The Arizona Sheriff

[Steven Ayres]

From the looks of the promotion, we might expect that the the Big Six Sport Phaeton -- The Sheriff -- would have been a very successful model for Studebaker. Can anyone fill in for me how many were sold, and an idea of how many still exist?

Steven

[Steven Ayres]

Doc

IT was along toward 11 o'clock at night when Doc Jacobs died. Sheriff Jim Chappell of Yuma county had been in bed an hour when he got a call from his jailer, and a few minutes later one from Undersheriff Billy Dunne.

"They're gangin' up downtown and everybody's coat is stickin' out behind. Looks like they were fixin' on a necktie party," was the tenor of both messages. So Doc Jacobs had died! Foolish Yuma County thing, that shooting, too, and altogether uncalled for.

Dr. Leon Jacobs of Yuma probably knew every man, woman and child in Arizona within 250 miles of the desert city on the Colorado River opposite Baja California.

He had ministered to their wants for years; had brought the new citizens of the desert country into the world; had stood by the old-timers with soft touch and encouraging word even when the grim reaper's scythe came through the window.

Pretty smart fellow, too, was Doc Jacobs; he knew big cactus, as they say out there. Friendly, kindly, always helping someone and lots of times never getting a cent for it.

Jess Fuquay had a pretty little wife who loved bright flowers and green fields, running brooks and leafy places. She tried in vain to find in the shimmering sands of the desert, in the great white flowers of the nettle weed, the blazing barrel cactus and in the courageous struggle of the sagebrush against the arid air, something to fill that desire.

She just could not see in the purpling shadows around the Arizona mountains and in the painted landscape, the green, growing country-side she liked. She was restless. Irritable, too, she admitted. She and Jess couldn't hit it off at all.

And when she became ill and an operation loomed up ahead, the detestation which had been growing within her broke out into fury and she told Jess she was going to quit it all, go back where green things grew aplenty, where rain fell to cool the air of afternoon, where the rays of the hottest sun were warded off by wide leaves.

Not that she wouldn't trust the operation to Dr. Jacobs, she told Jess, but she must get away, and Dr. Jacobs had said he would give her a note to a physician friend he knew in Los Angeles.

The mention of Dr. Jacobs stirred first jealousy in Jess' brain, not always clear, either, with mescal and tequilla a few miles away in Mexico. That doctor was too friendly with people, he thought, and no use talking -- that medico had some personal interest in sending his wife away into the care of a friend.

The afternoon of the day she finally boarded the Southern Pacific and it disappeared into the purple shimmer of desert heat to the west, Jess, loaded up with tequilla, went to the astonished doctor, poured out his accusations and when the doctor smiled at the absurdity of it, shot him.

They locked Jess up. Five days later, Dr. Jacobs died. When he went, there passed the healer and advisor of almost every family around, and, as the message to the sheriff that night had said, they began ganging up on street corners with six shooters sticking out of hip pockets.

Yuma county never has had a prisoner taken from a sheriff and lynched. Sheriff Chappell, however, knew his years of personal friendship with every man in the forming mob couldn't count for anything, if they got started.

At 2 o'clock in the morning, having reached the jail by a circuitous route, he started with Fuquay in his Studebaker for Phoenix, 204 miles away. The roadbed is smooth and wide. But Chappell left the good road, for a short cut which winds through mountain passes with grades so steep as to be impassable to horse-drawn vehicles.

Yet in three minutes less than five hours, Chappell had landed his prisoner in Phoenix. And all along the road for a hundred miles behind him, came other makes of cars, straggling along at top power, hoping that something might befall the sheriff's car so that Fuquay might be hanged to a suharo or a cottonwood. The sheriff's Studebaker can't be overtaken by any car in Yuma, in a race over such roads.

Jess was given life imprisonment, but in many a home and ranchhouse in and near Yuma today, there stands beside the dining-room clock a .45 calibre cartridge, reserved for a time when Jess may come out of prison.

[Steven Ayres]

Eleven Desert Nights

WHEN a crime is committed out in Arizona, everyone knows that the county sheriff will pull up at the scene in an incredibly short time, and that his Studebaker car will be seen, seemingly in half a dozen places at once, around that territory for days, no matter how rough the ground.

Usually they get the criminal in the first week. Sometimes he gets away and then the sheriff's car is seen all over the county for weeks, until one day a preliminary hearing discloses the fact the man has been caught.

Occasionally they do get entirely away, across the Mexican border.

When that woman was blown up in Ajo (pronounced Ah-ho) the Mexican whose attentions she had spurned finally made his escape.

But the work of big Walter Bailey, soft-spoken, blue eyed sheriff of Pima County, is typical of what happens in the Southwest when crime is committed.

Ajo is at the far western part of his 178-mile county, 128 miles away from the county seat out on the desert by airline, 226 miles by roads winding through mountain passes and over the scorching sands.

Between Tucson, county seat, and Ajo lie these, in succession: Tucson mountains, Avra valley, Roskruge and Comobabi Mountains, the scorching Santa Rosa Valley where sage-brush dies of lonesomeness, Quijotoa, and Blanco Mountains, Nine-Mile peak, more desert, Gunsight Mountains and then, far away through desert mirages, lies the little mining town of Ajo, amid the Little Ajo ranges.

By swinging to the south, one can skirt the Quijotoa ranges, going through Coyote Village, but he meets Mesquite Mountains instead. A canyon, and two gulches ease the roadway a little here, though, and Blair's well, midway, breaks the desert with a tiny patch of green.

