The Arizona Sheriff

[Steven Ayres]

I found this great old promotional booklet online a little while ago, published by Studebaker in 1925, and just had to have it. Prescott, where I live, is the seat of Yavapai County, and the writer that Studebaker assigned managed to get himself deputized here -- or so he wrote, anyway. The stories are a hoot, with prominent Studebaker content, as you'll see, and I'll be periodically scanning them in to share with the group in this same thread. I wouldn't advise taking them too seriously as factual, but they provide a great look into the way of life in the West ninety years ago.



The Reason for This Book

The following stories of sheriff-ing in Arizona are not fiction. They are picturesque or thrilling incidents in the daily lives of the men who make life and property more safe in the remote mountains and deserts of the "Copper State" than in the streets of some great cities where thousands of police walk short beats night and day.

In achieving this result the Arizona sheriff finds a swift, sturdy automobile absolutely essential.

Twelve of the fourteen counties of Arizona furnish the sheriff's office with an automobile. Every one of these twelve has bought a Studebaker.

When this story came to South Bend, we commissioned Major Grover F. Sexton to visit each of these twelve sheriffs and see just what service Studebaker cars were rendering to the people of Arizona. Over fine roads leading through majestic scenery -- a veritable tourist paradise -- he visited rich mines, vast ranches, fertile, irrigated farms, picturesque pueblos.

In each county Major Sexton gathered stories of adventure.During his stay at Prescott he was commissioned as deputy sheriff of Yavapai County and assisted in the capture of a moonshiner who had killed a bootlegger. At Yuma he accompanied the sheriff in a swift chase of robbers who had looted a bank and killed the cashier.

He found that both good roads and bad roads gave the sheriff's Studebaker a severe test. Across the mesas stretched broad, smooth highways devoid of intersections where the throttle was thrown wide open and left open. There were wagon trails up into remote mountain valleys where the car was driven relentlessly in the teeth of ruts, rocks and steep grades. There were stretches of desert where no trace of trail existed but over which criminals must be pursued by a car crashing through brush and cactus stumps in the night. He Found that Arizona sheriffs and their deputies insist on driving Studebakers because they stand up under this hard service.

Every sheriff-driver there has tried other makes of motorcars. At least two sheriffs have preferred to keep old Studebakers to receiving new cars of other makes offered them.

Stories of Arizona sheriffs -- their courage, their humor, their keen intelligence -- as collected by Major Grover F. Sexton, Deputy Sheriff of Yavapai County, are published in the following pages. They tell how these soft spoken, hard driving men with nimble guns keep the highways and byways of Arizona safe by swift and certain capture of wrongdoers.

[Steven Ayres]

The Bar-C-Bar Horsethieves

Away out west of Seligman, Arizona -- Where the Grand Canyon of the Colorado leaves Coconino county -- Diamond Creek and its gaping gulch pour into the trackless gulf of the giant crevasse at a spot where probably not more than 100 white men ever have stood, since time began.

Seven of the 100 never will forget the cave under the mile-high canyon wall, just below the confluence of Diamond Creek and the swirling Colorado. For sixty feet it runs back up under the sheer rocky wall, thirty feet wide at its mouth.

Rocks tossed down from the plateau above every few minutes, day and night, shut three men and the eleven horses they had stolen within that stony pocket for five days, almost without food and water. Then, one night, the trio tried to bring the stolen steeds up the rocky canyon wall out of the vision of the sheriffs above, who had been throwing the rocks.

They had stolen the horses down on Lynch Creek, on the road from Jerome to Prescott, from the Bar-C-Bar ranch.

They traveled at night, herding the horses into shelter during the day, and had nearly reached Grand Canyon before Sheriff John Parsons, at Flagstaff, heard of it.

As the crow flies, John was 132 miles away. But even John's Studebaker could not sail as the buzzard soars in this largest county in the world, and his speedometer read 198 miles when he pulled out of the virgin forest (where no road has been to this day) onto the brink of the mightiest chasm in the world, the Colorado River Canyon.

Ninety miles had been made through the trackless woods. Ninety miles of primeval plateau hills and ridges, rock-strewn between, the cathedraled trees in places that never before beheld a human being. And through this wilderness, an automobile -- a Studebaker, of course, for to a Studebaker alone The Arizona Sheriff turns to cover these impossible miles!

There were only two places along its winding miles whence the thieves could come out of its vast depths, and here Sheriff John and his deputy sat to watch, like terriers at a rathole. It was January -- cold, windy. The glow of a campfire, far down at the bottom of the canyon, had betrayed the hiding place of the trio, all desperate, heavily armed men.

The same glow explained to Sheriff Parsons and his deputy, S.C. Thompson, how the thieves were able to keep themselves and their horses out of sight.

To have gone into the canyon would have invited certain death, an easy target against the gray stone wall. So the sheriff and his deputy waited at the canyon exits, patiently, for five days.

Their food ran out; their water almost so.

Fortunately, in the car was a small bag of corn, taken at a raid on a moonshine still a few days before. This they ground into meal on flat stones, Indian fashion, and made tortillas of crude composition. A jackrabbit ventured within reach of Parsons' deadly .45 pistol and gave them a taste of meat.

They were right over the cave under the canyon wall. Every fifteen minutes, day and night for five days, one of them would drop some small rocks over the cliff. That told the horsethieves they were watched.

