todnewman.com --- "Thoughts, Writing and Books, Sports Analytics"

Tag: pleasant valley war

  • The Man Without a Conscience: Tom Horn in The Rim Country

    The Man Without a Conscience: Tom Horn in The Rim Country

    Readers who know their Old West history will recognize the name the moment he rides into the story. Tom Horn—real cavalry scout, Pinkerton man, and, eventually, the hired gun hanged in Wyoming in 1903 for the murder of a fourteen-year-old boy—makes an appearance in The Rim Country, and it’s worth separating what’s documented from what’s invented before saying how the novel puts him to use.

    What we actually know about Horn

    Tom Horn was a middle child: fifth of twelve, perhaps always looking to capture attention. It seems that much of his life involved his pursuing adrenaline-tingling opportunities and then eventually overstating them in his autobiography. He did not have nearly as large of a role in the pursuit of Geronimo as he claimed; probably he was just attached to the Army column that was eventually successful. He did not participate in the Battle of Cibecue Creek as he alleged. This has been debunked by historians. Overstatement of his skills got him hired by Pinkerton, where he arrested a few outlaws—right before he was arrested himself for robbing a New Mexico casino.

    The historical Horn was definitely in Arizona Territory—the setting of “The Rim Country”—in the early-to-mid 1880s, working as an army scout and interpreter. He had a hand in the campaigns against Geronimo and was present for the surrender in 1886. By the 1890s he’d remade himself as a “stock detective” for Wyoming’s big cattle interests, a euphemism that meant intimidating and, when the money called for it, killing suspected rustlers. His participation in he Pleasant Valley War, which ran roughly 1887–1892 in the Tonto Basin, is lightly documented and partially legendary: he was in the vicinity and his resume shows a blank for those years, he was known to be connected with Ed Tewksbury, there is evidence he was deputized by various lawmen in the area, and he was the right kind of man. There are reasons to believe the stories of his involvement, but remember that The Rim Country is extrapolating, not reporting.

    What the novel does with that gap

    That’s the honest frame for how Horn functions in the book: he’s a plausible, legendary ghost slotted into a real conflict, hired—in this telling—by multiple different parties who need a man with no conscience and a fastidious dedication to his employers’ requirements. In the book, he doesn’t take a side in the Graham–Tewksbury feud itself. He’s there to survey the terrain, read the cattlemen, and price out how much violence it will take to move accomplish powerful people’s goals.

    The more interesting choice is formal rather than factual. Nora Callahan, the novel’s central sensitive, can read intention and conscience in the people around her—except in Horn. He registers to her gift as an absence, not a color on the spectrum of good and bad men. That blankness becomes the novel’s way of characterizing him without narrating a backstory: rather than explaining what made Horn what he was, the book lets a reader feel the specific chill of a man who has simply removed himself from the moral register altogether, and lets that stand as its own kind of history—the kind that doesn’t survive in an archive but was very likely true of somebody in that valley in those years, whether or not it was true of Horn precisely.

    It’s a case for how historical fiction can be honest about its own liberties: naming a real man with a legend of involvement, borrowing his known reputation, and then openly building fiction into the years the record doesn’t cover.

    Other Links of Interest:

    BOOK REVIEWS by Tod Newman

    POSTS ABOUT SELF PUBLISHING by Tod Newman

    VIDEO discussing the Series

    BUY The Rim Country: Book One “The Invitation” by W. Tod Newman.

    THOUGHTS on the dysfunction of the Old West

  • Billy Mulvenon – Ambitious Sheriff from the Capital of Arizona Territory

    Billy Mulvenon – Ambitious Sheriff from the Capital of Arizona Territory

    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.

  • James D. Houck – Mail Carrier, Prospector, Trader, Lawman, Sheepherder, Arizona state legislator.

    James D. Houck – Mail Carrier, Prospector, Trader, Lawman, Sheepherder, Arizona state legislator.

    James Houck is another in a breed who drifted west in the late 1800’s to Arizona Territory—a man who was a walking contradiction. He fought in the Civil War with a Wisconsin regiment and prospected in Wyoming and Colorado before settling in Arizona at the age of 23.

    The Early Life – Ambitious and Optimistic

    At twenty-three, Houck settled in Arizona Territory relying on his Civil War experience and some failed prospecting ventures. Like my main character, Nora, from my current The Rim Country series, he came west with all his belongings packed on a mule or burro. Both of them came west with little margin searching for a new life. Nora sought a business that would be important to her community; Houck seems to have sought quick wealth.