The road winds through ocatilla and cactus, soto and sage, scrub cedar and yucca -- desolate, rough, dreary.

At night, Walter Bailey sped through that 226 miles in his big Studebaker, leaving after midnight and arriving in Ajo at dawn.

The woman had lived in a tiny house of wood, her bed against the wall. Outside, the spurned Mexican had piled some blasting dynamite from the mine, covered it with some 'dobe bricks, and touched it off.

She was blown to bits.

For eleven days and nights, Sheriff Bailey and Frank Murphy, his deputy, never ceased their travel out and back across the desert and through the lower mountains, hunting. One slept as the other drove.

Ajo is 32 miles from Santo Domingo, Old Mexico. The little town of Midway lies 20 miles to the north.

Yet, thirty-four times in those eleven days, the sheriff's Studebaker nosed into Santo Domingo; nearly twice that many times it worked slowly through Midway.

The Mexican escaped, but the story of that ceaseless vigil, and the 2,100 mile run of the Studebaker car, still is told in Tucson.

The place names mentioned here beg for some orienteering. The Sheriff started his trip in Tucson and headed WSW onto what is now the Tohono O'odham reservation, and the tribe has changed a lot of place names since then. He likely followed the future trail of AZ86 as far as "Coyote Village," which I expect is now the tribal capital at Sells. The mountains he avoided don't look like much on a map, but check out the satellite images -- they're mostly raw lava that would cut tires to bits in short order. This is some pretty harsh landscape.

From there he set out on what are still dirt roads to the west, picking up some water at "Blair's Well," which I take to be the village of Santa Cruz, located among some converging washes. Then he tacked a little northwest over the desert to Gunsight, now a ghost town near a tribal casino, and back onto the 86/85 route up to the mine town of Ajo in what's now La Paz County. That's about 130 miles today, so it's hard to fathom how he might have racked up 226 on the odometer. Midway is still on the map, but it's just an old water stop on the train line across the Goldwater Air Force Range. Santo Domingo in Sonora is now called Sonoyta, just across the border from Lukeville.

Imagine the challenge of bringing a group of Big Sixes out here to retrace this route, without the pavement!

[Steven Ayres]

Sheriff of the Roads

Here's a story of a different kind of public service, supported by a Studebaker product.


UNIQUE among all the sheriffs of Arizona is Deputy L.H. Foster of Kingman, "Sheriff of the Roads" of Mohave county.

Rarely does he participate in running to earth the lawbreakers who take refuge in the towering mountains in his domain, lying below the Grand Canyon of the Colorado and running for 400 miles south through the Black, the Chemehuevis, the Hualpai or the Cerbat ranges.

He raises more posses of citizens than any other sheriff in Arizona. The appearance of his big Studebaker, tearing through black night and cloudbursts, is almost sure to be the ride of a Paul Revere.

Arizona's "sheriff of the roads," before he is a deputy, is the county engineer of Mohave county.

When it rains, it pours, up in his mountains. And after it pours, every dry wash, which had been a stony, dusty creek bed, is a raging torrent, carrying all before it.

The dry soil, seemingly so packed, is washed out by the roaring floods and those wonderful mesa roads, over which a motor car can make all the speed its engine can give, within a few minutes may be crossed by deep arroyos.

Since 100 miles is to an Arizonian what a few city blocks are to an urban dweller, a washed out road may be a serious thing to travelers, thus shut off from the expected water supply, the looked for gasoline station, or food.

Nor will a sheer mountain side, rising to the right; and a nearly perpendicular canyon wall, falling away at the left, permit detouring around the washout.

Every moment that new arroyo remains across the erstwhile solid road imperils the safety of automobilists.

And Arizona takes mighty fine care of its motorists in every way.

Whenever the storm clouds gather in the mountains far above Kingman, Deputy Foster, "sheriff of the roads," piles into his rubber coat and high boots, fills up the gas, oil and water tanks of his Studebaker and watches the course of the storm.

In half an hour he knows he will be on his way, perhaps to be gone a week or ten days before he can pull off his boots and lie down to a decent rest. Like a rainbow, the Studebaker is sure to follow every storm.

Posses of workers he picks up on the way, and with rocks, with pick~ and shovel and rented team, they will work in the downpour or immediately after it, to get the roadways into shape, then dash off in the night with headlights on full, looking for another place where the h~ighway needs to be made safe again.

If other sheriffs have battles with outlaws, the "sheriff of the roads" has his desperate battles with the outlaw elements.

A night rider of the storm is he, the Paul Revere whose Studebaker is his existence, and the existence of travelers on the lonely canyon roads of Mohave county.

The thunder is his phone call of alarm; the lightning blazes against him as the blazing six-shooters of outlaws strike at his fellow sheriffs. But like all the others with his life in his hands, he stands alone, if need be, between danger and his people. And not one whit less dangerous is his calling -- this "sheriff of the roads."

[Steven Ayres]

They Had Killed Three

THE two biggest single-handed guns ever brought into Maricopa county, Arizona, came in the holsters of Babe and Will Lawrence, last of the bad men of the county to run into the muzzle of a sheriff's gun.

Even the old-time cowmen look with awe at these weapons. Single-action, .45 calibre Colts, as are most guns out in the West, they yet had barrels that almost put them in the class of rifles. Drawing one was like drawing a sabre from its scabbard.

