With Blood in Their Eyes

Chapter Nine: 1915

Chapter Nine 1915 Robert Franklin McBride had been a deputy sheriff of Graham County, Arizona, for ten months when he could stand it no more. Again, he had arrested two men riding the road from Solomonville to Safford with a load of whiskey. Again, they had been released on the grounds of “insufficient evidence,” though there were six casesof homemade whiskeytakenfromtheirauto and stored inthebasement of the Graham County Courthouse in Safford. TheillegalliquorwaspouredoutonthedirtroadsofSaffordtosettlethedust. It seemed to McBride that a lot less whiskey and gin was being dumped than had been taken in. Whether Sheriff Tom Alger was in on the missing whiskey didn’t really matter. It was his jail, and if he wasn’t directly involved, he was complicit. It gnawed on McBride. He had risked a good deal going after whiskey runners headed for Safford and on to Fort Thomas on the Apache reservation. Once he had been shot at, and a couple of times he had to physically force runners to the ground in order to shackle them. It was usually for nothing. Runners rarely went to trial, and many, like the latest arrests, spent just a day or two in jail before they were set loose. The prohibition of alcohol in Arizona wasn’t a bad law. But enforcement was lacking. McBride thought sometimes it might be better if there were no law. But there was one, enforced or not. He didn’t like alcohol and had never consumed it himself, though most of his friends had at least tried it once or twice when they were boys. The use of alcohol was forbidden by scripture, as was tobacco and other stimulants. But the teaching of the Latter-Day Saints aside, he saw from his own experience that alcohol quickly turned good men into fools and otherwise good women into tramps and slatterns. One of his own friends, a Latter-Day Saint in good standing, had a fondness for the stuff, and McBride had been called on more than once to come to his friend’s aid when he was under the influence. Like a true friend, McBride helped to conceal his friend’s secret to the detriment of both their souls. The prohibition law, many argued, was simply a way to entice the United States into granting Arizona statehood, which it had done three years ago. Like the abolition of the death penalty, the law was a good compromise to those who, far away, wished to rule the lives of those in Arizona, a good deal of whom were 87 Thomas Cobb Mormon. It would not be seemly to repeal those laws so soon after statehood, thereby admitting that they had been passed to ease the way for statehood. And the church supported the ban, and he respected the authority of the church, whose politics, by revelation, came directly from God. Still, he thought it a terrible charade to pretend to enforce a law when you were actually turning a blind eye to those who broke it. He wasn’t keen on the death penalty, though he had a hard time refuting the argument that the death penalty ultimately saved lives. He had some difficulty, however,understandinghowtakingalifesavedmorelives.Inhisshortexperience with criminals and with murder, most murders were committed when the killer was out of his mind with rage, fear, or hatred and wouldn’t be stopped by the knowledge that there was a death penalty. In fact, the two murderers he did know seemed decent-enough men who had gotten themselves into tight spots they didn’t know how to get out of. Still, the Heavenly Father was clear on His commandments. Personally, he would rather deal with a murderer than a whiskey runner who was driven by a quite well reasoned desire for wealth. And there was good money in whiskey. Very good money. The prohibition of whiskey had driven its price up to a nearly incredible twenty dollars a quart, when gold itself was eighteen dollars an ounce. An ounce of gold, which would take a man considerable time to sluice, fell short of buying one quart of whiskey. The prohibition dwindled supply, which drove up prices. The high prices drove greed, which drove the illegal production and distribution of the stuff. He was struck by the way the most firm believers in the forces of the marketplace could be convinced that they didn’t operate in situations involving ethics and morality. Maybe he had been better off as a carpenter. He was a decent...