THE ROUTE TOWARD Globe took Burnham into the Tonto Basin. This extensive bowl, fifty miles long and thirty wide, enclosed some of the roughest terrain in Arizona. The basin was flanked by mountain ranges and cut by dozens of creeks, gorges, and broken-rock canyons. Hostile Apaches often used it as a refuge. It was remote and even more sparsely populated than the rest of sparsely-populated Arizona.
The diary of a young woman named Angeline Mitchell Brown, who came to Tonto Basin in the late 1870s to teach, captures the flavor of life there at the time. Her school had walls made of brush that enclosed a patch of dirt, and no door. One day while teaching she felt something tugging at her skirts. It was a foot-long Gila monster that lived in a hole near her desk and liked to sun itself there every morning. They learned to tolerate each other. Whenever the venomous lizard got in the way, she picked it up by the tail and moved it. Sometimes she stroked its back with a pencil.
One night in the cabin where she was staying, a loud purring woke her. Through a chink in the wall, a cougar’s paw was reaching for her. Twelve days later a band of Apaches in war paint rushed the cabin. The leader rode right in, but the low ceiling turned his dramatic entrance into a visual joke, so he backed out. Fourteen warriors and one boy stormed inside. They found Brown, two other women, and a baby. The oldest woman stepped forward and extended her hand. The Apaches, brandishing knives, pinched the women, pulled their hair, ripped earrings from their lobes. The women didn’t make a sound. The Apache boy was ransacking the cabin. When he found Brown’s precious photographs, she jumped up and grabbed them, and hit him in the face, an impetuosity she immediately regretted. Everything stopped. Torture and death seemed certain. Instead, in a bow to the women’s bravery, the Apaches left.
Around this time, a family named Gordon tried to establish a ranch in the mountains on the basin’s northern edge, but the bitter winters drove them into the valleys of the Tonto. (The family’s first location is still called Gordon Canyon.) They tried again forty miles to the south, on the Salt River, where they built a primitive house and a few brush corrals for their cattle.
Burnham paused there one day on the way to Globe, to graze his scrawny horse. The Gordons had little, but the raggedy young stranger clearly had less. The family offered him a meal and a place to rest. “This hospitality and the consequent turning aside from my purpose forged the first link in a chain of events that for years I could not break,” wrote Burnham. “I became a thread woven into a strange and intricate pattern—a pattern sometimes bright and cheerful, but never altogether free of the black warp of crime and the red woof of bloodshed which made up so much of the fabric of life in Arizona and northern Mexico in those days.”
The bright cheerful bits stemmed from his deepening friendship with the Gordons. So did the crime and bloodshed. The family was about to be drawn into what became known as the Tonto Basin Feud, sometimes called the Pleasant Valley War. Burnham’s code of friendship and justice evidently entangled him in the Gordons’ predicament and endangered his life. Yet he was lucky. In the coming decade, many men in the basin would be killed in ambushes, gunfights, and lynchings.
The feud’s origins were tangled and remain murky. Horse theft and cattle rustling played a part. So did animosity between cattlemen and sheep men. Friendships curdled because of greed and betrayal. Outside the basin, the money men in towns such as Payson, Prescott, Flagstaff, and Globe operated in the background, playing sides against one another to create opportunities for advancing their fortunes.
Many cowboys and drifters like Burnham were sucked into the feud, but its vortex was created by three families: the Grahams, the Blevinses, and the Tewksburys. All were shirttail ranchers trying to scratch a living in the most out-of-the-way fragment of the Tonto Basin, a verdant open valley tucked under the Mogollon Rim and hemmed in by mountains. The place was so isolated that settlers didn’t penetrate there until the mid-1870s. They named it Pleasant Valley.
The fastest way for a small rancher to get bigger, or for a cowboy to supplement his meager pay, was rustling, either by outright theft or by branding other men’s calves in the spring. The Grahams and Tewksburys began as friendly partners in crime, filching mostly from Jim Stinson, owner of the valley’s largest cattle operation. But at some point the Grahams registered all the rebranded cattle under their name only, cutting out the Tewksburys.