Babe and Will had been "cuttin' up" a little in West Texas, shooting up a few towns and stealing an odd automobile or two.

Sheriffs down there grabbed them and held them for more serious crimes in Oklahoma. Deputy Sheriff Joe Barger and an assistant started to drive them back in an automobile, handcuffed, from Texas into Oklahoma.

In the back seat, one managed to slip off one handcuff, and with it he killed Barger's assistant with a single blow. Barger didn't even hear the sound.

First he knew of it, he felt the assistant's gun right against his neck back of his ear, and heard a command to stop the car and stick his hands up. He didn't even look back. They took him out of the car, disarmed him and tied him to a tree. The slain assistant was dumped at his feet and they drove hellbent for Arizona.

Gradually, they worked their way up to Butte, Mont., where they killed a policeman. Their next appearance was in Tempe (pronounced Tam-pay) not ten miles from Phoenix, capital of Arizona, in the rich Salt River district below Roosevelt dam.

Their suspicious actions and the tell-tale bulges beneath their coattails attracted the attention of Policeman Birch of Tempe, and he sought to question them. He never had a ghost of a chance. They shot him down. He emptied his gun, but a second and third shot killed him.

Then they edged back into town.

Just on the eastern outskirts of Tempe is Needle Butte, a nearly bare rocky basalt needle reaching up 900 feet, with here and there a suharo or giant cactus in a little pocket of earth among the stones.

Anything moving on Needle Butte is visible all over the little city. The outlaws had not reached the top before they were seen, and a phone call brought the news to Deputy Sheriff R.F. McDonald, who also is chief of police of Tempe.

Everybody around there knows the deputy's Studebaker, and when he apparently left town, the coast seemed clear. But he only drove around the butte, over stones, through gullies and brush, seemingly impassable.

With his 30-30 rifle slung over his arm, he then climbed up its steep sides to the top, coming in from the east side. On the way he saw a Mexican, who pointed out that he had seen the two men climb the hill. Giving the Mexican his pistol, McDonald continued his climb, the Mexican fo~llowing.

He saw the two men -- and they saw him -- when he was about a hundred yards away. But he appeared to pay no attention to them, and they, fearful to risk a shot and start a battle at that distance, waited.

Out from under his downcast eyes, McDonald saw one of them start putting his coat flap back, when he was about 75 feet away. He stopped and turned around to yell to the Mexican:

"Get a move on you, if you expect me to get that darned horse of yours!"

When he turned back, his 30-30 sort of slipped into place and he was covering the pair with the big rifle before they knew it. He told them to drop their guns and put their hands up. Babe unbuckled his belt and let gun and holster slip to the rocks.

There is an established ethical custom of giving up guns when the drop's on you. Learn the etiquette of surrender, if you don't want to be a tenderfoot.

To yield up a pistol, unbuckle the belt and let belt, holster, and gun slip gently to the ground. Take a rifle by the barrel tip, set the stock on the ground, then let the gun gently down with the left foot. No other style of surrender is regarded as strictly au fait.

Will let the rifle down and McDonald "frisked" Babe while the Mexican went over Will. Seeing Will's empty holster, McDonald asked the Mexican:

"Have you got that fellow's gun?"

The Mexican answered that he had, so McDonald started down the hill, direct into town, ignoring the car on the other side of the butte.

Will pretended to stumble a couple of times, but Mac told him:

"Better keep on your feet, partner if you ever get down on the ground you'll stay there till the undertaker gets here."

The slayer thereafter kept to his feet.

He noticed that Will watched him very carefully, all the time, but didn't understand why until, down in the jail office, when he had the pair remove their coats, he saw Will's nine-inch barreled .45 gun sticking down inside his trousers in the middle of his back.

There were plenty of witnesses that it was Will who killed Policeman Birch, so Babe was returned to Oklahoma, where he drew a 99-year sentence.

Will Lawrence pleaded to the Maricopa county jury that he shot Birch in self-defense; that Birch was trying to draw a gun and, indeed, had fired at him, for Birch had emptied his pistol. The jury, however, sentenced him to death.

He has appealed the case to the State Supreme Court, and it will be heard this winter.


There's an interesting formation miles to the east of Tempe called Weaver's Needle, but I think the one in the story is now called Tempe Butte, better known as A Mountain, rising above the campus of Arizona State University.

[Steven Ayres]

Butch

A reminder of how it was for black folk between the wars.

BUTCH WARD was guilty of a vile crime including murder. It was the duty of Sheriff Alt Edwards to protect him from mob vengeance till he could have a regular trial.

The sheriff was in a quandary. To appear with the negro handcuffed would be the signal for a lynching before he could move a foot. So he told the colored man to be ready to say he thought he knew where the man they wanted was, and, with this arrangement, started for the county jail.

To fully half a dozen armed groups, on the way up, this story was told, and Edwards finally reached the jail, just a few rods ahead of one group which had guessed the truth. Edwards sent at once for every deputy in the county to rush to the jail and defend it.

Soon after midnight, about 200 men, armed and with half a dozen cowropes, gathered. Edwards learned of it, and in full view of the crowd peering in front windows, removed his outer clothing and lay down on a bed in the office, as if to sleep.

With lights out, he hastily dressed and sneaked the negro, Ward, out the back door. On their stomachs, they crawled half a block to where a deputy was crouched down in the back seat compartment of the sheriff's big Studebaker car.

In ten minutes they were eight miles away, off for Florence and the state penitentiary, where the negro was lodged for safe keeping.

