Legends of the Old West - PLEASANT VALLEY WAR Ep. 4 | “The Disappearance of Martin Blevins”

Episode Date: July 28, 2021

In August 1887, the simmering feud heats up to a boil when the notorious Blevins family becomes an ally of the Graham family. When a member of the Blevins family disappears, a search party finds itself in a deadly shootout with a Tewsbury brother. A Tewksbury ally discovers that his ranch has been burned, and then a Graham brother suffers a terrible wound during an early-morning ambush. Join Black Barrel+ for bingeable seasons and no commercials: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. This show is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please visit AirwaveMedia.com to check out other great podcasts like Ben Franklin’s World, Once Upon A Crime, and many more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. On May 3rd, 1887, at about 3 o'clock in the afternoon, there was a heavy rumbling sound in towns all over southern and central Arizona. At lower elevations, geysers of water shot up from the ground and caused dry creek beds to roar to life as raging rivers. Mountains seemed to shake and crack, and great plumes of dust and debris flew skyward like eruptions from volcanoes. In Tombstone, the Epitaph newspaper reported that of the approximately 7,000 adobe bricks used in buildings around town, fewer than 120 were left unbroken. The event was the Sonora earthquake, the largest known earthquake to hit Arizona.

The epicenter was just south of the town of Douglas, on a fault line near the Arizona-Mexico border. was just south of the town of Douglas on a fault line near the Arizona-Mexico border. Today, Douglas is one of two main border crossings in southern Arizona, the other being Nogales, straight south of Tucson. Around 60 people were killed in Douglas, and the earthquake has been estimated as a 7.6 on the Richter scale. By comparison, the Great San Francisco earthquake that destroyed the city in 1906 was estimated as a 7.9. For those who remember the Northridge earthquake in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles in 1994, the one that caused $6 billion worth of damage, that was a 6.7. The Sonora earthquake was felt from Phoenix in the north to Mexico City in the south, and from Yuma in the west to El Paso in the east.

On the Apache reservations, members of several bands thought the end of times might be near, and they gathered for the day of reckoning that they thought was upon them. The apocalypse didn't happen, and the earthquake largely spared Pleasant Valley, but it was, in fact, the beginning of the end for the three main families in the Pleasant Valley War. The next five years would be a period of reckoning, and most of the combatants would not survive it. Thank you. commerce platform that helps you sell and grow at every stage of your business. From the launch your online shop stage, all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage. Whether you're selling scented soap or offering outdoor outfits, Shopify helps you sell everywhere. They have an all-in-one e-commerce platform and in-person POS system. So wherever and whatever you're selling,

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business, no matter what stage you're in. shopify.com slash realm. From Black Barrel Media, this is Legends of the Old West. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. And this is a six-part series about the bloodiest feud in the West, the Pleasant Valley War. This is Episode 4, The Disappearance of Martin Blevins. Mormon pioneers John and Will Adams settled on a stretch of Canyon Creek in the northern

end of Pleasant Valley. They were right outside the northwest corner of the Fort Apache Reservation. Their homestead was remote in terms of being isolated from other settlers, but it was relatively close to herds of cattle and horses, and the railroad in the town of Holbrook was on a straight line to the northeast. Those factors made it an ideal spot for a family on the run. Martin Blevins moved his family from Texas to Arizona, probably to stay ahead of the law. The Blevins family was known as a collection of horse thieves, and Martin was connected to a gun

fight that happened after a horse race. His eldest son, Andy, was also connected to the murder of a deputy sheriff. So a remote location that was also within striking distance of cattle herds and a railroad would do nicely for the Blevins clan. All they had to do was get rid of John and Will Adams. The two eldest brothers of the Blevins family, Andy and Charlie, confronted John and Will at the homestead. The Blevins boys produced their guns, and Andy ordered the Adams boys to leave their home or they would be killed on the spot. It seems like John and Will complied. It's not clear if they tried to get help from the law, but either way, they left Arizona. And just like that,

the Blevins family had a ranch in Pleasant Valley. Apparently, they wasted no time re-establishing their reputations as no accounts and thieves. A prominent resident in the town of Snowflake called them the worst family of thieves and outlaws in the country. Within a year of their arrival in Pleasant Valley, some newspapers described them as the boldest and most daring of desperados. Others came right out and called them horse thieves and cattle rustlers. Soon, the words Canyon Creek, where they had their ranch, became a common metaphor for the Blevins' operation. They quickly became one of the chief suppliers of stolen