This double-cross festered into a grudge. Stinson long suspected the Grahams and Tewksburys of stealing from him, and he shrewdly widened the rupture between them by hiring the Grahams to gather evidence of rustling against the Tewksburys. In an equally shrewd move, the Daggs brothers, who owned the Arizona Territory’s biggest sheep operation, took advantage of the rift by hiring the Tewksburys to help them defy the basin’s cattlemen and run sheep into the lush grass of Pleasant Valley.
The bitter emotions aroused by theft and betrayal were intensified by the cutthroat rivalry between cattlemen and sheep men for pasturage. On the Graham side, all of this was probably tinged with racial resentment of the Tewksburys as “half-breeds”—the mother of John D. Tewksbury’s three adult sons was a Klamath Indian.
Throughout the early 1880s, the conflict escalated from legal counter-claims to rougher forms of hostility, mostly from the Graham/cattlemen faction. Someone killed a valuable sheepdog. Someone shot the coffeepot from a shepherd’s hand. The cabin of a man associated with the sheep men was burned. A flock of prize male sheep was clubbed to death. Men on horseback, firing pistols, stampeded a herd of ewes over a cliff. In the surrounding towns, men in saloons traded threats.
Human blood spilled in February 1887. A Ute Indian hired to tend sheep in Pleasant Valley was found bullet-riddled and beheaded, perhaps to frustrate identification. Over the next few years, many more cold-blooded murders followed on each side. The famous Hatfield–McCoy feud claimed about a dozen lives. In the Tonto Basin War, at least thirty men died, with estimates up to fifty. The vendetta decimated the principal families and their associates, but also claimed innocent sheepherders, cowboys, and prospectors who wandered into its web. This feud, along with frequent rampages by Apaches and the rough justice in towns like Tombstone, helped convince the rest of the country that Arizona was too savage to deserve statehood. (Arizona was the last of the forty-eight contiguous states permitted into the Union, in February 1912.)
Among all the Grahams, Blevinses, and Tewksburys, only one male survived. In 1892 the last Tewksbury, Edwin, almost certainly murdered the last Graham, Tom, assassinating him from ambush with the help of an accomplice. Despite extensive evidence, including eyewitness identifications by several witnesses including Tom Graham, who took hours to die, neither Edwin nor his accomplice were convicted.
Despite the presence of sheriffs and judges on the Arizona frontier, justice was erratic. It could be as sudden as a bullet. Sometimes a town mob or an isolated band of cowboys turned matters over to Judge Lynch and sentenced a killer or rustler to the “jerk plan.” In 1883, for example, during the robbery of a store in Bisbee, a gang fired indiscriminately into a crowd and killed five people. The five gunmen were caught, sentenced, and hung. A Bisbee dance hall owner named John Heith, who had planned the robbery but hadn’t participated, also was arrested and sentenced to life in prison. Citizens from Bisbee considered that a lenient miscarriage of justice. They dragged Heith from the county jail in Tombstone and hanged him from a telegraph pole. No one in the mob wore masks, and everyone knew the men involved. This could have posed a problem for the coroner’s jury charged with investigating the lynching. Tombstone’s coroner, Dr. George Goodfellow, who had witnessed the execution, devised a solution: he ruled that the cause of death was “emphysema of the lungs” produced “by strangulation, self-inflicted or otherwise.”
In the case of Edwin Tewksbury, justice proved not only blind but malleable to the point of farce. During his two trials for the murder of Tom Graham, Edwin benefited from alibis concocted for him by a parade of friendly witnesses. Equally crucial, Edwin had the advantage of a pricey defense team, probably paid for by the wealthy sheep barons, the Daggs brothers. In 1926 when an Arizona historical society wrote to P. P. Daggs asking for his memoirs, including his role in the feud, Daggs replied, “I know you would not be unkind enough to lure me into anything for which I would be captured and shot at sunrise. I have one consolation[—]the enemy will not do it. They are all sleeping in premature graves with their ‘boots on.’ I ought to know something about the ‘Tonto War.’ It cost me enough . . . ninety thousand dollars.” Even forty years after the feud ended, Daggs tempered gloating with caution.
