According to legend, Wyatt Earp single-handedly held off a mob of Tombstone miners attempting to string up a gambler. The actual facts are these: on...
Wyatt Earp vs. a Tombstone Mob
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Bob Boze Bell
The Arizona Rangers vs. Criminals
Arizona has had three different Arizona Ranger law enforcement groups. The first Ranger group was created in 1860, the second in 1882 and the third...
The Hairy One Hangs
Sonoran bandito, Augustine Chacon, alias Peluda (“The Hairy One”), robbed and killed in Arizona, and then hid out in the Sierra Madres until his...
Vaquero: Master Horsemen of the Southwest
The American cowboy owes so much to the master horsemen—Mexican vaqueros—who were rounding up cattle on horseback several hundreds of years before...
Named By Their Enemies
The Spanish asked the Zunis who those renegades were who were running off with all their horses and a Zuni said, “Enemies,” which sounded to the...
Wells Fargo Agent Relieved of Cash And His Prize Pistols
At the end of 1881 and early 1882, a flurry of stagecoach robberies in Cochise County brings Wells Fargo Agent James Hume from San Francisco to...
Hi Jolly
Hadji Ali reportedly hailed from Syria and arrived in Texas in 1856 to escort a shipment of camels for use by the U.S. Army. In 1857, leaving from...
Wyatt on the Phone: “Can You Hear Me Now?”
In 1926, Wyatt Earp wrote his autobiography with a friend, John Flood. In it Earp recalled using a telephone in Tombstone (taking a call from...
First in War, First in Peace
Perhaps the greatest chief of the Chiricahua Apaches who ever lived, Cochise fought his way through southeastern Arizona and into Mexico in the...
Tall Paul
One of the tallest men in Arizona territory in the 1880s was Pima County Sheriff Bob Paul. The former stagecoach shotgun messenger had been on the...
Ambush at Bloody Run
United States Army Paymaster Maj. Joseph Washington Wham (rhymes with bomb) is riding in a dougherty (canopied ambulance) on his way to pay “all...
Mining Your Own Business
Approximately 250,000 abandoned mines exist in the state of Arizona, testifying to the scope and impact of mining on the state. Naturally, at the...