In addition to the two feuding families, the Grahams and Tewksburys, several people were involved. It was a very bloody feud between two families, ranchers versus sheepmen, people who took their war to the extreme. Of course, while the Lincoln County War is probably better known because Billy The Kid was involved, the Pleasant Valley War had the highest number of fatalities of any range war in American history. It is believed that close to 50 people were killed during that range war.
While some want to point to troubles in Tombstone as the reason that Arizona statehood was stalled, many believe it was because of the level of violence involved during the Pleasant Valley War that gave the Arizona Territory a reputation of being a badland not ready for statehood.
As I said a minute ago, many books and articles were written about the feud years after it ended. During my research of period newspapers, I found the story below written by Elmo Scott Watson. Between 1920 and 1951, Elmo Watson was, among other things, a photographer, journalist, Western historian, and journalism teacher. His story below was sent out by syndicated telegraph by the Western Newspaper Union. If you've read about the Pleasant Valley War, you should read what Watson has to say about some of the main characters in that deadly drama.
It was published by the Plumas Independent newspaper on October 8, 1936.
The Story Of A Famous Feud
By Elmo Scott Watson (1936)
Speak of a feud and one naturally thinks of those fierce family vendettas that have made notorious certain sections of the mountain country in West Virginia, Tennessee or Kentucky. Yet the soil of the trans-Missouri West as well as that of the East in times past has been dyed red with some of the bitterest feuds in American history.
In the West most of these feuds were "range wars" fights between two factions for control of desirable grazing country for their herds or flocks rather than internecine family conflicts. Outstanding among them were the Lincoln County War in New Mexico in the early eighties, and the Johnson County War, or so-called "Rustler War" in Wyoming in 1892. But to Arizona goes the distinction of having a civil conflict in which was combined both a family vendetta as fierce as any ever carried on among the mountaineers of the East and a" "range war" as bloody as any ever staged on the plains or in the mountains of the West. And, of all places, this feud was carried on in a locality known as Pleasant Valley!
If you have ever read Zane Grey's "To the Last Man" or Dane Coolidge's "The Man Killer!," you have caught glimpses of the Pleasant Valley War even though neither novel follows the feud in detail nor pretends to give an historically accurate account of it. But the war has its historian Earle R. Forrest, whose book "Arizona's Dark and Bloody Ground," published recently by the Caxton Printers, Ltd. of Caldwell, Idaho, is the first attempt to tell the whole story of that dark page in the annals of the Southwest.
In the preface, Mr. Forrest says: "The Pleasant Valley vendetta that swept through the Tonto Basin country in Central Ariuna during the latter 1880's was one of the most sanguinary and bitter range feuds the old West ever knew. Its ferocity and hatreds were rivaled only by the bloody battles and assassinations of the Lincoln County War in New Mexico ten years before, but it is doubtful, even with all its terrorism, if the number of killed there equaled the casualties in Pleasant Valley. Both were born of blood feuds, and both were fought in defiance of the law of the land until they burned themselves out after most of the participants had either been killed or had grown weary of strife. Even the well-known Hatfield - McCoy feud that held the West Virginia and Kentucky mountains under a reign of terror for almost twenty years did not surpass the lifelong hatreds born of the Pleasant Valley War."
The family element in this feud is furnished by the Tewksburys and the Grahams, the chief opponents in the war. But others were drawn into it, some by choice and some by force of circumstances over which they had no control. For in this conflict, there were no neutrals.
Among the others who were dragged into it or voluntarily took up arms were several men already noted, or soon to be notorious, in the annals of the Wild West. There was Tom Pickett, who had been a "warrior" with Billy the Kid in the Lincoln County War in New Mexico but who was then a cowboy in the famous Hash Knife outfit. There was Charley Duchet, a frontiersman and a gunfighter in the wild days of Dodge City, Kansas. And there was the famous Tom Horn, scout and packer in the Apache campaigns, later a stock detective on the Wyoming ranges and destined to be the central figure in one of the most baffling murder mysteries in the history of the West.