There had to be a preliminary hearing in the jurisdiction of the sitting court, and sentinels representing the townsmen watched the jail every hour of the day for three days, in two-hour shifts, to learn when the sheriff would bring Ward back.

Edwards told a fellow townsman he planned to bring Ward out to the Irons ranch, toward Miami at the historical mound, and hold a secret hearing there. And he stayed in the jail till hours after his deputies, leaving at night in the Studebaker, had gone to Florence for Ward. Then he, too, started alone
toward Florence.

Within two hours, 500 men lay in ambush at the Irons ranch, waiting. They had overlooked the county judge, who sneaked out of his back yard into a waiting car, and back-tracking all around the copper filled ranges to the South, worked his way to a point below the tiny town of El Capitan, near Capitan peak in the Mescal Mountains.

The judge trudged over the mountain in the dark, to await the prisoner.

Meanwhile, the deputies had left Florence with Ward, starting out over the Bankhead highway north, as though to take Superior road at Junction and go on to the Irons ranch through Miami. They started just before dawn.

A few miles out, they left the roadway at a dry wash, ran up and around Mineral Mountain, a 9,000 foot peak, forded the Gila river at Cochrane and drove the Studebaker at top speed over a scarcely broken pathway worn by burros, through Ray Junction. This was probably the most desperate ride ever taken with a prisoner in Arizona, through the suharo, ocatilla, cholla and every other known kind of cactus, up and down a mountain side where only a burro had gone, and then at terrific speed over a difficult wagon trail.

They had not been out of Florence five minutes before all Globe knew they had started for Irons ranch. An hour later however, someone at Cochrane reported the fast traveling car going over the mountainside, and the mob started back from Irons ranch.

Too late, however, for Ward had been brought to the judge within his jurisdiction, and court was held in a thicket of creosote wood and barrel cactus, with giant suharo as bailiffs.

The deputies were just starting over the mountain on their way back to Florence when the first of the posse appeared, having tracked the judge. They raced the sheriff's car clear to Florence, but there isn't another vehicle in the county that can keep up with that Studebaker in such a race through the cactus covered mountains, and Ward got back safely.

For the first time in the history of Arizona jurisprudence, the state sought a change of venue to Florence for the trial, fearing a certain lynching if he were tried at Globe. Ward was sentenced to hang, and was executed June 20, 1924.

El Capitan is a tiny ghost town just off AZ77, about 14 miles south of Globe via Pioneer Pass and 45 ENE of Florence as the crow flies. The Bankhead Highway is now AZ79, the Superior road is US60. The decoy party probably left the highway at Cottonwood Canyon Road, went around Mineral Mountain (only 3,351 feet high on my map, rather than 9,000) to Box Canyon Road and south again to the river at Price to head back into town. The sheriff's return trip was more tortuous: south to Hayden and back northeast along the river, then tacking southwest on the Florence-Kelvin mining road. Florence still hosts Arizona's main prison complex, including the original site.

[Steven Ayres]

Yeggs

TWO tough-looking hombres, they were, when they dropped off the Southern Pacific at Naco and began wandering around the tiny village, half of which is on each side of the Mexican boundary below Bisbee, Ariz.

Two or three times they approached the immigration office, evidently considering crossing over into Mexico. But the look on the face of the old immigration officer caused them to hesitate, for "Dad," as he is known, doesn't fool around much.

So they contented themselves with swaggering around the American town, one always carrying the black traveling bag they brought.

From a Mexican, they learned that after dark, it would not be difficult to slip over the fence east of Naco and get into the Mexican wide-open town, where Matt Meadows, owner of the most magnificent house of refreshment, is uncrowned king.

So might have passed the day, but for the fact the same Mexican rushed up to them about 2 o'clock in the afternoon, all excited, to say:

"Mus' be careful, boys; dat Lee Hall's Studebaker ees just come in; she stan', right now, front from hees hous'."

One Studebaker car looked like another to the pair for they had not yet learned what a sheriff's Studebaker means in Arizona. But they sensed from their informant's manner that there must be something about the combination with Lee that bore ill omen for them.

Lee, who is a low-voiced, but quick-shooting deputy sheriff, noticed the two men eyeing him, saw them separate and walk back and forth around the little town and thought he'd better quiz them a little.

Strangers, loafing around the border, usually are wanted.

So Lee backed his Studebaker out and made off as though to run over to the commission house at the west side of the city. The car stopped, as though something had happened. It was, strangely enough, right beside the one stranger with the bag.

Lee got out, lifted the hood and looked at the engine. When he straightened up, his right hand was on his hip, near the highly carved staghorn handle of his long-barreled .45 pistol. Totally ignoring the car, Lee asked:

"Lemme see that bag, stranger; what have you got in it?"

Opening it, he found a complete set of safe-blowing equipment -- nitro-glycerine in a cotton-packed bottle; half a dozen brand new files, as many new steel drills, a drill brace, some rope and some putty.

"Get into the car, friend," said Lee to the stranger, "and I'll find you a place to set this grip down. Must be kinda heavy carrying it around all the while, this way. Where's your friend?"

The man professed ignorance, but Lee spied him down the street.

The car seemed to have recovered from the difficulty which caused it to stop and Lee drove up beside the other stranger. He drove with his left hand.

"Stick your hands up, stranger, and get some air in your chest," was Hall's greeting.