livestock. They preyed on Mormon settlements and herds that belonged to the Navajo or the Apache. Andy Blevins' name appeared in newspapers just before Christmas, 1885. According to his statement, Andy stumbled upon a group of Navajo men stealing horses from the ranch. He shot and killed two of them, and wounded two others. The way the papers explained it, Andy was in the right, and the Navajo men allegedly had bad reputations amongst their people. The next month, in January of 1886, Andy was in the papers again for an eerily similar reason. Again, he purportedly caught some Navajo men trying to steal a horse that belonged to his employer. He claimed he followed them, recaptured the animal,

and was returning home when the Navajos threatened him with their guns. Andy immediately opened fire with his Winchester and killed two Navajo and wounded a third. So in the space of two months, he seems to have killed four Navajo men and wounded a third. So in the space of two months, he seems to have killed four Navajo men and wounded three more. As the months passed, the communities in the area started to view the Blevins brothers as the instigators, not the Navajo. Native American leaders stopped allowing white settlers to graze cattle on native land.

And with the long history of raids and reprisals in the area, one newspaper issued a warning. Such troubles are serious, and if the white men don't unite in putting a stop to this stealing from the Navajos, we may see terrible times along this river from it. The paper turned out to be right. In March 1887, a number of the Blevins family brazenly stole 75 Navajo horses. A party of Navajo tracked the thieves, which wasn't hard to do because the Blevins clan didn't even try to cover its trail. about halfway between the towns of Payson and Snowflake, which was in the vicinity of the Blevins Ranch on Canyon Creek but doesn't appear to have been the Blevins homestead. The Navajo captured one of the Blevins brothers, but we don't know which one.

Whichever it was, the Navajo forced him to show them the location of the horses. At some point, the Blevins brother broke away, drew his revolver, and fired at the Navajo. The Navajo returned fire, and one of the shots hit the Blevins' brother. The wound was in the thigh, and it was bad, but he managed to escape to another nearby ranch. The Navajo ended their pursuit at that point, but it wasn't the end of their search for Andy Blevins. But it wasn't the end of their search for Andy Blevins. If there was still any mystery about the feelings of the Navajo toward the Blevins family, it was cleared up real quick a few weeks after the altercation about the stolen horses.

One of the Blevins family went to a store in the town of Heber to buy some potatoes. While Blevins and the store owner were down in the cellar selecting the potatoes, a party of Navajo rode up to the business. They were painted for war and yelled the name Blevins over and over. The wife of the store owner reacted quickly. She had just finished baking 12 loaves of bread. She pulled them out of the oven and loaded them into her apron, which must have been huge. She ran outside and began handing them to the Navajo war party. Now, if you've ever been in the presence of freshly baked homemade bread, you know the glory of it.

The Navajo lived in a state of constant hunger, and the smell of the bread must have been The Navajo lived in a state of constant hunger, and the smell of the bread must have been intoxicating. The warriors accepted the loaves in place of the Blevins and rode away. Whichever Blevins was in the store, he knew he'd come within an inch of his life. But that was the end of the close calls. The Blevins family made enemies of pretty much everyone in the area, and their luck was running out. In July 1887, a few months after the incident in Heber, the three oldest brothers, Andy, Charlie, and Hampton, decided to travel to Holbrook to buy supplies. Before they left, they turned a herd of horses out to graze. The morning after they departed, their father Martin discovered the herd was gone.

Martin returned to the cabin to tell his son John that he was going to track the horses while their trail was still fresh. He rode out with a neighbor and traveled south. After two days of searching, the neighbor went home. They hadn't seen any sign of the animals, and the man had to get back to working his own ranch. The neighbors stopped by the Blevins Ranch to tell Mrs. Blevins that Martin was continuing the search. She was worried. Martin hadn't taken enough supplies for a long journey, and now he was in the area of the Middleton Ranch. Six years earlier, in the fall of 1881, Apaches had attacked the Middleton family at the ranch and killed two men. The family narrowly escaped and never returned to the ranch.

And the Apaches hated the Blevins family just as much as the Navajo did. The Blevins stole Apache horses at every opportunity. When the older Blevins boys returned from Holbrook, their mother sent them to look for their father. The boys searched for a day and a half, but they had difficulty picking up a trail. They returned to their ranch, resupplied, and divided up. They also added some hash knife cowboys to their search parties. The search parties zigzagged back and forth along Canyon Creek, trying to pick up Martin's trail.

By the second week of August, they'd managed to search a 20-mile section south of their ranch and had no luck. They were frustrated, and the daytime temperatures were growing steadily hotter. They didn't give up the search, but ultimately, they never found Martin Blevins.

