I
know what 21 year old John Pleasant Gray was thinking on the evening
of Saturday, 13 August, 1881, when he first saw the bloody man
staggering through the yellow tabosa grasses. He was frightened, fearing an
Apache raiding party must have ambushed the workmen who had spent a
month building the adobe cabin he had slept in for the first time
last night. The laborers had left the day before, escorted by the
ranch hands, leaving only himself and the cook in their isolated
outpost 15 miles north of the Mexican border. And in the clear air
of the New Mexico dusk, John could see the dark brown blood caked on
the man's lower face, as he stumbled across the distance between
them.
Raised
in civilized Sacramento, California, and the Sonora, Mexico port of
Guyamas, John Gray had never seen the Animus mountains before the
spring of 1881. He could not know that Apaches could rarely afford
attacking large parties of whites. John had never seen the Sonoran
Desert before 1880, when after graduating college he joined his
family in Tombstone, Arizona.
John's
father, 56 year old (in 1881) "Colonel" Mike Lee had lived
in Tombstone almost since before it was a town - 1879. He had
lived there long enough to be sued by Ed Schefflin for stealing ore
from The Good Enough claim. But Mike had served in the California
Legislature, and hired expensive Sacramento lawyers, who counter sued
Ed - and won. The title of "Colonel" was purely
ornimental. Mike Lee had been born in Tennesse and raised in Texas,
and moved to California in 1849, but he never served in the milia in
any of those places.
In Tombstone(above) Mike Gray owned a boarding house, was
secretary to the town council, and served as a Justice of the Peace,
where he acquired the title of "Judge". As such Judge Gray
spent his time arrainging alledged drunks, petty thieves and killers,
and assessing taxes. He was a "mover and a shaker" in
Tombstone, well known as "selfish and dishonest" and "a
slippery character". That spring of 1880, looking to give his
returning son John Pleasant a good start in life. Judge Gray paid the
infamous Curley Bill Brocius $300 sight unseen for 300,000 acres of
land on the slopes of the Animus Mountains, in New Mexico. And he
sent John and his 18 year old son Richard "Dixie Dick" Lee
Gray, to manage the palce, although neither of them had any more
expericence at ranching than did Judge Colonel Mike Gray himself.
Curly
Bill Brocius (above) did not actually own paper to the land in the Animus
mountains. He claimed a homestead there.
Brocius and he and his partner, Robert E. "Dutch" Martin (above), often grazed
cattle there, which they had rustled in Sonora Mexico, and driven
across the border through Guadalupe
canyon, about 20 miles south of Martin's ranch around a New Mexico
the spring called Cloverdale. In Sonora 'Dutch' Martin was known
as a thief and a murder, responsible for killing a dozen Mexican
citizens a year. But in Cloverdale Robert Martin was a respected
businessman, with a wife and child.
Just
about the time John Pleasant Gray was graduating from the University
of California, businessman Dutch Martin had been murdered - shot in
the head from ambush by rustlers who had lately taken to rustling the
largest rustler's cattle. 'Dutch' Martin was 45 years old when he
died, and William "Curley Bill" Brocius (above) was nearly 40
himself. Where the freckled faced "Curley Bill" had once
been, ".. able to hit running jackrabbits, shoot out candle
flames...and ...quarters from between the fingers of "volunteers,
" the middle aged alcoholic Curley Bill's world was beginning to blur at
the edges, like Wild Bill Hickock's before him. Hickok had died at
39, so Brocius the gunman was living on borrowed time. Time to change
careers. And time to replace Dutch Martin in the Rustlers Trail.
The
trail began between the western foot of the Dragoon Mountains and
eastern rampart of the Mule Mountains, centered upon the San Pedro
River (above, left). There, cattle were fattened on the feed lots of the Clanton
and McLaury ranches before being slaughtered to feed the hungry
miners in Tombstone and its mill town outliers of Charleston,
Contention, Fairbank and Millville. The cows had arrived in this
promised land from the east, by crossing the Dragoons through South
Pass, and enduring the water-less desert of the Sulfur
Springs Valley. The drovers had prepared the cows for this endeavor
by fattening and watering them on the slopes of the 6,000 foot high
Chihuahua Mountains (above, right), at way stations like the Horse Shoe Valley 7-Up
ranch , whose owner of record was a San Francisco barkeep named
"Buckskin" Frank Leslie - recruited by Curley Bill.