Simpering, the stranger asked as he languidly lifted his arms up a little, "Just how high would you like them, Mister?"

Out came Lee's big .45 gun, so swiftly it just seemed transplanted to his hand by magic, as he replied:

"Just as high and as quick as you can get them, young feller, and just keep them right there."

Up they went, and the automatic pistol in the stranger's shoulder holster under his coat didn't see daylight until Hall himself took it off.

Later, it appeared, the two were wanted in six states for safe blowing, and in Colorado for a murder after a bank robbery.

And when the Colorado officers came the pair were right there in Lee's little old jailhouse and glad to get away.

Fort Naco had been established just a few years before this story to guard the border crossing, in response to a raid into New Mexico by Pancho Villa in 1916. It was the route for Mexican workers to reach the big mines at Bisbee, now a really fun little artist's village running up the canyonsides around the old played-out pits. It's not to be missed if you're touring anywhere near.

[Steven Ayres]

Doomsday Tomb

OLD "Lige," the Mexican rancher-prospector-caballero, or cowman, would have been a free man to this day, instead of doing time for life in the Arizona state prison, if it had not been for the fact he just couldn't resist using that silver mounted saddle.

He bore a good reputation around Greenlee county, too, did old Elijah Urtiaga; he could come down the ten miles from his ranch up on Pigeon Creek Gulch, east of the Double Circle place, and his credit was good in any store in Clifton, the county seat. Friends -- he had hundreds of them, including every county official.

Bob Zager did a lot of prospecting up around "Lige's" place, staking out claims wherever a copper vein showed its head. Kind of a bad man, too, was Bob, though it was more just plain meanness than anything else.

Bob was always in and out of Clifton, but one day showed up missing. As time wore on, a search began for him. A fellow prospector had seen him with 'Lige at 10 o'clock one night, and no one had seen him afterward.

The sheriff was to go out of office soon, and wanted to clear up the case. They dug and prospected all over 'Lige's ranch, looked into every cranny and crevice, but no sign of the missing prospector was found.

Urtiaga finally went down to old Mexico, and lived in Agua Prieta, across the border from Douglas, for several months.

Meanwhile, W.T. "Skeets" Witt, former banker, miner and prospector, came into office as sheriff. Skeets is a go-getter who goes and doesn't stop till he gets.

He and his chief deputy, George Martin, duplicated the hunt on the old Mexican's rancho, with no better success. Then they started looking up 'Lige.

Skeets Witt has lots of friends across the Mexican border, 500 miles away, and soon 'Lige was being watched. Noticing it, he worked his way up into Arizona, but not until he had been seen using a saddle that once belonged to Zager. He told fellow Mexicans he had bought it from a boy.

A few weeks later, Skeets' Studebaker, on a 700 mile hunt in the mountains, came upon 'Lige down in Dos Cabezas, a little mining town near Wilcox in Cochise county, and brought him back to Clifton. The old man, who had told folks in Dos Cabezas he could not speak English, though American born, talked freely here. Sheriff Witt, Deputy Martin, and Dan Lange, county prosecutor, heard the old man tell the most amazing story of the disposal of a slain man ever heard in Arizona. They had quarreled over a mining claim, admitted the old Mexican, and he shot Zager dead.

"You'll find him underneath that 10-ton boulder in the bottom of Pigeon Creek," he told them, "with three feet of running water over him. I buried his horse in the arroyo back of the butte and covered it up with stones."

With a coroner they went to Elijah's cabin. He pointed out the boulder, 20 feet from his cabin door. It was about eight feet long and half as wide, but he insisted, so for two days a force of men worked to free the stone.

Under it, with head upstream and face upward, in three feet of water, lay Zager's skeleton. About it were a few strips of clothing and some trinkets by which it was identified.

Within twenty minutes of the time he shot the prospector, the old Mexican told them he had picked out Zager's tomb. The huge boulder, not more than 20 feet from the Mexican's doorstep, lay upstanding on its smallest end.

Standing in water up to his waist, 'Lige had dug a pit beneath the stone, fastened Zager's body at the bottom, then undermined the boulder till it fell over onto the body.

Then he shot the prospector's horse, after leading it to the edge of a small arroyo, and pushed it into the crevasse. For four days he worked to pile stones on it carelessly, setting several bunches of sacahuista, or bear grass, to take root in the horse's body and lend the place an air of naturalness. Searchers had been past the place a dozen times.

But when it came to disposing of the silver-mounted saddle, the old fellow just couldn't see it go under ground. Against his own judgment he saved it, and shipped it to Agua Prieta, whither he went a few months later.

But for the lure of its solid silver horn, the silver conchos rivetted to the skirts and the braided leather cinch, which overcame his judgment, that great granite boulder would have been Zager's tomb till doomsday.

In Greenlee county they still talk about it -- that and that 700-mile trip of Skeets' Studebaker.

It would be fun to go out and see whether that rock can still be found, in the Apache NF 20 miles north of Clifton and about ten miles east of US 191 at FR475 and the Juan Miller campgrounds, close to the New Mexico border. Or, as we say 'round here, out in bum-f*** Egypt.

[Steven Ayres]

He IS a Sheriff!

WE look for a "typical Western sheriff" in Arizona.

Everywhere, we are told, "see Walter Bailey," sheriff of Pima county, which is 178 miles wide and 80 miles from north to south.

In the old courthouse at Tucson we see a great big fellow, well above six feet, wearing a wide panama hat, disappear into the sheriff's office.

