If you’ve been following this blog’s excursions into the Pleasant Valley War, you’ve met the Grahams and the Tewksburys, the sheepmen and the cattlemen, the Mogollon Rim looming over all of it. This time the subject is the law itself—or what passed for it in 1880s Arizona Territory—in the person of Sheriff Billy Mulvenon.
Mulvenon arrived in Arizona Territory in 1876 and took his first job as a stable keeper for a local mine. That not being fully satisfactory, he became a Deputy Sheriff for Yavapai County, home to the territorial capital, Prescott. After four years as deputy, he was elected sheriff in 1885.
A Bad Year to Take Office
As historians of the territory would tell you, 1885 was a poor year to become sheriff of a county that notionally had oversight of the powder keg in the Tonto Basin known as Pleasant Valley. For the next two years the feud between the Grahams and the Tewksburys smoldered without drawing Mulvenon in directly—Payson, where he kept an office, was close enough to the valley to hear the trouble but far enough to stay out of it. That changed early in 1887, when Jim Tewksbury shot two men from the rival faction in a killing that couldn’t quite be called self-defense. Mulvenon enlisted a posse from Payson to invade the valley and arrest the Tewksburys. The clan ran and hid, the search turned up nothing, and Mulvenon retreated to the relative comfort of Payson and Prescott, his first expedition a complete failure.
Mulvenon’s Second Invasion
Eventually the noise from the valley reached too many newspapers in the territory for the governor to ignore. After John Tewksbury and a ranch hand were murdered by the Graham faction—likely at the hands of the notorious gunfighter Andy Cooper—the governor ordered the sheriff to act. In writing.
Mulvenon went first to Payson, where his deputy, was in residence, and the two of them raised a second posse, this one including men sympathetic to the Tewksburys. Among them was probably James Houck, a sheepherder who knew the valley from his time as a deputy sheriff in Apache County to the northeast, and who was himself suspected of favoring the Tewksbury side—the cattlemen who, for their own complicated reasons, had opened Pleasant Valley to sheep. The record on exactly who rode with Mulvenon and why is thin and self-serving in places; contemporaries had every reason to shade their own involvement after the fact.
Acting on advice that turned out to be bad, Mulvenon staked out the most central spot in the valley—the Perkins dry goods store, where both sides of the feud did their shopping. His first customers were from the Graham faction: John Graham, the family’s elder statesman, and Charles Blevins, Andy Cooper’s younger brother (Cooper operated under a false surname for reasons that needed no explanation). Mulvenon went on to round up every combatant he could find. Most of the Grahams escaped and couldn’t be tracked; the Tewksburys, wiser, negotiated a favorable surrender. Mulvenon rode home believing himself a hero—until reports surfaced that he’d fired first on unarmed men, and he found himself facing trial for murder.
He was acquitted. The frontier press had already cast him as the hero of the hour, and Prescott, as it turned out, preferred a heroic sheriff to a valley full of feuding families—regardless of what the evidence actually showed.
Mulvenon outlasted the controversy. He went on to serve in the Arizona Legislature and founded the Arizona Brewing Company, operating it out of a building in Prescott still known today as the Mulvenon Building—a legacy that outstripped, in the end, anything he accomplished in Pleasant Valley.
Mulvenon’s Representation in “The Rim Country”
Mulvenon is present in Book Two of The Rim Country much as the record suggests he was: a man riding at the head of a posse he doesn’t fully control, chasing a resolution that keeps slipping past him until the second invasion finally forces one. I’ve leaned heavily on Earle Forrest’s Arizona’s Dark and Bloody Ground, which remains the best-reasoned reconstruction of the surviving primary sources. Almost every account written before Forrest’s was compromised by participants protecting their own reputations or covering their embarrassment, and the contemporary newspaper reports are, in places, almost comically—and demonstrably—wrong. Reconstructing Mulvenon meant reading through that fog rather than trusting any single source at face value.
On the page, he comes off as a lesser figure than Sheriff Commodore Perry Owens of Apache County, and I think that’s the honest read of the history, not just a novelist’s preference. Owens had the clean, decisive triumphs—taking down the Blevins gang single-handedly in St. Johns, later doing the same to Ike Clanton. Mulvenon’s expeditions had real institutional force behind them and plenty of newspaper coverage, but every one of them carried some unresolved stain, whether it was a failed first raid or a body count he had to answer for in court. That contrast—the sheriff who gets the clean legend versus the sheriff who gets the complicated one—is part of what makes Pleasant Valley worth telling as fiction rather than just recounting as fact.
If you want to see how that plays out on the page, Book One of The Rim Country is available for sale at https://todnewman.com/shop/the-rim-country, with Book Two—The War (1887)—following as I finish it.
Other Links of Interest
BOOK REVIEWS by Tod Newman
POSTS ABOUT SELF PUBLISHING by Tod Newman
If you liked this historical essay, you might LOVE the Many Novels authored by W. Tod Newman.