He just disappeared. But as one of the search parties traveled closer to the old Middleton ranch, the men smelled smoked meat. William Middleton had sold his ranch to a merchant, and now the merchant's brother-in-law, George Wilson, was at the cabin. Also at the cabin was Wilson's friend, Jim Tewksbury, the hot-headed Tewksbury who'd committed armed robbery three years earlier. So Jim Tewksbury, plus a Blevins brother, plus some hash knife cowboys, was a recipe for disaster. As the search party rode up, Jim Tewksbury cracked open the cabin door. The distance between the front door and where the search party had stopped was about 30 yards. The searchers asked for supper, which was a common request.

As you no doubt know already, it was customary in the West to offer a meal and a place to stay to riders who passed by your house. So the searchers were surprised when Jim replied by saying something like, no, sir, we ain't running no hotel here. The searchers couldn't see it, but Tewksbury held a cocked Winchester rifle in his other hand behind the door, and George Wilson, though he was terrified, stood in a corner of the room with a shotgun. The party turned their horses around and cursed the two men who would not give them hospitality, and then one of the Hashknife Cowboys, John Payne, took it too far. He shouted a racial slur at Tewksbury, whose half-Native American blood sometimes made him an easy target for cheap insults. Depending on who was telling the story, Payne may have also fired a shot at the cabin. Either way, Jim pulled his Winchester out from behind the door and fired at the searchers. Jim Tewksbury was a hell of a shot. His first bullet hit Hampton

Blevins in the head and killed him instantly. Hampton tumbled from his horse. The other searchers kicked their horses and started to flee, but Jim kept firing. His next bullet shattered the ribs and pierced the lungs of one of the cowboys. His next shot hit the man in the knee, went through his leg, and hit his horse. The horse ran for a few more steps and then collapsed and died. John Payne managed to squeeze off a shot toward the cabin, but Jim turned his rifle toward the cowboy and fired. The shot hit John's horse and killed it. The horse fell to the ground and trapped John underneath,

and Jim kept firing. A bullet screamed past John Payne's head and tore off his ear. Payne struggled free of his horse and started to run, but a bullet smacked him in the back. He died right next to Hampton Blevins. The other hash knife cowboys got away, though not very easily. As one of the cowboys rode hard away from the scene, he fell out of the saddle. He'd been shot at some point during the barrage and was losing blood. The other cowboys left him behind, and as he lay on the ground, he passed out, but he didn't die. He was revived sometime later by a hard summer rainstorm. He lost all sense of time. He didn't know how long he lay there, but it was long enough for his horse to wander away. With no horse and badly injured, he dragged himself along the ground for close to 40 hours

until he collapsed from fatigue. During his journey, a mother bear and her cubs tried to attack him, but he found the strength to fight them off. After almost two days, he staggered up to the ranch of Al Rose, a man who seemed to be a friend of both sides of the feud. The cowboy had walked and crawled for 17 miles. He was delirious, and his open wound was badly infected. Al Rose and another neighbor, Bob Sixby, dressed the wound and cared for the injured man. But that cowboy wasn't the only one with a harrowing escape story. One of the other cowboys had been shot, and he pretended to be dead until the shooting stopped. Then he crawled into a wooded area to conceal himself. He treated his wound with a little tobacco and bound it with his own underwear.

For three days and two nights, he slowly limped along a creek until he made it back to the Blevins Ranch. There, he told Mrs. Blevins about the death of her son Hampton. And most importantly, he told her the name of the man who killed him, Jim Tewksbury. No one knows for sure why Jim fired on the search party that day. Some historians say that it was just his natural violent streak. But the situation in Pleasant Valley could also help explain it. The Hash Knife Cowboys were known to act as enforcers for the big Aztec cattle company,

and some of them were thieves in their own right. And rumors had been flying through the valley that Hash Knife Cowboys were going after small-time ranchers. And on that day, a Blevins brother was with the cowboys. And it sounds like the Blevins boys were prepared to do whatever it would take to find their father. One was quoted as saying, we're going to start a little war of our own. So when Jim Tewksbury saw a group of hash knife cowboys in the company of a Blevins brother riding up to his friend's ranch, he might have assumed the worst. Some stories say Hampton Blevins drew his weapon first. It's possible, but unlikely. He only had one arm, so if he was holding his horse's reins in his only hand,

it would have been tough for him to get the drop on a guy like Jim Tewksbury. But whoever started it, and for whatever reason, the result was the same. The Blevins family was understandably devastated. They'd lost a father and a brother in the space of a couple weeks, and they organized a group to go back to the Middleton Ranch. The second oldest brother, Charlie Blevins, recruited Johnny Graham, Alan Ed Rose, and several others in the North Valley. When they had about a dozen men, they rode back to the Middleton Ranch. They arrived on August 10, 1887, and found the place abandoned except for some hogs and chickens and the gruesome dead bodies of men and horses. for some hogs and chickens and the gruesome dead bodies of men and horses. Jim Tewksbury and George Wilson had fled after the shootout. The group buried Hampton Blevins and the hash knife cowboy