The thieves, afraid to venture out into the canyon lest a shower of stones or bullets extinguish them in the fashion of Apache warfare of a century before in these same mountains, were even less fortunate than the watchers above.

On the sixth night they could stand it no longer. At midnight they led the stolen animals out, single file, after tying cloth about the animals' feet so they would not strike sparks on the stony trail.

The three began a long, slow, careful ascent of the canyon walls, almost sheer and a desperate ride even in daylight. They trusted to the leadership of a burro.

Just before dawn, when Parsons and Thompson were exchanging watch at their ceaseless vigil, they saw, midway up the canyon wall which juts out north on the west side of Peach Spring Draw across from Diamond Point, a tiny flash or spark.

"They're coming out, John," said Thompson. "Let's shake a leg around there where that burro went down the other day, and we'll pick them up like a turkey buzzard and then we can get home and get something to eat. You're a fair good cook, John, but your tortillas are kinda wearin' on me."

One foot covering had slipped from a horse's hoof. Two pieces of flint had crunched under the exposed foot and far out on the cliff side, the tiny flash had been seen by the eagle-eyed sheriffs.

After that, it was easy. The thieves emerged just after daylight had struck through the tall yellow pines on the top of the plateau.

Parsons and Thompson "cracked down on them," as they describe covering a man with a gun out here, and the hunt was over.

The trio drew sentences of 2 to 4 years in the state prison.

"But I'll get even with that Thompson," now says Sheriff Parsons, "if I have to live to be as old as Methuselah."

"Here I goes and bakes him up some of the finest tortillas he ever put a tooth into, when he hadn't had anything else to eat for days, and he takes the first excuse he could to kick about my cookin'. Ever see such ongratitude?"

"Where do you get that stuff -- put a tooth into?" retorts Thompson. "Say, a stone crusher couldn't have sunk a tooth into them things you called tortillas.

"Half the time I didn't know whether I was eating food or chewing down a hunk of pyrite rock. You ought to thank your stars I ain't suing you for damages; my stummick ain't felt right to this day."

[Corvanti]

ok, i'm already "hooked", waiting for more!

and thank you for keeping it all in this one thread...

[8E45E]

Yep, it was the 'car of choice' in Arizona for law enforcement agencies.

http://forum.studebakerdriversclub.com/showthread.php?30816-1925-Duplex-Phaeton&highlight=duplex

Craig

[showbizkid]

Mr. Ayres, Kudos! This is great stuff!

[Steven Ayres]

Copper

Arizona likes to be the "Copper State," but all those copper vats, boilers, tubes and gadgets piled up around the office of Sheriff Ed G. Weil in Prescott, seat of Yavapai county, aren't there to emphasize this fact.


This absolutely fearless, "hard-boiled little son of a gun," as the tough characters of the county now call him with just a shade of affectionate pride mixed with their enmity, told the folks of his county that if he was elected sheriff, he'd clean the mining country up so's it would be fit to raise a family in.

All around in the mountains, up canyons and gullies and in deep holes in the rocks or out on deserted ranches, were moonshine stills, bringing into being out of corn mash, wheat, rye or even fruit -- vile, powerful liquor that would run an automobile engine except that it might blow the cylinder heads off.

Yavapai county has an area of 8,130 square miles, with an average of 3 persons to the mile. To go to the other end of the county, over the very heart of Arizona's roughest mountain country, into the Santa Maria valley, or off down to the cactus plains around Divide, meant a day's journey.

The sheriff asked -- and got -- a Big Six Studebaker automobile. They tried to give him another make, but the sheriff said, "I'm going to work the car as no sheriff's car has been worked before and I'd rather keep the old county Studebaker, 'cause I know it will stand it." So he got a new Big Six Studebaker. Then you'd ought to have seen him clean up! He has had stills piled up all over the big car, and for awhile, the copper production of his office, in the shape of stills, almost equalled the production of the big mimes at Jerome.
He didn't "monkey around," either. Where there was a still, he just simply went and got it, and the presence of half a dozen rifles and pistols defending the still might just as well have been so many cholla (pronounced choy-ya) cactus plants -- one just went around them.

Just the other day, it was, that I.P. McKelvie killed Tex Elliott. McKelvie had set up a gigantic distilling equipment in a tiny, deep canyon in the rocks on the gulch leading up into the Santa Maria Mountains off the Congress road, 86 miles from Prescott as the buzzard sails (but 182 miles by a road, winding back and forth up and down the mountainsides).

Tex was buying corn liquor from McKelvie. But when McKelvie brought some of it out to the main road, for Tex to pick up in his car, he tasted it and suspected that a mixture was being sold him. An argument arose. Tex's hand reached the handle of his revolver, but the 9-inch barrel delayed his draw and McKelvie shot him dead.

Sheriff Weil was notified about midnight. In an hour his big Studebaker car had started out into the mountains with the sheriff and five deputies including the author.

Such a drive through the mountains, over a road clinging to the side of canyons like a swallow's nest, doubling back on itself on steep grades amid rough rocks; now down a 20 per cent grade and immediately up a 17 per cent hill! Many other cars can't make this Black Canyon Trail.

The sun was well up when they arrived at the scene of the killing. Yet a Justice of the Peace must next be hunted up, to conduct an inquest. Twenty-six miles away a mountain justice was found and brought in.

