the suggestion of handing over his keys but was soon convinced that he should do so. At least ten malefactors were imprisoned at this time but the committee wanted only McCloskey and Keller. These men they took to the Plaza. The fourth and fifth cottonwoods from Montezuma (First) Street on Washington were chosen as gibbets. The condemned men, singly were put into a wagon, allowed a few parting words and then the wagon was driven out from under them. Keller confessed his guilt. He had plenty of drop and appeared to die easily. McCloskey made quite a sensible talk--said he deserved his fate and warned the spectators to profit by the spectacle of his punishment. He bitterly spoke of liquor as the source of his many misdeeds. Just as the wagon commenced to move, McCloskey mounted to the endboard and voluntarily made the leap into eternity. McCloskey's spirit had hardly flown ere, there were two cowering figures more in the dreadful wagon. They were those of two Mexican merchants who had for several days been preaching a crusade against the Gringos. They had been captured by a clever flank movement from among their demoralized partisans. Slankard spoke good Spanish and made himself quite plain. Pointing to the swinging bodies he warned the shrinking men that such would be their fate if another incendiary word were to cross their lips. They were then released. The vigilantes turned their efforts towards cleansing the town of its undesirable element. Everyone suspected of being a rough or a crook was given a canteen and a warning. Departure was forthwith many finding an appropriate field of operations in Tombstone. The first lynching in Phoenix occurred July 3, 1873 when Mariano Tisnado was hanged on a cross beam of the Monihan corral. On the face of things it would appear that he had been hanged for stealing a widow's cow but there seems little doubt that he was guilty also of the murder of B.F. Griffin, a highly respected pioneer who had lived south of the village. In 1877 the execution of another popular decree in the hanging of a soldier who had shot Lew Bailey through the window of a hall in which the better element of the population had met to dance. This hall was the old stage station on the east side of Center Street, half a block north of Washington. The lynching was on a cottonwood on the site of the present waterworks. Bailey later died of his wounds. Maricopa County in all its history has had but one legal execution that of a Mexican boy, possibly 18 years of age, by the name of Demetrio Dominguez, who had murdered in the Bradshaw Mountains, a wood camp foreman who had discharged him from employment, with possibly, unnecessary severity. Dominguez located his victim, a large and powerful man, in a stage coach on the Prescott Road, near Gillett and in the middle of the night climbed into the stage and found his quarry, knifing him to death. The official surveyors of Yavapai and Maricopa counties had to jointly meet to determine the venue of the crime, which was established only a few feet south of the joint county line. The trial was held in Phoenix in the fall of 1880 and in November Sheriff Rube Thomas hanged the lad on a scaffold erected in the old cemetery in the southwestern part of the village, very near to a grave that had been provided. The Mexican population resented the conviction and so the cortege from the jail to the scaffold, a distance of over half a mile, had an escort of about fifty citizens, all armed with rifles. File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/az/maricopa/history/other/phoenixa643gms.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.org/azfiles/ File size: 7.2 Kb