Arizona's Deadliest Gunfight: Draft Resistance and Tragedy at the Power Cabin, 1918 by Heidi J. Osselaer (review)

With such a book title as Arizona's Deadliest Gunfight, one might expect to find yet another dramatic account of legendary Wild West gunslinging at the O.K. Corral. But, perhaps surprisingly, Heidi J. Osselaer's book is about draft dodgers during the First World War, although—to be sure—this carefully researched history is no less colorful and exciting. The book's timely publication amid the centennial commemorations of the Great War adds to a growing body of recent scholarship—a good deal of which builds on Jeanette Keith's Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War (2004)—that sheds important light on the often forgotten or misunderstood realities of rural people who opposed the United States's involvement in World War I, especially its compulsory military conscription. Osselaer's impressively researched book aims to cut through stereotypes and conspiracy theories to provide a responsible, even-handed account of the February 1918 showdown in southeastern Arizona's Galiuro Mountains, which resulted in the violent deaths of Jeff Power, the father of two draft resisters, and three local lawmen and threw the region into a frenzy.

Osselaer seeks to move beyond older and narrower folklore debates about who should be blamed for firing the first shots on that cold, fateful morning at the Power cabin, though she does work through that historical evidence, too. Instead, the book focuses on what Osselaer sees as the "central question" in what she says was really a "much larger battle over what it meant to be an American during World War I": "Why did lawmen feel it was necessary to travel for miles into the backwoods in the middle of the night and in the dead of winter to arrest men wanted for nonviolent crimes?" (p. xiv). She argues that this tragic event ultimately represented a clash between a traditionalist Power family who "sought seclusion from the world" and a modernist sheriff and posse who zealously "sought to bring law and order" to Graham County, especially amid the hyper-patriotism of the war years (p. xiv).

Osselaer sets out in the first several chapters to better understand why the Powers resisted the draft and delves deep into the family's history in search of clues. "Members of the Power family were always hill people," she writes, poor hardscrabble farmers and miners who had settled "in at least ten different states and territories" before arriving in Arizona (p. 3). This foray into Power family history unearths some important insights, such as reasonable speculation that Jeff Power's father, Sam, may have even avoided the Confederacy's military conscription in the Texas Hill Country during the Civil War. But Osselaer reaches too far in other places in her attempt to link long ancestral traditions to the Powers' draft resistance in 1918, like her presumptions about unchanging Jeffersonian precepts that instilled in the Powers a natural suspicion of government authority and a supposedly generational culture of southern honor that made them "unwilling to turn the other cheek" (p. 32). These overstretched and unconvincing assumptions weaken the book's larger traditionalists-versus-modernists interpretive framework. After all, despite the Power family's residence in remote Rattlesnake Canyon, their gold mining aspirations and other ambitions defy a simple characterization of tradition-bound hill hermits who wanted to isolate themselves away from the modernizing world around them.

Osselaer is on much firmer ground in recounting the differences and tensions between Sheriff Frank McBride and the Gila Valley townsfolk, on the one hand, and rural mountain and canyon folks like the Powers, on the other, who were often "viewed as heathens" by the former (p. 71). McBride, who owed his election to fellow Mormons in the valley—"the largest bloc of voters in … Graham County"—and local supporters of prohibition, had set...