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.
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. There are fourteen chapters posted now, covering the years 1882 through 1884 — the friendship, the partnership, the betrayal, and the first death that makes everything that follows inevitable.
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.
[Read The Rim Country on Wattpad — free]
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.