The first glance, catching the hat, seemed to promise much. Then we are in his office. Here rises a soft-voiced, smilingly pleasant man, with clear, blue eyes and long curling lashes that any school girl would prize.

Below his blue coat are white flannel trousers, white socks and white, rubber-soled shoes. Good Heavens! A sheriff?

His voice is low and gentle. He "doesn't remember" any rough work of his office. Why, he might as well have just stepped off his million dollar yacht, or have come in from the exclusive country club.

A sheriff!

The clear, blue eye, typical of every sheriff on the border, is the only straw to grasp. He talks about his friend, Harold Bell Wright, noted novelist, and their happy days together. Then we mention six shooters -- the single-action, longbarreled .45's of the frontiersman.

Smilingly and almost apologetically, he pulls out from the skirt of his country club coat a weapon that brings shivers with it. No movie gun that Bill Hart ever carried was a more desperate looking weapon than this horn-handled, silvermounted, junior field piece.

But, somehow, it fits his hand so customarily! He drew it out slowly, but there are those in Arizona and Mexico -- and others not living now -- who could tell that this self-same weapon can come from his hip holster so fast that lightning seems to be going backward.

And then he just mentions when he got it. Nearly a quarter of a century ago, when he was a line rider for customs houses.

Line rider!

That meant traveling 1,200 miles, on horseback, back and forth from El Paso to Yuma, across the loneliest American desert, where an occasional jack rabbit or cottontail was a friend and a rattlesnake and a gila monster no longer were enemies because they, too, were living things out on the wide stretches.

It meant long, eager watches for the remote wells which gave life for another day for a man and beast. It meant smugglers, rum runners, criminals trying to get into Mexico; it meant all the ruggedness of pioneer days, even out there.

What a background of hardship, of adventure, of peril and danger, to yield this six-foot product of the soft voice, the gentle manner.

Walter Bailey IS a sheriff! Those clear, blue eyes are the channel through which all the quickness of draw, the swiftness of trigger finger, and fearlessness of those days agone, come like a flash when trouble breaks out in Pima county.

Walter Bailey is more than a sheriff. He is a true westerner. A native of Arizona, the man who took a party through desert mirages and dug water for them out of the sand, and who speaks today courteously and with infinite friendliness is the same man, the typical westerner.

The old-time cow pony has given way to a swift Studebaker, which may account for the yacht costume, but let trouble start! The car goes like a flash where no cow pony could have traveled, and this gentle appearing man is steel again, matching the unyielding stamina of his Studebaker car by enduring nights and days of ceaseless hunting, long after less durable folk would have broken down.

Walter Bailey is, indeed, a sheriff!

Harold Bell Wright, mentioned here, was among the most famous and popularly read authors of the day, and lived in Tucson until about 1935. His old ranch is now a subdivision named for him, with streets named for his characters.

[Steven Ayres]

A Sheriff's Dream

FOR 204 miles from Yuma, in the heart of the Arizona desert, runs a wide road to Phoenix; a branch goes to Tucson, and through Tombstone, Bisbee and Douglas to El Paso.

They are transcontinental roads, and the state highway commission keeps them fit for all the speed any motor car can show.

Yuma is their port of entry from the west. Here is one of the passages across the Colorado River.

So, much of the activity of Sheriff Jim Chappell of Yuma county centers around answering telephone calls from California cities and then going out in his Studebaker, and grabbing the automobile thieves, robbers, and murderers that these phone calls have referred to. For none of them can outrun the Studebaker across the desert.

As an example, there was that time that two fellows of bad repute all over Arizona, Bud Calhoun and Slim Bigelow, went over into the Imperial Valley, paradise of Southern California, and almost killed that old farmer, Meadows, about eighty miles up and across the Colorado from Yuma.

Long before they had reached the Yuma bridge, the immigration folks there had been warned to watch for them. But they carried muchas weapons, in the shape of six-shooters, rifles and clubs, and the lone inspector who admitted them at 3:30 in the morning was afraid of their arsenal. He phoned Sheriff Jim.

Jim was asleep at the time, dreaming of a conversation with Billy Dunne, his chief deputy, in which Billy, speaking of Jim's visit up to Los Angeles, had just said:

"Good thing you got back here to the United States before you got all mildewed up in that wet climate."

Jim had just thought of a corking retort with which to burn up that fresh deputy of his, when the phone woke him up. He wasn't in good humor.

Time he got dressed, armed and into the Studebaker, the pair had twenty minutes start of him. At break of dawn, he saw the cloud of dust far away on the desert showing where they were stepping on the gas for Phoenix. The road makes wide turns around buttes and hills, and the sheriff wanted to get back to sleep, to see if he could take up the conversation of his dreams and humiliate the deputy into the dust with a withering answer.

So he just ambled off the good road and at 55 miles an hour poked the nose of his car right across the desert, regardless of hummocks, arroyos, brush, rattlesnakes, gila monsters or anything else. "Nothing for the old Studebaker, though," says Jim. Right over the peak of a low butte and down the other side, with throttle wide open, he tore and half an hour's riding brought him to the pair beside their own car, on which bearings had burned out. It couldn't stand the abuse, for it is not exactly cool on the desert as soon as the sun comes out.

Jim roared up with one hand on the wheel and the other on a six gun with a hole in the barrel that looks like a duster well in the oil country. Ceremonies were somewhat dispensed with. Conversation, likewise, was not particularly in accord with all social amenities.