"I never conducted no inquests," he protested to Weil, "all I've ever done since I was elected justice is to marry folks."

But the sheriff brought him along, anyway; law is law. The body lay in the open Arizona sun, unprotected, but he at least, was dead, and Sheriff Weil wanted McKelvie.

So they left the body there and hit up the gulch in the mountain fastnesses.

It is positively weird, the way these desert sheriffs can interpret a wagon track, beating off the main road into the mesquite and scrub oak. Half a dozen tracks left the road and wound up an arroya. They followed.

Field glasses pointed an end to the gulch, about a mile ahead. They hid the car in a clump of scrub brush.

They came upon McKelvie right at his big layout. Deputy Bill Poulson and an aide crept up on top of the canyon wall to cover everything with rifles and with a camera for evidence.

Sheriff Weil and Deputy Dad Denny just walked right up into the open canyon with rifles and covered the distiller. His own rifle lay beyond his reach, on the rocks beside Weil. Upon the canyon rim the deputy's camera clicked as McKelvie's hands went up. The picture is kept for evidence.

Hidden in a cache around the rocks, they dug up twelve barrels of mash, all ready to run on the two stills in the open, set up on camping ovens. They found fifty gallons of poisonous white mule liquor, some of it still warm.

Sheriff Weil went back for the deceased Tex Elliott. Bill Poulson, the deputy, used to be an undertaker. To him fell the lot of bringing in the body which had lain under the boiling sun all day.

They took off the extra tire at the rear of the Studebaker, wrapped the body up in some old sacking, bound it to a board and tied it onto the back bumper. Above it, beside it, in front and all around it were tied parts of the distilling apparatus, brought down by Dad Denny. It was away after dark when the strange caravan pulled up before the county court house at Prescott.

When the sheriff and his deputies left the car with their prisoner, they had to crawl out through copper stills, like prairie dogs coming out of a hole.

McKelvie testified before the coroner that Tex tried to fire first. As the body had lain, the bootlegger's hand was still near his drawn pistol. So McKelvie was freed of the murder accusation. The government is still to try him for moonshining.

"Wish they'd hurry up," grumbles Sheriff Weil; "here I've got a dozen more places to raid and I need room to store the copper in. I'm running a sheriff's office, not a copper storage warehouse. Government's awful slow on things like that, isn't it?"

They call Weil "the two gun sheriff of Yavapai County." Before election he promised that if he got the job he would clean up the wide open places around the mining camps. And be it known a wide open dive near a mining camp is a pretty rough place. He was told that if he tried it he would be ridden out of town on a rail.

But within two weeks of his election he blew into the Tia Juana dance hall at Cottonwood near the monster Jerome Copper mines at night, with two deputies and his six shooter. He lined 45 men and 22 women in the place up against the wall, sent his deputies through the place to gather up two truckloads of evidence, drove the whole crowd out into the street, nailed up the dive, and went on back home.

While waiting for his deputies to collect the evidence, Sheriff Weil sat on a pool table, legs dangling over, and two pistols displayed, careless-like. The men with hands up grew restless. So Weil began joking with them and finally told them to go sit down and be good little boys. The whole 45 obeyed as though they were in Sunday school.

Among the 45 men were some bad hombres, a number with several notches in their pistols. But Weil did not even take the trouble to relieve them of their guns, telling them he supposed none of them wanted to commit suicide. And the rail ride is still waiting.

The tough, wide open, vicious Cottonwood dives are wide open no more. A little white mule corn liquor is smuggled in there, of course, as everywhere, but just try to buy a drink after the word has come that Ed Weil's big Studebaker car is on that side of the mountains!

Try and get it! They know that Studebaker can go anywhere, and does. And that makes this mountain bobcat of a sheriff highly pleased, for he does hate to muss up folks.

CAUGHT!
Photograph of the arrest of I.P. McKelvie at his moonshine still in a tiny rock canyon of the Santa Maria Mountains the day after he beat Tex Elliott, bootlegger, on the draw, shooting Elliott dead. Near Sheriff Ed G. Weil (left foreground) the moonshiner's rifle is seen on a rock. "Dad" Denny, deputy sheriff, is seen in the lower right corner, covering the moonshiner with a rifle. This picture was taken by "The Deputy from Yavapai" just as Sheriff Weil and Deputy Denny covered the moonshiner with rifles and he elevated his hands. Fifty gallons of illicit liquor were seized in this arrest. McKelvie was acquitted of the slaying charge, having fired in self-defense.

Historical notes: Today US 89 winds down the cliff from Prescott into the hills above Congress, which host several ghost mining towns in what is still very rugged, four-wheel-drive terrain. The Denny family is still prominent in the area.

[Steven Ayres]

Desert Rum Runners

In this piece I was particularly interested in the reference to the transition from horses to cars as a practical matter. Times were changing fast in those days, and it's fascinating to me to look at the pictures of these men and imagine how far the world turned in their lifetimes. Then I think of the law enforcement officers in Cochise and the other border counties today and their continuing challenges with smugglers, and it seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same. But I can't imagine them plunging across the desert giving chase in a four-door hardtop sedan, unless you count the Hummer as such.

Catching rum runners along the Mexican border is far from the tame motorboat pursuit on the open sea.

When a sheriff out in Arizona starts after a car laden with contraband whiskey, mescal or tequilla, the two race off across Arizona's multitudinous square miles with no regard for roads, cactus or even mountain ranges.

