Vigilantes and Bad Men
Arizona, the Youngest State
McClintock, 1913, page 464

At Tucson in 1873 the people began to appreciate that lax 
enforcement of law on the part of county officials made 
possible the escape of too many desperate criminals.  So, 
on August 8, the population rose, more or less enmasse and 
took from the county jail and hanged John Willis, Leonard 
Cordova, Clemente Lopez and Jesus Saguaripa.  A coroner's 
jury summoned commended the executioners and stated that 
"such extreme measures seem to be the inevitable result of 
allowing criminals to escape the penalties of their crimes."  
Willis had been found guilty of killing Robert Swoope at 
Adamsville in the course of a drunken discussion of the 
shooting of Colonel Kennedy by John Rogers, who own fate 
seems to have escaped local historians.  The three Mexicans, 
for plunder, had murdered in Tucson one of their own 
countrymen and his wife.   The execution was without 
secrecy upon a common gibbet erected before the jail door, 
after the condemned men had been given the benefit of 
clergy.



The people of the young town of Safford in August 1877 took 
the law into their own hands and hanged Oliver P. McCoy, who 
had acknowledged the killing of J.P. Lewis, a farmer.  McCoy 
was to have been taken to Tucson for trial, and there was fear 
of miscarriage of justice in the courts.



In December 1877 the people of the little village of Hackberry 
in Mohave County hanged Charles Rice, charged with the murder 
of Frank McNeil whose offense seems to have been the disarming 
of Rice's friend, Robert White, in the course of an altercation 
in which White appeared to be in the wrong.  About the time of 
the hanging, White, fearing a similar fate, tried to escape 
and was shot down and killed by his guards.



At Saint Johns, in the fall of 1881, was a summary execution, 
a gathering of citizens taking from the jail and hanging Joseph 
Waters and William Campbell, who had killed David Blanchard and 
J. Barrett at the Blanchard ranch.  It was told at the time that 
the men hanged had been hired to do the murder by someone who 
wanted the ranch as a trading post.  But nothing was done with 
the third party.



April 24, 1885, popular judgment was executed five miles below 
Holbrook, where two murderers from the town, Lyon and Reed, 
were run into the rocks by a posse of citizens headed by James 
D. Houck and killed.  The couple had killed a man called 
Garcia.




One of the most serious criminal episodes in Yuma was early in 
1901 when Mrs. J.J. Burns, a farmers wife, was shot and killed 
by a Constable, H.H. Alexander who had been charged with the 
service of a legal paper.  About two months after the shooting, 
Alexander was convicted of murder and sentenced to life 
imprisonment.  April 9, while being taken from the courthouse 
to the territorial penitentiary, walking between two officers, 
Alexander dropped dead, killed by a rifle bullet from the 
window of a building near by.  It was assumed that a relative 
of the King family (to which Mrs. Burns belonged) had assumed 
the fullest degree of vengeance but the matter was taken no 
further.




On December 1899, the county jail at Holbrook had a notable 
prisoner, George Smiley, convicted of the killing of a section 
foreman named McSweeney.  The sheriff at that time was F.J. 
Wattron, a school teacher/editor, who thought to make the first 
legal execution in the new County of Navajo, a sort of social 
gathering.  So he issued a "cordial gilt-bordered invitation to 
visitors assuring those invited that the latest improved methods 
in the art of scientific strangulation will be employed and 
everything possible will be done to make the surroundings 
cheerful and the execution a success."  There were hundreds 
of protesting letters over the sheriff's levity.  Governor 
Murphy waxed indignant, scored the sheriff for flippancy and 
granted the prisoner a month's reprieve.  Smiley was hanged 
January 8, 1900.



One of the most famous of frontier sheriffs was Commodore Owens, 
whose particular field was Northeastern Arizona.  He looked the 
part of the frontier sheriff with long hair down his back, large 
hat and high boots, carrying at least one large revolver.  What 
gave him more than local celebrity was a fight in 1886 in 
Holbrook in which he killed three cowboys and wounded a 
fourth.