But the robbers did understand Jim, full and complete, and with engine banging and rattling with its burned bearings, they limped down the road ahead of him, back to Yuma.

Miserable crime, thinks Jim -- for two young loafers to go over and beat a good honest citizen, a hard working man, almost to death for $450. The pair got 6 years' imprisonment for it.

But what disgusts Jim most is that, search the Arizona statutes as he will, he cannot seem to come across, under the heading of "treason, murder, felonies and other high crimes," any adequate punishment for men whose wrong doing breaks into a sheriff's dream of a conversation with a smart Alec deputy who has just made a wise crack, just in time to prevent the sheriff from handing said deputy a retort that would curl his hair.

About a year has passed, since then. Jim has told the deputy of the dream half a dozen times, right up to the point of the rude awakening. The stage is set.

One of these days, Jim is going to remember what the biting retort was that he was all ready to spring, and then there's going to be the sheepingest lookin' undersheriff around Yuma you ever saw.

[Steven Ayres]

Wild West Meets Itself

THE real Wild West and the movie people's reel Wild West clashed, a bit ago, near Rainbow Bridge, on the Navajo reservation clear up at the northern part of Coconino county, Arizona. The real, old-time kind won -- for a time.

The film folks take a lot of their wild, outdoor stuff up there above Tuba City, the width of any Eastern state from Flagstaff, seat of the county, which is the largest county in the world, with almost 19,000 square miles.

They dress up their movie cowboys like the cowpunchers on a dude ranch, with more trappings than any cowman ever possessed at one time.

Bill Voight, old-time cowpuncher, sometime hoss-thief and just general offshoot of the romantic old cattle days, saw some of this equipment.

There was a peach of a pinto horse, bearing on his back a saddle such as no rich Mexican ever dreamed of. Silver fitted and conchoed, laced and woven with leather thongs, the saddle was worth $300 if it was worth a cent.

It was too much for Bill, and he stole the outfit, horse and all, and beat it over into Grand Canyon, most wonderful and awesome of all the world's natural scenery. If only he could get that saddle down to Texas, wouldn't he show up those cheap cowmen around San Antonio!

It was 9 o'clock at night when Sheriff John Parsons heard of it at Flagstaff, county seat. But night or day -- they're alike to an Arizona sheriff -- and in ten minutes Sheriff Parsons had set out in his big Studebaker, through some of the wildest country in all the Rocky Mountains. It is now thoroughly established in Arizona sheriff-dom that only a Studebaker can make these runs, and "live."

The robbery occurred 172 miles from the courthouse, in a straight line, but that means 292 miles by the car's speedometer. Up through the San Francisco Mountains, highest of the high peaks of Arizona; across the Little Colorado River at Cameron; across the Painted Desert, a bad lands unsurpassed by any in the world; down into Moencopta Wash, a young canyon itself; around White Mesa, down Echo cliffs and to the west of Inscription House, the ancient home of the long-vanished, highly civilized Indian races.

All that night, all the next day, and all the second night, they drove before getting back to Flagstaff. With them they brought Herbert Ward, who knew Voight. He was the results of 584 miles of probably the most difficult driving ever undertaken by any automobile.

From him it was learned that Voight had fled down the Colorado bottoms, a mile deep in Grand Canyon, going westward. So Sheriff Parsons telephoned to Grand Canyon settlement.

In reply, he learned that Voight had just sold the pinto to the postmaster there and had shipped the silver saddle to San Antonio. A telegram stopped the saddle's journey, and another flying trip to Grand Canyon, 85 miles away, got Voight.

From his description, Sheriff Parsons spotted him among the scores of tourists there to view the sights. Voight was making quite an impression on two girls, who were drinking in his exaggerated stories of ranch life, when he saw Parsons. He started to reach for his gun, but the sheriff cracked down on him and he couldn't see beyond the yawning muzzle of the sheriff's big gun.

Voight pleaded guilty to horse stealing before the U.S. Commissioner at Flagstaff, and will receive sentence when the federal court sits in the fall.

Sheriff Parsons used to be a horseman himself, and the old fever is still with him for the feel of a saddle. In spite of the fact that his car made possible an arrest never possible in horse days, the sheriff says:

"Just wish he'd had a bottle of liquor on him; maybe we could have hooked him under the prohibition law and confiscated that saddle. I'd certainly be right proud to own it myself."

"Moencopta" here refers to Moenkopi, the wash (and the town) adjacent to Tuba City.

[Steven Ayres]

Wagon Tracks

TWO wagon tracks led off a scarce-traveled road in the draw running up between the mountains above Jerome, Arizona, where are located the largest copper mines in the world.

Just two wagon tracks across a mountain desert, through scrub oak, mesquite and jack pine, yet to the practiced eye of Sheriff Ed Weil of Yavapai county, a gold and silver prospector for nearly thirty years, they were as filled with information as an open book, and as easily readable.

Moonshine, to Ed Weil, is just like a red rag to a bull. So his long-nosed Studebaker car began poking in and out of this rough country, searching for it.

That's why he was on this old road, 26 miles from Prescott in an air line, 66 miles by the tortuous mountain trail he was following in the Studebaker.

"I never saw such a road as those wagon tracks made," says Mr. Weil. "I don't see how even horses and a wagon could get over it.

"Well, to show you how it was, we met 'em, up there, coming back; they couldn't get through any farther. It was right on top of a hill, I remember.