    Early on, he got a contract with the Army to carry mail between Fort Whipple and Fort Wingate—dangerous work due to the dry, waterless terrain and the ever-present risk of attacks by the natives. He held this contract three years, then used what he’d learned of the country and its people to establish a trading post on the Puerco River, betting correctly that the railroad would come through and make his fortune. It is likely that his Navajo neighbors taught him the sheep business here.

    The bet paid off. When the railroad arrived, Houck had already built water tanks for the steam engines to be topped off—his trading post became a scheduled stop. A settlement grew up around it taking his name: “Houck’s Tank”.

    From there Houck again moved on, up into the higher country around Springerville and Heber, where he established a ranch and raised both cattle and sheep and was elected to represent Apache County as a state legislator. It was an uncomfortable position to hold two ways at once—a sheepman caught between the wealthy Flagstaff sheep interests, the Aztec Land and Cattle Company’s holdings around Holbrook, and the growing cattle business taking shape in Pleasant Valley below the Rim, all of it held in an uneasy truce that kept sheep from crossing into cattle country at the boundary of the Rim itself.

    Deputy Sheriff Houck Complicates the Pleasant Valley war

    In his early forties, Houck was recruited or volunteered to serve under the well-known lawman Sheriff Commodore Perry Owens of Apache County. It’s unclear why he chose this thankless job, but in time he was embedded down in Pleasant Valley advertising that he was officially sent to help curtail the range war between the cattlemen and the sheepmen. Since he was a sheepman himself, there was much suspicion that he was aligned on one side of the battle. The record shows that he was involved in extrajudicial killings of multiple men solely connected to the cattle ranching side of the war—and that most likely he lied repeatedly to cover it up. There’s no evidence that he ever had warrants for these men. The record indicates he was operating more as a mercenary but with a badge.

    In 1900, thirteen years after the Pleasant Valley war, Houck bought Cave Creek station, north of Phoenix, and developed it as a shearing camp for sheepmen. His general store was built of rock, solid and a local reference point. He filled his time by jumping back into enforcing the law in Maricopa County and getting some mail routes. Eventually Cave Creek—and the Houck Ranch—became sought after by tuberculars looking for better weather.

    Houck saw a downturn in his fortune as a drought and persistent overgrazing brought Cave Creek down to a trickle and many of the folks moved away. Houck got divorced, remarried, and eventually closed his store. The King of Cave Creek was broken and took a fatal dose of strychnine at age 75.

    Houck in “The Rim Country” Book Two

    In the second book of the Rim Country series, Houck makes an appearance. Consistent with the best analysis (Arizona’s Dark and Bloody Ground, by Earle R. Forrest) that sifted through the oft-contradictory primary sources, Houck was aligned with the Tewksbury family and may have used his badge in the valley without the knowledge of Sheriff Owens in St. Johns. This is how I write him. He made claims to have warrants that history is fairly clear that he didn’t have—Owens had a hard time getting warrants even for the Blevins boys himself. Doubtful the judge ever gave him a warrant for the Grahams.

    I show Houck going through the valley looking for information—something it seems likely he would have done for a while. When William Graham—John’s little brother—is murdered, I write the story of Houck taking credit for it, knowing that the lawless conditions in the valley plus his official position will protect him. I also speculate in the book, due to some reports that William Graham indicated he was shot by a Tewksbury, that Houck was covering for one of his Tewksbury friends—possibly Ed. We’ll never know for sure, but what we do know is that Houck’s time in Pleasant Valley created undue chaos. I attempt to show this confusion through the eyes of multiple characters.

    How was the valley confused? Houck was hunting Grahams at the same time a different county sheriff was attempting to serve warrants to the Tewksbury men for the murder of Hamp Blevins. There was also known to be a marauding band of Chiricahua Apache in the valley pillaging ranches while resisting being sent west to Florida by the U.S. Army.

    It seems clear that Houck was involved in five or six murders, including a lynching in the valley. The lynching, especially, seemed very useful to Houck’s career ambitions. Houck was found grazing sheep on the ranch of one of the victims afterwards and indicated to the victim’s mother that nothing would ever be done about the lynching. This is what the best analysis of the historical record indicates; in my novel I fill in the gaps to try to explain Houck’s motivations.

    Conclusion – How I Treat Houck in The RIm Country

    In The Rim Country: The War (1887), I work to capture all of this ambiguity about Houck. Someone who fought in the war, served the government, traded with the Navajo, and desired to be a deputy sheriff must have some redeeming qualities. But a deeper look into his life reveals a man who was inconsistent and was always looking for greener grass on the other side of the range.