Take your choice -- an Arizona desert or an Arizona valley -- and racing across it in an automobile, often at night and not infrequently even then with lights out is somewhat (!!!) different from gliding down a boulevard to work.

Sage brush, thick as it may grow, is only three or four feet high, and that doesn't count. Sand, 'dobe mud or rocks underneath give precarious going.

Here is a big patch of soto -- stumps solid as basswood, from two to six feet high and six inches through, bearing on the top of a big ball of spiney, prickly, bayonet-like blades.

There is a weird looking forest, reminding one of Dante's inferno or a witchland, of ocatilla. Fingers an inch thick and seven to ten feet long, tough as leather and literally covered with prickers half an inch long, grope into the air like the tentacles of an octopus.

Now are bunches or hummocks of sacaton grass, or larger hummocks of sacahuiste or beargrass, to run into which is like hitting a potted palm.

Back and forth through this run arroyos -- deep gullies worn by floods. Now a dry-wash, or stone-covered riverbed, gives relief from the thorny vegetation, but makes up with stones and ruts.

All around are mountains, stretching steeply up for 4,000 feet, with sharp-ridged buttes or flat-topped mesas in between. Two decades ago, they said only a burro could cross much of it. Now they say only a Studebaker can traverse it.

Over east of Douglas, up San Bernardino river and the Rio Blanco, or White River, past Apache Mountain and into the Chiracahuas was a favorite route for rum runners from Old Mexico into the States. Opium came with it, and, for several years, much marihuani, the deadly weed smoked with cigaret tobacco.

Here was where Percy Bowden, a deputy sheriff at 18 and known for miles around as the "fightin'est bare-handed sheriff on the border" won his reputation by overtaking 1,300 automobiles laden with whiskey during less than eight years, and bringing them all in.

"Those were the days, when the automobile first came to be used for smuggling," now reminisces Bowden, who is chief of police of Douglas. "Every kind of a car was used, big and little. I remember one great, big Simplex that one fellow used. He had a piece of 90-pound railroad rail bent around and fastened on in front for a bumper.

"That was to knock down fence posts and soto stumps when we got to running them across country.

"Guess I must have knocked down 500 miles of wire fence in those years myself.

"I got kind of discouraged, when they gave me my first car, a small Studebaker. Some of those big cars could have run over me. But, boy! how it could get over that rough ground!

"It stood the gaff so well that within two years almost every successful rum runner had bought a Studebaker; it was the only car that could give us a run. The only reason we caught them was that the 15 to 20 cases of liquor each carried was a weight handicap for them.

"Most of the flats were fenced off for ranches. When the whiskey runners would see us coming, they'd turn out lights and beat it across country, right through the brush. Nothing left for us to do but turn out lights and take after them.

"Light of the stars helped us to steer shy of buttes and some arroyos. We stopped occasionally to listen to where they were plunging on, and then we'd head after them.

"Talk about thrills. If you can beat plunging through the dark and all that prickly brush at 30 miles an hour and then suddenly dropping into an arroyo all covered with stones at the bottom, I'd like to know how. And if you can find another make of car that can stand it, I'd like to see it.

"All you can do is turn and follow the arroyo out till it's shallower, then turn out and start after them again. If you turn on lights, they'll see them and dash off in another direction.

"We always knew they were heading for some road, so we'd head that way too.

"The lighter cars bumped around so much, and the long thorns on the ocatilla and the sand burrs punctured tires so often, they had to give them up.

"The bigger cars could thrash through the brush, but they couldn't stand up under such driving. They'd break down and we'd grab them.

"They always carried guns, but I never had any shootings. "Soon they got to getting the same make of cars we used and then it was any man's race. The federal prohibition law helped, for now we can confiscate a car carrying liquor."

This is the same kind of work that made famous a group of old time peace officers who now are employed in, or make as their headquarters, the salesrooms where are sold the Studebaker, in which they lived while in service. There's Bert Polly, deputy sheriff and constable; Bill Sherill, another deputy; Frank Riggs, most peaceable of men but who knew every bad man in Arizona and old Mexico for years; young Johnson, Frank's nephew; Tom Mooney, former constable and deputy.

Hardly a day passes but Red Gannon, now a lease operator but a while back a deputy sheriff known by his .45 pistol to every outlaw in the county, drops in to chin a moment with his old cronies and sit in a Studebaker again, or Broncho Billy Woods, ranger and government officer for years, or Billy Brakefield, another famous deputy and half a dozen others come in and sit on Johnny Bowden's desk and stop all work of automobile selling as they chat over the old days.

Every one of them had been cowmen. Every one started his sheriff-ing on a cow pony, and every one took part in the maintenance of order during the transition period, when the suregoing, fast motor car replaced the picturesque horse and saddle. The cow pony is to them a romance, as to you and me. But the cars they use are as close to their hearts as their big six shooters, for the car and the six-gun were their very existence.

[Steven Ayres]

A Shirt Tale

County Prosecutor Dan Lange's brand new dress shirt, the pride of all Clifton, and in fact, a matter of awe for the whole mining county of Greenlee, Arizona, just got tromped almost to pieces.

And the worst of it was that Dan was in it at the time.

Mexican heelmarks on even a carefully laundered dress shirt sort of render its appearance somewhat out of kilter for a banquet where a fellow is the principal speaker, and how Prosecutor Dan does go after a Mexican when he gets into trouble, nowadays!

