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  • 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.

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    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.

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  • 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.