David Grasse - The Bisbee Massacre: Robbery, Murder and Retribution in Arizona Territory, 1883-1884

David Grass

Foreword by Marshall Trimble

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-2735-9

2017 David Grass. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Front cover: the lynching of John Heath (authors collection); John Heaths gravestone in Boothill Cemetery in Tombstone, Arizona (Library of Congress)

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

To my parents, Walter and Gerry Grassie.
I dont have the words

On the evening of December 8th, 1883, five heavily-armed men rode boldly into Bisbee, tied their horses near Main Street and walked up the street to the Goldwater-Castaneda mercantile store which also served as the local bank. All but one were wearing kerchief masks. Two of them, armed with pistols and Winchester rifles positioned themselves at the front door while the other three entered with pistols drawn and ordered the patrons to raise their hands. One spotted one of the proprietors, Joseph Goldwater, and ordered him to open the safe. It was supposed to contain the payroll for the miners working for the Copper Queen Mining Company. However, the stagecoach carrying the big payroll hadnt arrived yet. Their take in the heist was small, about $800 and two gold watches.

Outside the store, shooting erupted as the two bandits posted at the front door began firing randomly up and down Main Street. In just a few moments three men, including a deputy sheriff and a woman, eight months pregnant, lay dead or dying in the street.

The five outlaws moved hurriedly back to their horses, mounted up and quickly rode out of town heading east towards the Sulphur Springs Valley.

The brutal and senseless killings would become known as the Bisbee Massacre.

Immediately after the gang made a hasty exit a posse was organized and went after the gang in hot pursuit. In the posse was a man whod recently arrived in town named John Heath, who picked up the trail and about nine miles out of Bisbee, noted where the gang had split up.

The posse returned empty-handed having lost the trail but thanks to some good detective work on the part of Cochise County lawmen all five were quickly rounded up. The outlaws were identified as Omer Red Sample, James Tex Howard, Dan Dowd, Bill Delaney and Dan Kelly.

When the gang split up, Delaney and Dowd had headed for Sonora and Kelly for New Mexico. Sample and Howard returned to their stomping ground at Clifton where they stopped at Maud Elbys brothel and showed the girls the money and a couple of gold watches taken in the robbery. They also allegedly implicated a sixth man whod lived in Clifton until recently. From there things began to unravel. The sixth man said to have planned the robbery and acted as inside man was John Heath. He was also arrested and charged with murder.

The wheels of justice was moving swiftly. Two months and a day after the massacre their trial began at the county courthouse in Tombstone.

Author David Grass has done an excellent job of piecing together the story of one of Arizonas most sensational murder-robberies. Even more fascinating are the probing questions he raises. He dissects the testimony given by witnesses at the trial and takes what appears to be an open and shut case and turns it into a real page turner.

He also raises a number of questions. The citizens of Bisbee and Tombstone were outraged and wanted blood. So, why werent they given a change of venue? And, why werent they given separate trials instead of trying all five men together? Most of the testimony by the witnesses was hearsay and circumstantial. Could the court-appointed attorneys have done a better job defending their clients? Did they fear public retribution if they represented the defendants too well and planted seeds of doubt in the jury?

There was never any doubt about the outcome. The five men were convicted, found guilty and sentenced to hang on March 28th, a few weeks after the trial ended. Because he wasnt present at the scene of the crime, Heath was tried separately. His trial began immediately after the others were sentenced. All five testified that Heath had nothing to do with planning or participating in the Bisbee robbery-murder.

Heath was found guilty of murder but sentenced to life in the territorial prison. On the morning of February 22, an angry mob stormed the jail, ignoring the five condemned men, took Heath out and hanged him from a telegraph pole on Toughnut Street. John Heath was the only man in Tombstones wild and wooly history to be lynched.

A few weeks later, on March 29, the five condemned men stood on the scaffold. Each proclaimed his innocence. It would be the largest mass hanging in Arizona history.

The Bisbee Massacre is much more than the story of the massacre and the trial that followed. There are biographies of key figures in the rich history of Cochise County from the movers and shakers to men on both sides of the law. Grass tells us about the aftermath and what became of the principal figures in the story in the years that followed.

There is also a comprehensive history of the Queen of the Copper Camps early history including Army Scout Jack Dunns discovery of the rich mineral deposits in Tombstone Canyon that led to the founding of what many have called the grandest city between San Francisco and New Orleans.

The Bisbee Massacre belongs on the bookshelf of anybody with an interest in frontier justice, Arizona and western history.

Marshall Trimble
Arizona State Historian

I would be hard-pressed to say exactly why I chose the subject of the Bisbee Massacre, what the impetus was for writing an entire book about it. The episode just intrigued me. Aside from the legendary feud between the Earps and the cowboys, the trial, conviction, and subsequent punishment of the Bisbee bandits was the most newsworthy event to happen in Cochise County in the late 1800s, yet no one, to my knowledge, has ever bothered to really delve into the event and produce a nuanced and in-depth study of this often overlooked, albeit darker, historical episode. Though events of the Bisbee Massacre have been recounted again and again, no previous writer had taken the time to gather together all the threads that so enhance the telling of this particular event. It was my ambition to collect all these different threads and weave them into a cohesive wholea whole which would be both informative and entertaining.

When I first began this project, I very much thought I would simply be chronicling an event chronicled many times before, although with a little more detail than before. I wanted to include Deputy Sheriff William Billy Daniels and his pursuit and subsequent capture of the outlaws Dan Big Dan Dowd and William Delaney. The 1800s were an era completely devoid of the forensic science methods and sophisticated tools used in todays criminal investigations, such as mug shots, fingerprints, DNA evidence, computers, telephonic communication, digital surveillance, paper trails, etc. Yet here was a determined law enforcement officer, utilizing only a horse, an expert tracker and a single photograph, who was able to trail his quarry through the Arizona desertsarguably some of the most inhospitable country ever createdacross an international border, and into a foreign country and to capture both men without firing a single shot. This is a pretty impressive feat just in and of itselfa truly amazing and commendable piece of detective work.