John Payne. The burial party cooked the food they found in the cabin and then saddled up to ride home. And at that point, it's possible someone suggested they burn the cabin. Of course, there was no proof that the group that was now the core of the Graham side of the feud burned the ranch. That kind of destruction was more commonly linked to Apaches, and there had been scattered Apache raids around that time. But if the Graham-Blevins posse didn't do it, then the timing was suspiciously coincidental. When the owner of the ranch returned a few days later, it was torched. The house, the corral, and the barn were completely destroyed.

While the owner contemplated his livelihood after the loss of his ranch, Johnny Graham's nephew made the trip to Prescott to charge four members of the Tewksbury family with murder, even though Jim was the only one who was directly involved. George Wilson, who was at the cabin with Jim Tewksbury during the shootout, also made the trip to Prescott, not far behind the nephew. Wilson swore out an arson complaint against members of the burial party. And the new complaints redrew the lines of the feud. On one side was the Tewksbury family and its allies George Newton, who owned the Middleton Ranch, and George Wilson, the brother-in-law of George Newton. On the other side was the Graham

family, supported by the Blevins brothers, the Rose brothers, and the Sixby brothers. And it took almost no time at all for the chaos to start up again. While the grave of Hampton Blevins was still fresh, there was an attack on a Graham. Exactly one week after the shootout at the Middleton Ranch, Bill Graham, a younger half-brother of Johnny and Tom, was ambushed on the trail, or so he said. The result was gory and frightening and also shrouded in mystery. On August 17, 1887, 21-year-old Bill Graham left the family cabin around daybreak. Arizona is known for its heat,

and even though it doesn't get as hot in the highlands as it does in the low desert of Phoenix, it's still plenty warm in August, so most people try to do their hardest work in the early hours. It seems like Bill's intended purpose was to round up some horses, but whether they belong to the Graham family or someone else is still an open question. Bill was known as a horse hunter, which is a more colorful way of saying horse thief. He rode out to a trail that ran along the northern boundary of the Graham's land,

and whatever his intended destination was that day, he never made it. A few hours later, he stumbled through the door of his family's cabin. He was trying to hold in his insides. It looked like he had been gut shot, and the wound was horrifying. He had also been shot in the arm. He was in shock and weak from the loss of blood. The Graham brothers frantically sent for help. Neighbors Bob Sixby and Al Rose hurried to the ranch. They did their best to wash the wound and sew it up, and Bill screamed through the surgery. It was a job that would have tested the fortitude of all but the strongest nurses and surgeons. And even with the crude frontier operation, gut shots were almost always fatal, and everybody in the cabin knew it.

For the next 24 hours, Bill Graham slipped in and out of consciousness. Fever and infection set in, and those were dire signs. But even as Bill's strength faded, he was able to tell his story. He said he had been riding on the trail when a shot came from behind a tree about 40 paces away. The bullet hit him in the bowels, and as he reached for his pistol, he was shot in the arm. He estimated that about 20 shots were fired at him. He remembered that someone shouted that he would not be harmed any further if the Grams would leave the county. Apparently,

the attackers then rode away and left Bill to his fate. Before Bill died, he named his attackers, and the revelation certainly won't be a surprise at this point. He said Ed Tewksbury was the man who shot him from behind the tree. He also said John and Jim Tewksbury and five or six others, some of whom he didn't recognize, materialized from hiding spots along the trail. The Grahams, of course, believed Bill's story lock, stock, and barrel. They were certain the Tewksburys killed their brother. But when it came time for the coroner's inquest to make an official declaration about the cause and manner of Bill Graham's death, Bill's story was called into question. His statements were riddled with holes, and then a whole different version came to light. But none of that mattered to the Grahams. Next time on Legends of the Old West, despite serious questions about Bill's story,

the Grams go after the Tewksberries. Before the month of August is done, more blood is spilled in Pleasant Valley, and September turns out to be just as bad, if not worse. The two deadliest months of the war continue next week on Legends of the Old West. And members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week. They receive early access and the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com.

Memberships begin at just $5 per month. This series was researched by Julia Bricklin and written by Julia and myself. Special thanks to historian Eduardo Pagan for his help during this production. Audio editing and sound design by Dave Harrison. Original music by Rob Vallier. I'm your host and producer, Chris Wimmer.

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