This is the story. It's told by "Skeets" Witt, the sheriffingest sheriff Greenlee County has had for many a day, so it's all right for you to know it, for Skeets and Dan have been bosom companions ever since early days.

Dan kinda hankered to go along with the sheriff on his raids, and watch that "long drink of water," as he affectionately calls the longitudinal sheriff, gather in the fellows he later had to prosecute. Dan wanted to see the sheriff's Studebaker climb mountains, too. He'd heard so much about it from men in court who hadn't been able to escape it.

Dan was to make an address before a business men's meeting in Clifton, and he arrayed himself as Solomon never could have hoped to be attired. Conspicuous in the sartorial elegance was the hard-boiled shirt that made 'em all sit up and take notice.

Just before he started to speak, came a message from Skeets: "Soon's you get through throwing the bull down there, beat it up to the jail; we're going to raid Morgan's gambling dive at Morenci."

Clarence Morgan, tough gambler from earliest days, ran a rather wide open place in Morenci. You see, the sheriff has to climb 3,000 feet to the plateau above the county seat before he ever can start after anyone, and they could always see his Studebaker coming up the mountains.

Every bad hombre in Greenlee County knows that Studebaker now. It has done every bit of travel for the whole sheriff's office for three years, and mighty little of it has been elsewhere than up and down mountain sides. There's scarcely an acre of Greenlee's solid mountains that hasn't seen that car.

But this night everyone was supposed to be at the banquet to hear Dan Lange spout, so they didn't watch. Dan legged it over and hopped into Skeets' car soon as his speech was ended, thinking he'd get back before the evening was over.

"Cover up that white sheet you're wearing for a shirt," Skeets advised him. "They'll see that mess o' ghost clothes coming a mile."

So they were all muffled up when they arrived at Morgan's. Sheriff Witt sent two deputies to guard the rear, and posted Dan to see that no one got out the front door after he and Deputy Martin got inside.

The place was going full tilt. Jose Bustillos was dealing stud poker; John Jarrdi presided over the black jack table and Morgan himself was dealing monte.

A good monte dealer will trim edges of cards off so that when he makes a draw cut, he knows what cards will stay in his hand, because they are little wider and the others slip past them. Or, they'll notch the edge of a card and watch to see that it doesn't come too soon if someone is betting heavily on it.

There was such a gang around Morgan's table, they didn't see Witt come in. Indeed, he had to crowd through the mob to get up to the table. He spoke to Morgan who gave no heed. So he reached out and grabbed $137 lying on the table. Morgan rose and reached for his gun.

"Hello, Clarence," said the sheriff; "wish I had time to play a little with you; I know your game and I could skin you out of your eye teeth. But inasmuch as this place is pinched, guess the sheriff hadn't ought to be caught playing in it, had he?"

When he spoke the word "pinched," the 100 men in the place began milling around like a herd of scared cattle. The back door was guarded, so they all made a rush for the front door.

Dan didn't have time to open up his coat and awe them with the vision of his dress shirt before the mob was upon him. They knocked him down in the rush, and literally walked all over him. His coat flew open, too late.

After some 100 Mexicans had romped over that shirt, Dan was not of a mind to go back to his banquet.

When the three gamblers came up in court next day, Dan, displaying his humbled dress shirt, earnestly besought the judge to give Jose a death penalty; to give John the rope and four swift kicks besides, and he would leave it to the court to fix a punishment sufficiently atrocious to fit Morgan's crime.

But the judge, who didn't like to see an honest and corking good county prosecutor putting on airs with a dress shirt in a mining camp, only gave them each a fine of $300 and 60 days in jail.

[Steven Ayres]

Across a County

From murder to moonshiners; from accidents to arson, the life of The Arizona Sheriff is spent mostly in Studebaker automobiles these days.

They live -- and succeed -- through the instrumentality of the mechanical successor of the cow pony of their earlier days, and of their big .45 calibre pistols, which nothing has yet succeeded.

Take four successive days from the records of Sheriff Alf Edwards of Gila county, all of them spent in his Studebaker. The first netted him a big moonshine still in Torito Creek, east of Bloody Basin in the Verde River Valley, extreme western end of his county, and 168 miles away by road.

The next got a firebug, playing at arson at South Bend in the far northeastern end of the county, 182 miles away by road over the mountains. Next day, Jack Johnson, who will be tried this winter on a charge of murdering old Andres, the goatherder; the fourth, taking Slim Kelley, who promised young Ed Murray, a Globe boy, a ride to El Paso in his stolen car, and then drove so carelessly the car turned over, killing the lad.

The geography in the little old red schoolhouse indicates that Gila county is some 90 miles from north to south; and some 128 miles from east to west. But when one follows the winding, twisting, backtracking roads up and down mountains, through canyons and around mesas, the speedometer shows 261 miles from east to west; 176 miles from north to south.

On each of those four days, Sheriff Edwards brought in a man at the point of a gun. And his Studebaker carried him almost the full distance a speedometer can register in Gila county.

[Steven Ayres]

Wampum

Apologies in advance for the particularly awful characterizations of natives in this one. It reflects the times. In the 1920s the US was still pursuing an official policy of systematically erasing native culture through reeducation, relocation, language bans and general harassment "for their own good." We're still dealing with the fallout from that period in AZ today.