At that time Holbrook was still included within Apache County 
of which Owens was sheriff.  One Andy Cooper had a few head of 
Cattle in Pleasant Valley.  He had a bad reputation with stock 
men and on numerous occasions had been accused of stealing 
cattle and horses but the fellow had been canny in his operations 
and never could there be gathered together evidence enough to 
convict.  Finally the Apache County grand jury found an 
indictment against him but evidence was lacking.  The sheriff 
was advised by the district attorney that the indictment had 
been found more as a scare than anything else.  On the day of 
the killing, Cooper was in Holbrook visiting his mother at a 
time when the sheriff also happened to be in town.  He was 
advised of Cooper's presence by a number of saloon loungers.  
When Owens showed no inclination to make the arrest, he was 
baited by the crowd and he finally lost patience.  He rode 
to the house of Cooper's mother, Mrs. Blevens, and dismounted 
about thirty feet in front of the house, and walked up to the 
house.  He knocked on the door and when he identified himself, 
the door was slammed in his face.  He began backing up toward 
his horse when the house door opened and a rifle ball sang 
just past his head and killed his horse.  Before the door 
closed, Owens fired, shooting his would-be murderer through 
the shoulder.  The man he had just shot was John Blevins, 
Cooper's half brother.  At almost the same instant, Cooper's 
face was seen peering over the sill of a window. Owens 
immediately fired through the boards of the house, shooting 
Cooper through the lower part of the body.  A third cowboy, 
named Roberts was seen stealing around from the rear of the 
house, with a revolver held over his head ready to fire.  
Owens shot him in the back as he was turning around, and 
though he dragged himself to a back room he was dead in ten 
minutes.  Then young Blevins, a lad of only 16 appeared 
through the same front door where the first shot had been 
fired.   Clinging to him was his mother, shrieking and 
trying to hold him back the the half crazed lad, was dropping 
his pistol to shoot when Owens sent a bullet through his heart.



One of the most lurid dime novel bandits the Southwest ever 
knew was Augustine Chacon, captured near the international 
line by Ex-Captain Mossman of the Arizona Rangers, who had a 
personal interest in landing the desperado.  Chacon murdered 
a Mexican in Morenci in 1895 and thereafter was sentenced to 
hang.  He escaped from jail a few days before the date of his 
execution and later was charged with the murder of two 
prospectors on Eagle Creek and of an old miner whose body 
was found in an abandoned shaft.  He then joined Burt 
Alvord and other outlaws in Sonora and participated in at 
least one train robbery.  Chacon after his arrest was duly 
hanged at Solomonville in December 1902.



In the list of desperadoes of the early days, a place should 
be reserved for a blacksmith named Rodgers who at the Santa 
Rita mines in 1861 boasted of having killed eighteen persons 
and who then produced a string of human ears to prove his 
tale.  At the time he promised that he would make the number 
twenty five before he quit.  In this ambition he later killed 
six men at El Paso, where he was caught and in an endeavor to 
make the punishment fit the crime, he was hanged by the heels 
over a slow fire--and his own ears made the twenty-fifth pair.



The first legal execution in Yuma County occurred in 1873, and 
was that of Manuel Fernandez, hanged for the murder of D.A. 
McCarty, generally known as "Raw Hide".  The crime was committed 
for loot and before it was discovered the Mexican and his 
confederate had worked several nights carrying wagonloads of 
goods away from their victim's store.



A rather noted criminal was Joseph Casey, hanged in Tucson, 
April 15, 1884.  He was a deserter from the regular army and 
had been charged with a number of murders and with other 
criminalities along the border finally being arrested in 
1882 in the larceny of cattle.  October 23, he, three men 
held on a charge of murder and five other prisoners broke 
jail at Tucson but Casey six months later was re-arrested 
at El Paso.  April 29, 1883, again an inmate of the Tucson 
jail, in a second escape killed jailer A.W. Holbrook.  A mob 
tried to get him out to hang him but there was swift 
retribution and he was soon sentenced by Judge Fitzgerald 
to capital punishment and was duly hanged.

A notable execution occurred at Tombstone late in 1900 in the 
hanging of the two Halderman brothers, found guilty of the 
murder of Constable Chester Ainsworth and Teddy Moore at the 
Halderman ranch in the Chiricahua Mountains.  The brothers 
had been arrested on a charge of cattle stealing by Ainsworth 
and Moore and had been allowed to enter their home to secure 
clothing.  Instead they reappeared with rifles and shot the 
officers from their horses.  The murderers fled, but were 
captured near Duncan by a sheriff's posse and returned for 
trial at Tombstone.

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