A Wild West Sheriff
Among the law officers who tried unsuccessfully to quell the feud was the famous Commodore Perry Owens, the long-haired sheriff of Apache County, a bizarre figure who might have stepped out of the pages of a dime novel "thriller," and who during the course of the feud was the survivor of one of the most amazing gunfights in the history of the Old West.
And these were only a few of the antagonists in a war waged with a ferocity and ruthlessness almost unparalleled in the history of the West. Before it was ended, one family, the Grahams, was completely wiped out and of their allies, the Blevans, there was only one survivor among the father and five sons. Of the three Tewksbury brothers, one was killed during the war, one died a natural death and the third, who stood trial for the murder of the last Graham, lived on to become known as the hero of Zane Grey's novel and the "Last man of the Pleasant Valley War."
Three Half-Breed Sons.
The fierceness of the vendetta may be attributed in part to the character of one of the families involved in it. For the Tewksburys were "half-white and half-Indian," the sons of John D. Tewksbury, Sr, a native of Boston who went to California in the days of the gold rushes, settled in Humboldt County and there married an Indian woman. She became the mother of three sons, John, James, and Edwin, who had grown to young manhood when the elder Tewksbury settled in Pleasant Valley, Arizona, in 1880.
As for the other proponents in this bloody conflict, Tom and John Graham, they were born on a farm near Boone, Iowa, went to California in the seventies and in 1882 located in Pleasant Valley.
"Tom was the oldest and because of the personal enmity that later developed between the Grahams and the Tewksburys, he became the acknowledged leader around whom the cattlemen rallied when sheep invaded the valley. Tom Graham is pictured in fiction of the vendetta as the leader of the rustlers that swarmed through the mountains, a ruffian and killer of the worst type. Nothing could be further from the truth; for he was a quiet, peaceful man and honest in all his dealings. Even after the invasion of sheep made war certain he refused to take human life; and his restraining hand held his followers in check until the first blood spilled by the Tewksbury forces made further restraint impossible. But he has been held responsible all these years for the acts of others."
A "Short Trigger Man."
Chief among these others were the allies of the Grahams, the Blevans, who was known in Arizona as Andy Cooper, mainly because a sheriff back in Texas, where the Blevans came from, was looking for him. Cooper, or Blevans, was noted as a "short trigger man," a killer by instinct, and he soon became the leader of the rustlers who preyed upon the cattle herds in that part of Arizona.
The origins of the feud are wrapped in mystery. Various reasons have been given for the hatred which existed between the Tewksburys and the Grahams but none of them have ever been substantiated. One story says that a woman was at the bottom of it, that the attentions of a man in one of the factions for the wife of a man in the other faction started it. Another says that the Grahams and the Tewksburys were partners in rustling operations, then fell out over the division of the spoils. There may be some element of truth in both stories but the fact remains that the hostility between the two factions which slowly developed might not have burst into the flame of open warfare if It had not been for an event that took place just 50 years ago this autumn.
Forrest records it thus.
"The Tewksburys are driving sheep over the rim of the Mogollons!"
"From mouth to mouth, from ranch to ranch throughout all Pleasant Valley this message was carried by dashing young cowboys in Paul Revere style. The effect was like an electric shock and more dangerous than a charge of dynamite. For years the cattlemen of this little valley in the wilderness of central Arizona had successfully held their range against the encroachments of sheepmen from the north who were only too eager to scatter their flocks over the luxuriant grass of this beautiful land.
Hastily those cattlemen and their cowboys saddled their horses and rode out to investigate. Perhaps it was only a rumor after all; but with their own eyes, they could see them in the distance like a great mass of maggots rolling down over the trail from the rim and swarming out over the valley at the foot of the Mogollons like a plague of locusts, greedily devouring the grass, tearing it out by the roots; and already a cloud of dust drifted up in the lazy morning air from the desert they left behind.
"The die was cast. The Tewksburys wanted war. Well, they would get it; all they wanted and more than they had bargained for."
Cattlemen vs. Sheepmen.