Tom Jones ran that Indian, Red Sleeve, all over Arizona, it seemed like, but at the end of the 632 miles of continuous chase, he got him. There'll be a lot of Navajo braves sitting around the court room looking at Red Sleeve this fall, and they won't be smoking any peace pipes, either.

Tom is a deputy sheriff of Apache county, Arizona, living at the county seat, St. Johns, beautiful little green gem of a town set into the top of the mesa up near the head-waters of the Little Colorado River.

[Steven Ayres]

Sheep Herder!

Ranch life at the foot of the Sierrita Mountains is rather dull, even for the Mexicans whose uneventful lives build few ambitions for bright lights.

Pablo Natchez found it so, tending his few cattle and cultivating a small patch of beans and corn behind the deep well from which a windmill drew just enough water to maintain a little bit of green about his 'dobe hut, at the foot of the Samaniego Mountains, in the Sierritas.

His nearest neighbor to the south sometimes annoyed Pablo. For the neighbor had a few sheep.

To a cattleman, sheep are anathema, even if he is a Mexican cattleman. It wasn't hard for Pablo to disagree with his neighbor. Yet, he was all the neighbor there was, and out in the foot-hills a little company is very welcome.

Because of that, Pablo came back one evening with a water bottle filled with tequilla, the evil-smelling yellowish alcoholic poison distilled from the mescal plant, which closely resembles a century plant.

He called on the neighbor, and when they started drinking, great peace settled down between them. The evening was becoming a great success, cementing eternal friendship.

Then out in the ocatilla brush, a ewe sheep bleated for its lamb.

A bombshell dropped into a prayer meeting could have caused no more distress. Gone in a moment was the great amity being builded. A gutteral expression of disgust from Pablo brought a stinging retort from the neighbor.

Words grew into blows and Pablo, with a stick of mesquite and some stones caught up from the hearth, killed the neighbor, on the latter's own doorstep.

A passerby found him and reported by telephone to Sheriff Walter Bailey of Pima County, at Tucson.

It was well on into the night, then, but Sheriff Bailey, who rode the border for seventeen years as a line rider connected with customs offices, doesn't distinguish whatever between night and day when there's need.

He got Deputy F.E. Murphy, an old-time sheriff himself, into his Studebaker, and they covered the indescribably rough 28 miles to the foot of the Sierritas in 38 minutes. Along this road can still be seen the abandoned wrecks of half a dozen other makes of cars that have broken down under the strain of the difficult travel and have been left to travelers to pick apart for spare parts.

Pablo hadn't gone back to his own ranch. He knew Bailey, so he started climbing the 12,000 foot Samaniego peak, to hide out until the sheriff's office would get tired of hunting.

But he didn't know Bailey quite that well. The man who rode back and forth, 1,200 miles along the Mexican border, for seventeen years knows only one way of "sheriff-ing." That is to go after your man and, "after a while when you've got him," bring him back.

For five days and nights, unceasingly, the sheriff's big Studebaker car circled the mountain ranges, rarely on any road whatever, watching every burro trail. That became tiresome. So Bailey, a "delicate" fellow of some six feet and 200 pounds, who can kink a piece of cattle wire and snap it in two with his bare hands, just started right up the mountain, leaving the car midway up, so if Pablo got below him, Murphy could start the chase at once.

About midnight, he had come within 200 feet of the very peak of the highest mountain in the range, and had found, still warm, the remains of the Mexican's fire.

At dawn he saw Pablo skulking behind a scrub pine, right at the very peak, which was a narrow plateau.

"So I brought him in," says Bailey, forgetting to mention the attempt of the Mexican to hold a big six-shooter up under his left arm so as to appear unarmed, and the quick draw that kept Pablo's attempt to snatch it and shoot from materializing.

Pablo got ten years for manslaughter because there were no witnesses.

The soft-spoken sheriff of the keen, clear blue eyes hurried his Studebaker back to the court house, because there were a lot of papers to serve in some civil cases and they were "really important."

[Steven Ayres]

The Howlin' Coyote

The way Joe Young leaped to his feet. stuck his long nose into the air and howled like a measly coyote sure was funny.

Joe, in an absent-minded moment, had appropriated a fine horse from the Flying V ranch, four miles out south of Holbrook, Navajo county, Arizona, where that ridge makes up between Porter's Tank wash and Washboard creek.

Never really noticed that it wasn't his, either, still he got up back of Navajo, which really is over in Apache county.

He had hidden out in the Petrified Forest National Park*, that weird group of hillsides surrounded by fluted, washed-out mountain foothills looking like the bad lands of the Dakotas, where what once were great logs and trees of Norfolk Island pine now lie, as they fell, turned to stone that polishes as beautifully as onyx.

Joe had been a thorn -- a sort of cholla (pronounced choy-ya) thorn, in the flesh of sheriffs around these parts, for years. Never took anything very valuable, but liked to hang around a ranch till the folks drove away, then go in and steal anything he could get his hands on, principally food.

He irritated, terribly, yet was a small source of trouble. But when he annexed the Flying V horse, Sheriff F.D. Divilbess concluded that thorn had to be taken out.

So O. C. Williams and George Willford, deputies, were told to take the sheriff's Studebaker and not come back till they had Joe. It was the Studebaker 'cause no one knew what rough going must be covered, and a sheriff can't take chances in a manhunt.