Volatile feelings lingered for decades in Tonto Basin. Zane Grey, writer of popular Western novels, was fascinated by the feud and started making research trips into the basin in 1918. He called it “the wildest, most rugged, roughest, and most remarkable country” he had ever seen, with inhabitants to match. He eventually bought a cabin on the Mogollon Rim and spent several months there every year. In the foreword to his novel about the feud, To the Last Man (1921), he remarked, “I never learned the truth of the cause of the Pleasant Valley War, or if I did hear it I had no means of recognizing it. All the given causes were plausible and convincing. Strange to state, there is still secrecy and reticence all over Tonto Basin as to the facts of this feud. Many descendants of those killed are living there now. But no one likes to talk about it.”
During the feud and for decades afterward, each faction’s supporters spun competing versions of events. The biases are apparent in most books written about it. From any perspective, the feud was ugly through and through.
The same year that P. P. Daggs responded to the historical society, Scouting on Two Continents appeared. In his account of the feud and his minor role in it, Burnham explained that he hid identities because emotions in Arizona were still raw. His rough draft, however, referred to the Gordons by name. This family consisted of “old man” William Gordon (then in his fifties), his rugged wife Betsy, five daughters, and a son, Tom, several years younger than Burnham.
After they befriended him, Burnham eventually went on toward Globe, a silver boomtown founded in 1873. Five years later there still wasn’t a house made of lumber or a shingle roof. Everything was adobe, with roofs of dirt or grass. Around Globe, Burnham worked as a cowboy and mining camp hunter. From talk overheard in town, he gathered that large forces were about to collide. “I sensed the growing struggle among officials and politicians as to whether Arizona should be run by a few great cattle barons or by certain wealthy sheep men backed by allied interests in the towns.”
Every few weeks he rode twenty miles or so to spend time with the Gordons on the Salt River. As a young drifter far from his kin, he clearly prized the warm sense of family they extended to him. He also valued old man Gordon’s expertise as a marksman.
Gordon used an old black-powder buffalo rifle with a double trigger, heavy but deadly at long range. He taught Burnham how to compensate for light, shadows, and wind. Range could be gauged and corrected by shooting at something near the target that would make the hit visible, such as water or dust. If in doubt, instructed old Gordon, shoot low, since most misses go high. If you are lying flat on fairly level ground, don’t shoot from the shoulder—that puts most of your bullets into the dirt or the sky. Instead, follow the example of the plainsmen—raise your gun a foot or so and shoot by hand. He learned that over-polishing a gun barrel turned it into a flashing heliograph saying “shoot me here.” He learned the importance of keeping his bullets clean so they slipped easily from the cartridge belt when needed quickly.
Burnham applied these lessons by practicing with his own guns, a Winchester 1873 carbine and a Remington 1875 Army model revolver, both caliber .44–40. He modified the revolver’s original sight by slotting it and soldering on half an Indian-head penny lengthwise down the seven-and-a-half-inch barrel. Intent on perfecting his marksmanship, he spent most of his money on thousands of cartridges, practicing until he was accurate and quick with both guns, using either hand, especially on snap shots from the hand, hip, and shoulder—the sort of quick instinctual shooting that could save his life in an ambush. He rode with his rifle balanced on the pommel of his saddle, “Arizona style,” like the Apaches, and strengthened his wrists until he could raise and fire his rifle with one hand. He practiced snap shots not only in daylight but at night, to learn to feel the direction of a target by sound as well as shape. In the dark, if there was more time to shoot, it was best to stoop or lie, which highlighted the target against the skyline.
A snap shot from a revolver, he learned, often went awry beyond ten paces, but with practice was lethal at close range. “The one great advantage of the weapon is the possibility of instantaneous use,” he later wrote. “It should be the aim of the scout to be able to draw and fire extremely quick—using only one continuous sweep of the hand until the bullet leaves the weapon.” He could spin and put all his revolver’s bullets within a small circle. “The master of the revolver need have no fear of any one man,” he wrote. “The drunken bully or the giant pugilist is as much at his mercy as a child. A bullet in the instep will calm the most ferocious wife beater.”
He practiced shooting while standing, lying, and running. He set five-gallon oil cans on the ground and did snap shots as he rode by or reined in. He spent even more time practicing from a galloping horse—moving toward the target, riding past it, or turning around to shoot while in flight, an important skill for discouraging pursuers. He learned to shoot Indian style, hooking one leg over his horse’s back, then leaning over to fire from under its neck. To train his eye and reflexes, and incidentally to entertain others, he learned to shoot the water under a cork, lifting it and then hitting it in midair. “It can be done,” he later instructed a friend, “by 3 months practice 10 trials a day.”
