In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

90 According to Leonard Alverson, none of the Ketchum gang, except Will Carver, had visited Texas Canyon before the September of 1897, when Carver led the party thither following the Folsom robbery.1 Aside from the likelihood that they showed up early in October, rather than September, there is no cause to dispute this, even though Alverson, in general, may have understated his dealings with the outlaws. Tom and Sam had seen something of Cochise County during late 1896 and early 1897, but many with a far more thorough knowledge of the country would not have been able to locate the canyon. Atkins’s detailed account of their long ride shows clearly that he had never been there before. In the fall of 1897, Walter Hovey, alias Hoffman, was fresh from a killing. Walter, commonly described as a cowboy or “farm laborer,” had fallen afoul of a ranchman named Joe Richards. Each threatened to kill the other, and one night someone tried to ambush Hovey near his home in Hunt Canyon. The conclusion followed swiftly. On the morning of Saturday, August 14, Hovey ran Richards to earth at the John Banke (or Bankey) ranch in Horseshoe Valley, in the Swisshelm Mountains, near Bisbee. Both men were armed. Hovey said afterwards that Richards reached for his gun with the words “God damn you, I’m going to kill you.” “But I got the drop first,” added Walter, “and that’s all there is to it.” The probate judge found that Richards had been the aggressor and discharged Hovey.2 As Hovey related it to a press correspondent in Tombstone, their difference arose because Richards had “wrongfully accused him of carrying tales with regard to cattle brands.”A version of this side of the dispute which he gave to the euphoniously-titled Bisbee Lyre was more explicit with names and circumstances, but amounted to the same. As the Lyre judged it, the killing was “the result of tale bearing busy bodies who are supposed to be friends of both parties.” The real reason, or a further one, may have been that Richards had spoken freely of Hovey’s friendship with Black Jack Christian’s old gang, the survivors of which were a migratory presence in upper Sonora and Chihuahua, southeastern Arizona, and southwestern New Mexico during + 7 ∂ CROSSED TRAILS Crossed Trails 91 the summer of 1897. U.S. Marshal Foraker claimed, perhaps extravagantly, that the Black Jack gang were “directly responsible” for the death of Richards.3 Foraker rightly discounted allegations that the Black Jack gang had committed the Folsom robbery, but he would have been surprised to hear that the authors of this latter crime were headed for the stretch of country where the Black Jack outlaws were then circulating. He did not know the names of the Folsom robbers; to his mind Tom Ketchum was long dead.4 It was symptomatic of the hiatus between the law-enforcement agencies that Foraker had no knowledge of Tom Ketchum’s feat in rising from the grave to lead the Lozier robbers. The converse was true of the Texas officers. They may have laughed at the initial reports that Black Jack, the man slain in Cole Creek Canyon, was really Tom Ketchum. But they were slow to grasp that this mistaken belief persisted for months with many in New Mexico and Arizona.5 By no means all the newspaper stories on the movements of outlaw bands were unfounded; the more inane were as likely to derive from a hasty official utterance as from journalistic licence. Cowpunchers, settlers , prospectors, or sheepherders would exchange news by word of mouth, but precious little trickled through to the officers in time for them to use it. Official and journalistic disseminators of misinformation combined in the previously mentioned report in the Santa Fe Daily New Mexican of August 21, 1897, where Dud [Dave] Atkins, Bud Upston [Upshaw], and Tom Kitchum [Ketchum] were named along with Tom Anderson (Bob Christian, but identified here in mistake for either Carver or Sam Ketchum) as the authors of a complicated and bloody series of rangeland events in Socorro and western Grant Counties.6 But neither the Snaky Four nor the remnant of the High Five gang had any role in the tit-for-tat sequence of ambush and retaliation. All these incidents turned out to be part of a vendetta between rival cattlemen-cum-cattle rustlers. Nor could the outlaws have been involved even if they had wanted to be. At the...

Share