Wasn't much trouble following Joe. Wherever vegetation was all blasted around a rancher's home, they knew the rancher had come home, found Joe had been there, and had released oratory of such torrid character that even the sage and creosote wood had lost their foliage, like a palo verde bush, which has no leaves.

Part of the way, Willford laid out over the front fender, watching tracks in the mesa sand, as Williams drove the car back and forth across country, regardless of roads, a task which will amaze anyone who has seen the Arizona flats, filled with cactus, mesquite and other brush. As usual, "only a Studebaker can do it," says Williams.

Just this side of the XTX ranch they saw horse tracks beating around back of a small butte overlooking the ranch house.

"Old Joe's going around to the kitchen door," said Willford; "we'll follow him."

They found the stolen horse, grazing, back of the butte. Quietly they sneaked up the west side of the butte, to the very top, which wasn't larger than a dining room rug. Down below, they saw the boss of the XTX harnessing up his team, ready to go to town. At their feet lay Joe, flat on his stomach in the sand, licking his chops as he anticipated the feast he would have, soon as the rancher drove away.

Williams kicked Joe lustily on his upturned feet. It was the horsethief's first intimation that anyone else was there. He never looked back.

Like a spring released, and with no apparent gathering together, Joe leaped to his feet like a startled kangaroo, shedding six-shooters like a hen moulting.

Up went his long nose into the air like a coyote and he let a succession of yells out of him that would shame to death a Hopi Indian doing a victory dance.

He got two to four years for horse stealing, for it was an old game to him, his fifth offense.

He spent days trying to get the deputy sheriffs to tell him how they had ever managed to follow his trail. He said he had dodged and back-tracked, and had ridden through all the bad terrain he could find, over hills and through gulches, so no one ever would be able to follow him.

He knew the sheriff used an automobile and he figured no kind of a car could go where he had forced his horse to travel. Every time he got a chance, between sessions of court, he'd go over the same inquiry, and doesn't believe yet that they followed him in a car.

But it still gives Williams and Willford a chuckle, in the old jailhouse at Holbrook, county seat, when they tell how Joe leaped up and barked at the sky.

*: Update on Petrified Forest and its trees here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrifi..._National_Park

[Steven Ayres]

The Howlin' Coyote

In which the author shows how a car can keep up with a mounted rider even over rough terrain. The right car, anyway!

The way Joe Young leaped to his feet. stuck his long nose into the air and howled like a measly coyote sure was funny.

Joe, in an absent-minded moment, had appropriated a fine horse from the Flying V ranch, four miles out south of Holbrook, Navajo county, Arizona, where that ridge makes up between Porter's Tank wash and Washboard creek.

Never really noticed that it wasn't his, either, still he got up back of Navajo, which really is over in Apache county.

He had hidden out in the Petrified Forest National Park, that weird group of hillsides surrounded by fluted, washed-out mountain foothills looking like the bad lands of the Dakotas, where what once were great logs and trees of Norfolk Island pine now lie, as they fell, turned to stone that polishes as beautifully as onyx.

Joe had been a thorn -- a sort of cholla (pronounced choy-ya) thorn, in the flesh of sheriffs around these parts, for years. Never took anything very valuable, but liked to hang around a ranch till the folks drove away, then go in and steal anything he could get his hands on, principally food.

He irritated, terribly, yet was a small source of trouble. But when he annexed the Flying V horse, Sheriff F.D. Divilbess concluded that thorn had to be taken out.

So O. C. Williams and George Willford, deputies, were told to take the sheriff's Studebaker and not come back till they had Joe. It was the Studebaker 'cause no one knew what rough going must be covered, and a sheriff can't take chances in a manhunt.

Wasn't much trouble following Joe. Wherever vegetation was all blasted around a rancher's home, they knew the rancher had come home, found Joe had been there, and had released oratory of such torrid character that even the sage and creosote wood had lost their foliage, like a palo verde bush, which has no leaves.

Part of the way, Willford laid out over the front fender, watching tracks in the mesa sand, as Williams drove the car back and forth across country, regardless of roads, a task which will amaze anyone who has seen the Arizona flats, filled with cactus, mesquite and other brush. As usual, "only a Studebaker can do it," says Williams.

Just this side of the XTX ranch they saw horse tracks beating around back of a small butte overlooking the ranch house.

"Old Joe's going around to the kitchen door," said Willford; "we'll follow him."

They found the stolen horse, grazing, back of the butte. Quietly they sneaked up the west side of the butte, to the very top, which wasn't larger than a dining room rug. Down below, they saw the boss of the XTX harnessing up his team, ready to go to town. At their feet lay Joe, flat on his stomach in the sand, licking his chops as he anticipated the feast he would have, soon as the rancher drove away.

Williams kicked Joe lustily on his upturned feet. It was the horsethief's first intimation that anyone else was there. He never looked back.

Like a spring released, and with no apparent gathering together, Joe leaped to his feet like a startled kangaroo, shedding six-shooters like a hen moulting.

Up went his long nose into the air like a coyote and he let a succession of yells out of him that would shame to death a Hopi Indian doing a victory dance.

He got two to four years for horse stealing, for it was an old game to him, his fifth offense.

He spent days trying to get the deputy sheriffs to tell him how they had ever managed to follow his trail. He said he had dodged and back-tracked, and had ridden through all the bad terrain he could find, over hills and through gulches, so no one ever would be able to follow him.