All this practice soon found application.
The Gordons got pulled into the feud by debts, not passions. They owed money to people in Globe who favored the Tewksburys. These creditors sent an ultimatum: slaughter or scatter the other faction’s livestock, or forfeit your herd to pay your debt. Old Gordon wanted neutrality and refused. His creditors immediately demanded cash, which they knew he didn’t have. When old Gordon got word that his herd had been attached and deputies were coming to seize it, he decided to hide the cattle in the mountains.
Burnham heard of all this and rode to Salt River to help the family drive the cattle. He and young Tom Gordon rode point and flank with the main herd, followed by the daughters with the gentler cows and the dogs. Old Gordon rode the rear to cover their flight.
According to Burnham, two young deputies from Globe caught up to the daughters, which set the dogs barking. Burnham and Tom heard the commotion and rushed back. The deputies were demanding the daughters’ cattle. Tom and Burnham said no. At this tense moment, one deputy dismounted. A dog bit him and he shot it. As everyone else drew their weapons, another shot echoed and the deputy fell dead. His outnumbered partner raised his hands.
At first no one realized who had fired the fatal shot. It was old Gordon, using his heavy buffalo rifle from 800 yards away. From that distance it was a lucky shot, the only lucky thing about it. “In that one act,” wrote Burnham, “a whole family and their best friend crossed the Rubicon that divides the law-abiding citizen from those who live beyond.” The killing forced the Gordons to choose sides in hopes of protecting themselves from the people who wanted their cattle—people allied with the Tewksburys. “In this Arizona trouble,” wrote Burnham, “I found myself on the losing side”—the Graham side. According to Burnham, Gordon bought off the surviving deputy. In return for a portion of the herd, the deputy concocted a story for the authorities in Globe.
Burnham’s involvement in the feud is unclear, as are his whereabouts and the sequence of his activities during the early 1880s. Nevertheless, certain documented events can help locate him and his movements during these blurry years.
The difficulties begin with his account of the feud. In Scouting on Two Continents he implied that he had been neck-deep in the bloodiest part of it. “Our friends were rapidly being killed off,” he wrote, adding, “To my sorrow, I found that many of them deserved it.” The Pleasant Valley vendetta evidently didn’t become murderous until after the beheading of the sheepherder in 1887. That year and the next were the feud’s most bloodstained. Yet during those two years, by Burnham’s own accounts, he was mostly busy elsewhere in Arizona and California.
Still, his descriptions of the sinister atmosphere in Tonto Basin and his understanding of the issues carry the tang of authenticity and firsthand experience. He clearly was entangled in a feud and endangered by it. Animosities between cattlemen and sheep men had been simmering for years before the first recorded murder, not just in Pleasant Valley but in the wider arena of Tonto Basin. The Gordons’ ranch, for instance, was about twenty-five miles south of Pleasant Valley. Burnham entitled his account “The Tonto Basin Feud,” and never mentioned Pleasant Valley by name. Over the coming years, he undoubtedly discussed those violent days many times with his Arizona friends. Perhaps these conversations and Burnham’s memory telescoped time and place. At any rate, the discrepancies and inaccuracies seem to stem from imperfect recall, not deceit, and his eyewitness account mirrors other reports.
After old Gordon killed the deputy, Burnham was occasionally required to give “personal service” to the feudists, a murky remark partly clarified by the next sentence: “At this time I used to practice incessantly with the pistol, both right and left hands, and especially from a galloping horse.” Like everyone enmeshed in the feud, he felt like a hunted man.
I moved warily and changed my name often. Throughout the Tonto feud, I kept one complete outfit in Prescott, where I not only had good clothes but loyal friends and a place I could safely disarm and rest. . . . I made use of all the craft and cunning I had learned among the Indians, as well as the methods employed by such bandits as Vasquez. In those days, every little detail of a man’s equipment was observed and remembered by those whom he met, and, of course, his horse and brand were especially noted. I took care never to ride a horse from one district to another, but established a cache and a friend in each district. I found that I could travel long distances on foot and very swiftly. I had worked in mining camps and knew the lingo. I could drive ox teams well enough to get a job. At times, I was a prospector with burros. Again, I was a hunter of game on the Black Mesa. I learned by bitter experience to conceal whatever skill I had at arms. On more than one occasion, my boyish boasting had nearly cost me my life. The hardest things for me to disguise were my height and my eyes. Being young and slightly undersize, my best role was that of a tenderfoot from back East—a mere careless, harmless kid.
