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