He knew the sheriff used an automobile and he figured no kind of a car could go where he had forced his horse to travel. Every time he got a chance, between sessions of court, he'd go over the same inquiry, and doesn't believe yet that they followed him in a car.

But it still gives Williams and Willford a chuckle, in the old jailhouse at Holbrook, county seat, when they tell how Joe leaped up and barked at the sky.

[Steven Ayres]

The Serenader

With all the fervor of old Castile, Severia Anaya wooed the little blue-eyed Emmy Duron, on the ranch just outside of Sacaton, up toward the Gila River Indian reservation and about twenty-five miles across the Gila River flats west of Florence*, where is located Arizona's state prison.

He was a romantic soul, was Severia, whose tender attentions to little Emmy far belied the suggestion of his name. Fiery, too, with a terrible temper, his fellow cowmen could testify.

But Emmy's father thought all his expressions of affection were a mess of foolishness and he frowned on such fol de rol with a vigor such as only a cowman can find words sufficiently adequate to express.

Imagine a love-sick calf coming up to his hacienda and twanging away on a guitar and singing a lot of mush! Idiotic, was the view of the old man, but to little Emmy, only sixteen though developed into a woman and sentiment hungry, it was divine.

Parental disapproval growing more and more vigorous, including aid away from the Duron ranch with an unfriendly boot for Severia, little Emmy saw the flower of her romance going before the scythe before it had come to full bloom.

So she and Severia ran away, were wed, and they fled to Southern California.

Old man Duron never had been balked on his own premises before, and he wasn't going to let any scuff of a girl, even his own daughter, start it. So he girded his six-gun about him, saddled a pinto and with another leading, set out for California.

It was nearly two months before he came back with his daughter, and little Emmy's perpetually tear-stained face told all the information the neighbors had of the affair.

But not long after, Severia showed up himself. Gone was the soft lilt in his voice; gone were the tender mannerisms. His ever present smile and happy mein of three months back had hardened into an increasing air of hatred.

The fiery Castilian's spirit of vengeance burned at white heat. And when he met the old man and asked for little Emmy, and the old man replied that he'd give him five minutes to make the California line again, Severia shot the old man dead.

Somehow the sound of a shot and the dull thud of a man falling to his death cools the vindictiveness, kills out the bravado of any man who wields a gun against the face of the law. Severia fled to the mountains.

It fell to Deputy Sheriff Chester McGee of Pinal county -- Chester of the quick draw -- to run down Severia, who was hiding in the Catalina Mountains, away up in the least accessible peaks.

Six days and nights, Chester looked for Severia, running the sheriffs Studebaker car up and down the mountains, where there are no roads to this day. He saw Severia breaking camp at dawn on the seventh day, and crawled up to within fifty feet of him, wriggling through the scrub brush and behind rocks like a prairie dog.

Just as he arose, he caught his toe and stumbled and Severia saw him.

"The only thing that saved my life was the fact he had foolishly wrapped his blankets around his rifle, so he could carry them easier," says McGee. "Before he could get them unwound, I had him covered."

And Severia's romance was at an end. The state prison had finished it. Where Chester caught Siveria, out in the Catalinas not far from Devil's Canyon, is the place where the posse cleaned out the gang that killed Deputy Sheriff W.P. Brown, McGee's predecessor, and two boys. McGee had this to remember as he started up for the murderer that morning.

*: This has to be almost exactly where I-10 now flows southeast near Sacaton, on the Gila River rez. The story ends over eighty miles away in what is now the Coronado National Forest, northeast of Tucson.

[Steven Ayres]

The Sheriff

Here we reach the centerfold and the real reason for this entire exercise -- to sell a really tough and stylish car!


THE SHERIFF
A One-Profit Studebaker of Powerful Character

IN HONOR of the Arizona sheriffs who have made the Studebaker a vibrant symbol of law and order, from the Grand Canyon to Old Mexico, the 5-passenger Big Six Sport Phaeton has been named "The Sheriff."

The name is suitable because "The Sheriff" is a car of amazing performance. The motor is the identical motor used in the 21-passenger Studebaker bus. Obviously it has a wealth of excess power for handling a 5-passenger Phaeton.

"The Sheriff" lists at $1575 f.o.b. factory. There are only seven other American cars of equal rated horsepower and they sell for prices which are $2175 to $5925 higher. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Big Six outsells every other car on earth of equal or greater horsepower, according to the rating of the National Automobile Chamber of Commerce and the Society of Automotive Engineers.

Studebaker is able to give such outstanding value because of its One-Profit basis of manufacture. No Other fine car is so completely manufactured by one organization. In efficient, modern plants Studebaker makes all its own bodies, engines, clutches, gear sets, differentials, springs, axles, gray iron castings and drop forgings.

Thus costs of manufacture are cut to the bone, profits of outside suppliers are eliminated, and the savings given to purchasers.

Being designed, engineered and built as a unit, it functions as a unit, with all the advantages of unit over "assembled" construction. Therefore, it is able to stand hard usage and yield scores of thousands of miles of excess transportation.

Depreciation is minimized by Studebaker's policy of "No-Yearly-Models," yet the Duplex curtains and other features make this car more up to date than the newest yearly models.

Studebaker's fair and liberal Budget Payment Plan enables you to buy "The Sheriff" or any other Studebaker out of income.