A photograph of Burnham from around this time partly confirms this physical description—he does look boyishly handsome, but neither careless nor harmless. He has a strong jaw, a cleft chin, and eyes whose intensity burns even in a faded black and white image. Everyone who met Burnham was struck by his eyes. “This quiet, unassuming gentleman would never pass unnoticed in a crowd did one but glimpse his eyes,” wrote one observer, “blue eyes of startling keenness and brilliancy, eyes that see everything without seeming to see, eyes that at times are as cold and fierce as the steel of a drawn sword.” Wrote another, with similar melodrama, “His eyes are of an amazing blue, and they fasten upon you when you come into his presence and never leave you, nor miss a shadow of your expression. They make you feel terribly naked.”
His other distinguishing physical trait was his height. He stood about five feet four inches, short for a man even then. He weighed about 125 pounds. Yet he didn’t seem slight, owing to an erect bearing, a deep chest and broad shoulders, and an air of alert energy. No one who looked closely would mistake him for a clueless tenderfoot.
So he tried not to give people a close look, staying on the move. For a time his head carried a bounty, and he often hid in the Pinal Mountains south of Globe. This life was stressful and solitary, but also forced him to hone survival skills that would save his life many times in years to come: observation, evasiveness, camouflage. He also learned about the consequences of taking sides in a conflict, even though that choice had been forced upon him. He found himself allied with people who were nearly strangers, whom he neither supported nor trusted, and whose actions he often deplored. Yet his fate was tied to theirs because of one rash act.
He knew good people on both sides whom the feud had turned into criminals, even murderers. “It was a harsh school of life—yet from this same belt of the West, Teddy’s immortal Rough Riders were largely recruited. All that was really needed was a good cause and a good leader to transform outlaws into heroes.” Whether a man became an outlaw or a hero depended on the leader, the cause, and the interpretation by others.
The feud also educated Burnham about the sordid side of politics, big and small, a view he never forgot. He realized that the feud and his role in it were merely pieces in a bigger contest between factions with money and political clout—real power, not firepower. “I had glimpses of the highest powers of government in that region,” wrote Burnham, “and I saw that all of us were only pawns in the game.” For the rest of his life he would be skeptical of big money and politics even while volunteering to be their pawn.
It made him feel helpless. “My life seemed no more than a twig of driftwood in a whirlpool.” He often thought about California, where life seemed free and fair compared to the bloody anarchy of Arizona, “wherein stalk murderers, bandits, and all the grim underworld, which, once entered, grips a man in bonds that at first seem light as cobwebs but later have the cruel strength of steel.” He was sometimes alarmed, sometimes roused, by the allure of that—“the swank and power that goes with supreme indifference to death.” Of these years, he later told the journalist Richard Harding Davis, “The trouble was I had no moral anchors; the old ones father had given me were gone, and the time for acquiring new ones had not arrived.”
He was walking this edge when he got an offer that nudged him closer to a moral abyss. The nudger was a young Kansan he had met on an Indian raid, likely in response to the Apache rampage during the summer of 1881. In late August that year, a Western Apache medicine man on Cibecue Creek, about thirty miles east of Pleasant Valley, began promising the return of olden times. This would happen, he said, through powerful medicine made from the pollen of tule cattails and a new dance that would resurrect dead warriors, who would help drive whites from the country. As his followers grew, so did white anxiety.
The army sent troopers from Fort Apache to take the man into custody. In a tense encounter at his camp, the medicine man submitted, but his followers, including some Apaches employed by the army as scouts, attacked the soldiers and killed eight. In the skirmish, the soldiers killed the medicine man. Bands of angry Apaches left the nearby San Carlos reservation and made a series of ferocious strikes. They killed three more soldiers, then murdered and mutilated four civilians near Fort Apache. They also raided a ranch in Pleasant Valley, killing two men and running off seventy-five horses. They shot many cattle in the valley and slaughtered sixteen purebred Morgan horses owned by the Tewksburys.
