Arizona History

Thought I'd start you out with one of my favorites, it's been very popular with clients when I do story telling. Many of my stories are from great historians, (thank you Marshall Trimball and Bob Boz, two of the best), and various newspaper articles from the period. If history was a straight line then news articles are pretzels or the origin of humor. Anyway: This story is remembered as The Great Bisbee massacre of 1883. (In old Arizona, Marshall Trimble). The Goldwaters importance and influence to the growth of Arizona is its own story but this one deals with the Goldwater-Casteneda store in Bisbee. After putting together various articles this is the story. Apparently 5 down on their luck cowboys had heard there was going to be a large deposit at the Goldwater store. The Goldwaters had a good reputation in many Arizona towns and in many cases they were trusted more than the banks. So in Bisbee the army,miners and ranchers deposited their payrolls at the store. Great for the Goldwaters because people would charge for goods all month then use their paycheck to get even and start over again. So the cowboys charge into the store with guns drawn and two people get shot. They get the safe open but there's only a couple hundred dollars inside. So disappointed and knowing someone had gone screaming down the street for the sheriff they jumped on their horses and lit out. Folks started shooting at them so they returned fire and in the confusion, three more townspeople lay dead. But somehow none of the bad guys were hurt. However, one of the dead was a woman. In those days there was 1 woman for every 50 men, most of whom worked in bordellos but this was a pregnant miners wife. The following outrage helped put together a large posse which galloped out of town. A couple days out the cowboys split up so the posse did the same. Two days later the posse caught up with two of the cowboys and the first question asked was, "why'd you hold up the Goldwater store" "We were told about a large payroll". The obvious next question was: "Who told you that". Turns out the inside man was head of the other posse,John Heath. If the bad guys hadn't split up,he was going to run the posse around in circles till they got away. So they arrested him too and after a couple of weeks all six are standing before the judge. Heath complains to the judge and asks why he's being tried for murder when he didn't shoot no one. The judge reluctantly agrees and tries him later. The 5 cowboys were tried for murder, found guilty, sentenced to hang and a few days later all 5 were hung at the same time. A couple weeks later Heath was sentenced to 20 years at Yuma prison. Today that would have been the end of it, but back then justice was looked at a little different. The townspeople felt the sentence was too light, nobody would have died if Heath didn't set up the robbery. So the folks commenced to grumble and after discussing the situation over a few whisky's and urged on by a few notables they politely escorted the gentleman out of jail, well they dragged him to the nearest tree and gave him a suspended sentence....Now lynching wasn't all that common and it was against the law even if he deserved it. So the towns people tried to hide the lynching and luckily part of the mob was the town doctor/coroner who was well liked and respected. So Dr. Goodfellow filled out the coroners report which is still on record today as follows:"cause of death unknown, possibly emphysema, possibly lack of oxygen due to altitude". After telling this story a few times I was turned on to similar phrases of the time period in other states.)