The
Chiricahua mountain ranches were a rest stop after the herds had
traversed the north-south San Simon Valley, which they had crossed
after resting on the slopes of the Pedrogosa or Peloncillo Mountains, transited by
the easy, well watered Skeleton Canyon on the Arizona-New Mexico
border (above).
Between the western mouth of Skeleton Canyon, it had been
an easy drive across the San Bernadino Valley from the Animus
Mountains, where the new Gray Ranch (above) was to provide ample
grass and water, just 15 miles north of the beginning of the trail -
the American side of the the winding, deadly pass through the
Guadalupe Mountains.
The
man who finally staggered into the Gray ranch that Saturday evening
had spent the day traversing an arm of the San Bernadino Valley, on
foot. He was exhausted, sunburned, dehydrated, and incoherent. It was
some time before he could even identify himself. But when John Gray
learned the man was not one of the construction workers, but a Cow Boy named Harry
Ernshaw he panicked. Ernshaw had been in the rustler party with as
his 19 year old brother. "Dixie Lee "Gray had been gone
south of the border to learn the rustler art under the tutelage of
Old Man Clanton himself. As quickly as he could, John saddled a
horse and went for help. He rode 20 miles east, to the slopes of the
highest peak of the Animus mountains, Mount Gillespie. Here, he knew
was a "Cow Boy" camp.
John
Gray would dramatically described the twisting canyon ride on dawn Sunday 14 August 1881, and the growing dread he felt approaching the grassy clearing where he had been told his brother's body lay.
"Out
of the clear sky," John recalled, "a black speck appears and
soon other black specks ... Soon they are high overhead, beginning to
circle slowly...circling round and round - and you know that
somewhere within that circle on the earth below lies a corpse..."
When the canyon walls fell away, John remembered the top of every
tree in the clearing supported at least one of those "fiendish
looking" birds. Sixty years later he said he thought of every
buzzard as, "the worlds most vigilant undertaker."
The
image of the 4 bodies was burned into his mind. "All were
perfectly nude...Billy Lang...Jim Crane...Old Man Clanton...and my
brother Dick, just turned nineteen....We found the dead body of
Charlie Snow...about a half-mile from the camp. The other cowboy,
Billy Byers, we found alive some five miles away. He was shot through
the front of the abdomen and the ball had gone clear through his
body..." Byers was "completely out of his head", but
he would recover.
John recalled, "We took our dead back to the
ranch." There they ripped up the cabin's flooring to make
coffins. "We buried the four bodies in a little square plot
on the top of the nearby knoll."
Before
its first stolen herd had even reached the new oasis, the Gray Ranch
had turned to dust in the mouths of its new owners. In his 1940
memoir "All Roads Led To Tombstone", John Pleasant Gray
sanitized the events of that summer, as people are wont to do with time. He
remembered, "My father and I felt conditions were too hard at
the time to fight against." He did not mention that the naked
scavaged corpse of his 19 year old brother had represented the
inflated cost of stolen Sonoran cattle. But Judge Gray had $300
invested in the property, and John Gray remembered his father
insisted they hold onto the property. "I made a trip out from Tombstone
every month," he remembered, "to sleep one night at the
ranch in order to comply with the preemption law." And to visit
his brother's grave. In closing that early episode in his long life
he added that after the Guadalupe Canyon Massacare, "Even the
rustlers kept out of the valley for fear of meeting the Mexicans."
A
few years later, Judge Gray sold the rustler's oasis to the George Hearst, father of William Randolph Hearst, for $12,000. So in the end I guess it proved
worth the life of Judge Gray's youngest son. But John Gray never said so.
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