So the cattlemen and rustlers forgot their own differences and joined forces to resist the invasion of their common enemy, the sheepmen.
Daggs Brothers of Flagstaff, at that time the leading sheep men in northern Arizona, needed a new range for their "woolies." They had heard of the trouble between the Grahams and the Tewksburys and decided to turn it to their advantage by breaking the united ranks of the cattlemen in Pleasant Valley and open that rich grazing land for their sheep. So they made a deal with the Tewksburys to send a band of sheep into Pleasant Valley under the protection of the Tewksbury guns and share profits with them.
The cattlemen immediately rallied to defend their grazing lands and Andy Cooper, the "short trigger man," proposed to lead a party of armed men to wipe out the sheep and their herders. But Tom Graham held him in check, hoping to be able to scare off the sheepmen without loss of life or destruction of property. However, the reckless cowboys soon got out of hand and in February 1887, they drew first blood by killing a Navajo Indian sheepherder. Soon afterwards the sheep. were withdrawn from the valley but the peace which came to Pleasant Valley was a short-lived one.
Then "Old Man" Blevans, father of the Blevans boys, allies of the Grahams, disappeared and was never again heard from.
In August, his son, Hampton Blevans, accompanied by four Hash Knife cowboys and three from the Graham ranch started in search for him. They stopped at the Middleton ranch where they found Jim and Ed Tewksbury and some of their adherents.
Hot words between the two parties were followed immediately by blazing six-shooters and when the - fighting was over Hampton Blevans and another cowboy were dead and two others of their party wounded. This was the first white man's blood spilled in the Pleasant Valley War, but it was only the beginning.
Next Jim Houck, a Tewksbury man, killed young Billy Graham and in revenge for that Tom Graham led a party of cattlemen to attack the Tewksbury ranch. In the siege and battle which followed John Tewksbury, Jr., and one of his followers was killed before the attack of the cowboys was beaten off.
From that time on it was a war to the death. Forrest's book is filled with the details of the various gunfights, ambushes, lynchings, and assassinations that marked the progress of the war during the next two years. It is a record of almost unbelievable ferocity and cruelty, yet its dark pages are relieved at times by the chronicle of deeds of high courage and loyal devotion on the part of both men and women as the wives of some of the clansmen also played a prominent part in the war.
By the end of 1888, the war was virtually over. Jim Tewksbury had died of tuberculosis. John Graham and Charley Blevans had been killed in a fight with a posse headed by Sheriff Mulvenon of Yavapai County.
Sheriff Commodore Owens of Apache County had had his famous gun duel in Holbrook in which Andy Cooper (Blevans), Sam Houston Blevans, and their brother-in-law, Mose Roberts, had been killed and John Blevans was in jail.
Triumph of the Tewksburys.
In the meantime, Tom Graham had married and his young bride had at last prevailed upon him to take up farming near Tempe. Ed Tewksbury and a few followers were left to enjoy their hollow triumph as winners of the war. But they had learned their lesson and they made no further attempts to bring sheep over the rim of the Mogollons.
Apparently, the feud was over. Then as suddenly it burst into flame again. On August 2, 1892, Tom Graham, while hauling grain from his ranch, was shot from ambush near the Double Butte schoolhouse. Ed Tewksbury and John Rhodes were accused of the murder and placed under arrest.
During the preliminary hearing of the accusation against Rhodes in justice court, the old feud spirit flared up again when Mrs. Tom Graham tried to shoot Rhodes down in the courtroom but failed in the attempt. Rhodes was discharged from custody.
Then the long battle to convict Tewksbury began. Found guilty of the murder, Tewksbury obtained a new trial on a technicality and in the second trial in 1899, the Jury disagreed.
After the passing of another year, the prosecution, evidently believing that a conviction would now be impossible, filed a motion to dismiss the charge. When this was granted on March 18, 1896, the curtain fell on the last act of the bitterest blood feud in the history of the Old West, a story that has become a legend of old Arizona's cattleland."
Western Newspaper Union
As published in the Plumas Independent newspaper, Volume 43, Number 4, 8 October 1936.
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