    Other Links of Interest

    MORE BOOK REVIEWS by Tod Newman

    Other NOVELS by Tod Newman

    If you liked this review, you might LOVE the The Rim Country Series authored by W. Tod Newman. Book Two – “The War (1887)” coming soon! Sign up below to the mailing list for info on its release.

    The Rim Country Book One
    The Rim Country Book One

    More about The War They Forgot to Put in the History Books!

  • Video Update on Pleasant Valley War Novel Series

    See what you think. I’m trying different ways to get the word out on how Book Two of “The Rim Country” series is coming.

    Other Links of Interest

    BOOK REVIEWS by Tod Newman

    POSTS ABOUT SELF PUBLISHING by Tod Newman

    If you liked this Video, you might LOVE the Many Novels authored by W. Tod Newman.

  • The War They Forgot to Put in the History Books

    The War They Forgot to Put in the History Books

    Most Arizonans know the name Tombstone. The O.K. Corral. Wyatt Earp. The gunfight that lasted thirty seconds and generated movies and a hundred years of mythology.

    Fewer know about Pleasant Valley. It is the War they forgot to put in the history books. Why? Because the town that survived—which even changed its name to make a break from the shame—refused to discuss what happened until forty years later.

    In the summer of 1887, a feud erupted in the Tonto Basin between two ranching families—the Tewksburys and the Grahams—that would kill somewhere between thirty and fifty men over the next five years, wipe out the male lines of both families, and leave a valley so saturated with violence that the survivors renamed it just to escape the memory. By body count, the Pleasant Valley War was the deadliest range conflict in the history of the American West. It makes the O.K. Corral look like a disagreement over a fence line.

    And almost nobody outside Arizona has heard of it. And few inside Arizona, to be honest.

    I’ve been researching this conflict for the better part of a year, and the more I dig, the more convinced I am that the Pleasant Valley War is one of the great untold stories of American history. Not because of the violence—though the violence is extraordinary—but because of what the violence reveals. This wasn’t a simple feud between bad men. It was a collision of cattle and sheep interests, racial prejudice against the half-Native American Tewksbury family, the corrupting influence of a territorial cattle baron with political aspirations named James Stinson, the arrival of hired killers like Tom Horn, and the fundamental question of who had the right to determine what an ideal ranching valley was for.

    Why I’m writing about it as fiction

    When I first encountered the Pleasant Valley War, my instinct was to research the history for a possible historical fiction novel. But the historical record has a gap at its center that no amount of research can fill: the inner lives of the people involved. We know what happened from a few differing perspectives. We don’t know what it felt like to watch it happen from inside the valley, day by day, before anyone knew how it would end. That feels useful to me. Is this the sort of pressure between opposing sides we’re feeling today—and are we equally unsure of the outcome?

    As someone who loves filling in these human gaps of history, I revel in the knowledge that this is where beautiful fiction lives.

    The Rim Country is my attempt to inhabit that gap. The novel follows Nora Callahan, a widowed Irish immigrant who settles in Pleasant Valley in 1882—five years before the killing starts—and finds herself positioned between the two families as their friendship slowly becomes something else. Nora has an unusual gift: a barometric sensitivity to the intentions of the people around her, a kind of reading weather that gives her early warning of what’s coming and no way to stop it.

    She is fictional. Everything around her is as historically accurate as I can make it.

    The Mogollon Rim, which forms the northern boundary of Pleasant Valley and rises 2,000 feet above the Tonto Basin floor, is the novel’s central symbol—a wall between worlds, between the valley’s closed world and the open country above, between what the valley was and what it was becoming. I’ve driven that rim. I’ve stood at the edge and looked down into the basin and understood, in a way that no map communicates, why the people who settled there felt both protected and trapped.

    That feeling is what I’m trying to put on the page.

    Why Wattpad?

    I’m publishing The Rim Country serially on Wattpad, which means you can read it chapter by chapter, free, as it develops. Book One of this series was completed on Wattpad and now is available for purchase at the link below. Now Book Two is in work on Wattpad.

    Serial publication is how Dickens published. It’s how most of the great Victorian novels reached their audiences — chapter by chapter, with readers waiting to find out what happened next. There’s something fitting about telling a story of this era the way stories were told in that era.

    If you’re interested in Arizona history, the Pleasant Valley War, or simply in fiction that takes its geography seriously, I’d invite you to start at the beginning. Chapter One is short. The mule is opinionated. The valley is beautiful.

    It won’t stay that way.

    Tod Newman writes historical fiction under the Desdichado Books imprint. He reviews books at todnewman.com and posts about the writing life, Arizona history, and whatever the Mogollon Rim is doing today.