The army responded with numerous patrols augmented by local guides. This was likely Burnham’s first action as a scout, and perhaps the first time he met Crook’s famous scouts, Archie McIntosh and Al Sieber. By the end of September 1881 most Apaches had returned to the reservation. Others, including Geronimo, fled to Mexico and would soon be heard from again. A handful of “broncos”—Apaches who refused to surrender—continued to roam the mountains near Tonto Basin, keeping the region in a state of fear.
The young Kansan who had been Burnham’s companion came to him in Globe with a proposition. For months the Kansan had been working as a night herder for a big mining outfit, protecting their cattle, at great risk, from rustlers and bronco Apaches. He had a sweetheart back home whom he hoped to marry, so he forced himself to save money by asking the outfit to hold his wages. The mining company, like many others, turned out to be a stock swindle. His wages disappeared into the bank accounts of a few pillars of the local community.
He wanted revenge and cash. He planned to start by stealing the superintendent’s personal horses and cattle, and then to rustle other small herds nearby. He already had a scheme to offload the beef. Someone from a gang led by Curly Bill Brocius, the leader of a notorious hive of rustlers and outlaws down near Tombstone, had offered cash for any cattle with brands from north of Globe and Phoenix, which would be unknown in Tombstone. The Kansan figured he could rake in a thousand dollars in three weeks, enough to marry his sweetheart. All he needed was a partner—Burnham.
It sounded easy. It almost sounded justifiable. Burnham, too, was tired of feeling like a pawn and a fugitive with empty pockets. Why not take something back for himself? Men were already hoping to kill him for something he didn’t do. If he was branded a desperado, why fret about a few more misdeeds? His thoughts agitated him. “Up to this time,” he wrote, “we had been adventurers but not criminals. Our decisions had been made, not by our minds, but by our environment and the quick blood of youth. But this was different. We must decide as men.” He agreed to meet his friend the next day with a decision.
He couldn’t sleep, so he rode into the pine-covered Pinal Mountains to think. For the rest of the night he swerved between the romantic and financial temptations of joining his friend and the arguments against it. Like many adventurous young men, he was excited by the idea of doing something daring and terrible. He thought about the dashing Tiburcio Vásquez and his bleak fate. He thought about his mother, and the dour relative who had predicted a bad end for him. He brooded about the girl in Iowa who saw something fine beneath his boyish pranks. He remembered his dreams of Africa.
When the sun rose he was still undecided. He rode into Globe. The stagecoach from Camp Bowie had just arrived with the mail. Like everyone in town, Burnham hoped for a letter. His always arrived addressed to the editor of the Arizona Silver Belt, Globe’s newspaper. The editor knew Burnham’s real name and received mail for him. Burnham didn’t identify this man in Scouting on Two Continents, but he was “Judge” Aaron H. Hackney. Then in his sixties, Hackney was one of Globe’s most respected citizens.
He had become another of Burnham’s father figures. Burnham probably knew him through family newspaper connections. For a few years in the 1870s, Burnham’s uncle Josiah Russell had been editor of the Clinton Herald in Iowa, and his uncle Edward Russell was the longtime editor of the Davenport Gazette. One or both of these men likely wrote to Hackney and asked him to keep tabs on their wayward nephew and report his activities. Hackney took an avuncular interest in the young drifter and evidently wrote to the uncles about the feud.
There was a letter for Burnham from Iowa—not from his mother or his sweetheart Blanche, but from Josiah, “the puritanical uncle of the town by the big river.” The letter was brief and sharp. “Duty before all,” it said. “Remember you come of the wrong stock to make a villain.” These words, wrote Burnham many decades later, “went through me like knives.” The letter’s stern simplicity woke him up. He saw that vengeance solved nothing and perpetuated itself, and that he was becoming a disgrace to his ancestors. “I realized that I was in the wrong and had been for a long time, without knowing it.”
He tried to convince his Kansan friend to abandon the plan, but failed. The young man ended up joining the Brocius gang. According to Burnham, he amassed far more than a thousand dollars but didn’t get back to Kansas and his sweetheart. Within two years the outlaw life killed him.
Burnham confided his troubles to Hackney. The old editor advised him to leave Tonto Basin for a while and to shun contact with people there. He gave him names of some friends in the south. Shaken, hoping for another clean start, Burnham left Globe for the wild silver camp called Tombstone.