"'How do you get through here to Mint Valley?' I asked them, to gain time and get out of the car.

"'Mister, the only way you can get through here to the Mint is to fly,' one answered and then he looked at my automobile. 'How in tophet did you ever get that car 'way up here?'

"'Oh, that's a regular automobile, with engine, wheels and everything,' I told him; 'the car made it pretty well. My deputy sheriffs and I travel by gun power, though, stranger, so stick 'em up.'

"Up their hands went, but there wasn't a sign of anything on that wagon but a few grains of corn mash that had fallen off at the back.

"So we made them tie up their horses right where they were, get into the car, and we backtracked over those wagon marks eight miles down onto the road, then followed the tracks back to where they had come from.

"We found 90 gallons of completed and partly aged moonshine in an abandoned ranch house, and camped there for the night. Next morning we brought them and the liquor back into Prescott.

"I didn't want to leave those two horses out there all alone, so we jumped into the car again and crawled back through that brush, and through those washouts to where we had left them. Somehow, I couldn't understand why they had gone so far up there with a wagon and why the in-going ruts were deep and the out-going ruts were shallow.

"So I pointed the car at the brush and said 'sic-'em and we wallered through the stones another half mile, and there we found another 60 gallons, making 150 in all, or 63 cases. Sheriffs got a cache of 143 gallons down South somewhere, but I beat 'em by seven gallons."

The reference to Mint Valley, now called Williamson Valley, tells me the shiners were trekking through what's now the Woodchute Wilderness west of Jerome, an area that's still pretty rough going. The Sheriff would have gone through Gold King Mine, now owned by Studebaker collector and unique character Don Robertson.



More on Gold King Mine

[Steven Ayres]

Wah-Wa-Tay-See

THREE horses and a milch cow is a lot of wampum to pay for a wife, even a good one, and then have some other buck Indian come shining around the bridegroom's tepee and try to lure the bride away with promises of a much finer wigwam.

Wah-Wa-Tay-See, or Little Firefly, was the fair bride in question. Mighty accomplished squaw, she was, too.

Long Feather, the Navajo brave who first won her heart, then paid her canny old Dad three pinto ponies and a grade Hereford cow for her, felt he made quite an acquisition, when he saw her industry in basket making, pottery baking, rug weaving and, particularly, her skill in baking toothsome corncakes.

The Great Manitou of the Sun smiled on the bear-grass thatched roof of Long Feather's new Eden, up near the Utah line where the Inscribed Rocks tell of earlier conquests.

But there was, in this Eden, the replica of the serpent in that first garden, in the person of Empty Thunder, another Navajo buck, who like his name, was much given to loud talking with no action.

He longed to possess the comely Wah-Wa-Tay-See; to let the Little Firefly light up his wigwam with her accomplished presence. So, in the absence of Long Feather, Empty Thunder began to roll around the Feather tepee, and the words that he spake were mighty, the promises he made were enormous, the picture of happiness he painted outshone the glory of Painted Rock Canyon.

As romantic girls will, Wah-Wa-Tay-See listened, foolishly. Trouble loomed over the hogan of Long Feather.

That night, as she slumbered beside the brave Long Feather, she was awakened to see Empty Thunder come into the tepee, armed with a neck yoke from his harness, and slay her husband.

This brought Little Firefly to her senses; she mourned for the no longer available favorable grunts of Long Feather at her skill; the missing slap which would tell her she was the wild goose favored of the eagle.

Adam had no mother-in-law to help straighten out the Eden tangle. But Long Feather had one, and she had highly favored the tall brave. Summoned by Wah-Wa-Tay-See, she and the bride set upon the triumphant Empty Thunder with the same neckyoke he had used, and the voice of the loud rumbler was stilled forever.


Sheriff F.D. Divilbess ran all over the Hopi and Navajo reservations and around Inscription Rock looking for the women. His Studebaker showed 324 miles when he finally found them. He had overlooked one thing. An Indian widow ordinarily is a shunned creature; but one over whose charms two braves have fallen in battle is in extremely high standing; she has the same passing favor that the winner of a bathing beauty contest attains.

Wah-Wa-Tay-See was holding high court right in the midst of the tribe. If the signs from the Great Manitou, made manifest at the next Hopi snake dance, are favorable, Little Firefly's next husband will have to deplete his herd of cattle considerably, and probably kick in with a goodly sum of the Great White Father's wampum minted in Philadelphia, to win her.

For the pale face jury said the homicide was justifiable.



This story feels largely made up, embroidered with Eastern white stereotypes from what may have been a core of truth. No, neither Dineh (Navajos) nor any other Western native people use tipis or wigwams. The Navajo rez covers Inscription Rock and lots of other ancient sites, but they were old long before the Dineh came down from Canada. Hopi and Dineh culture are quite distinct and unrelated. Manitou is an Algonquin concept. The "translation" of the petroglyph is complete BS. Despite the writer's cartoonish, insulting language and clear ignorance of native diversity and ways (the illustration shows a Pueblo village), the story does hint at the unusual power of women in Dineh culture.

[Steven Ayres]

The Arizona Sheriff

So ends our little book about the exploits of law enforcement in a very young state in a still young nation. How much of it is true and how much exaggeration and PR we'll never know. But if we accept any of it as true, we can be confident that the Studebaker marque played a significant role in Arizona history.

Hope you enjoyed it!

[Sam Ensley]

REading all of this has certainly been enjoyable. Thank you so much for sharintg it.