THE KILLING OF FRANK FOX
It is an iconic Old West tragedy, a drama uniquely Californian even though all of the participants were from Arizona. It’s a story that’s been told and retold around desert campfires of cowboys, prospectors, Boy Scouts and desert rats, written in magazine articles and as vignettes in books. It's got a special hook, too, a tangible, physical place to prove all the words, a shrine to seek out and recollect, stand over and feel the misfortune, to pay homage at the grave of Frank Fox.
The quick and simple story:
In Long-Gone Days, in a place called the Badlands, a cattle drive arrived at the oasis of Carrizo Creek. With the drive were two boys, Frank and Billy Thompson, 15 and 18 years old, who had joined the herd just before they had entered into the wastelands, asking only for food and to ride along. The two brothers had become favorites of the cowboys, never hesitating to help, always there with a smile.
They'd only been at the lonely waterhole a short time when out of nowhere, a lawman arrived. He'd come to arrest the boys for stealing horses back in Arizona. The boys were unarmed, but when Frank tries to run away, the deputy shoots him in the back, killing him.
Billy breaks away, dares the lawman to shoot him, falls to his brother's side, and tells the cowboys the truth. Their name isn't Thompson, but Frank and Billy Fox. They'd fallen in with some bad people, and yes, had stolen horses, only in hopes of escaping, coming to California to start a new life. He begs the cowboys to bury his brother, to keep the desert from feasting on his flesh. The cowboys promise.
The story ends with the cruel lawman hauling Billy off, surely to be hanged for horse theft, if not killed on the long trail back. And to this day, you can visit Frank Fox's grave, on the banks of Carrizo Creek, occasionally marked with a crude tombstone cut from the local rocks, his name, and the date of his murder.
This is the gist of the tale, embellished with facts and fiction, depending on the audience and the passion of the story-teller. Ed Davies' article for the June 1940 issue of Desert Magazine offers details to flesh the story out, a photo of a headstone. "Frank Fox, Killed April 1st 1882'.
For most, this is the Gospel version. After all, it's in Desert Magazine. He wasn't the only person to write about it. Ella McCain in her book 'Memories of the Early Settlers' stands over the grave, having just lost a child of her own, and her anguish is palpable. Lester Reed, in his book ‘Old Time Cattlemen and Other Pioneers of the Anza-Borrego Area’, has a picture of the grave and identifies its occupant as “Joe Fox”, so there are inconsistencies, but still, refuse telling a compelling story simply because there's some contradictions?
Then Phil Brigandi wrote an article in 2006 for Desert Tracks, where he corrected dates, and filled in some blanks. It's the best rendition of the story to date. Thing is, if you're going to factualize a fable, you have to tie it all up. Brigandi leaves too many strings dangling. Here's my try at it.
In February of 1890, the Fox brothers stole three horses from the Dry Creek Ranch in Pleasant Valley, Gila County, Arizona. A trail horse was selling for as little as $15 in Arizona, 1890.
Tradition would have it that Frank and Billy Fox were 15 and 18 years old. One newspaper has them 16 and 17, and if another possible article is accurate, Billy could have been as old as 21. In any case, they were young, but already, they seem to have been well known to the Law.
Dry Creek Ranch was owned by Hulbert B. Crouch, by all accounts a wealthy man. Thirty-eight years old, he had recently sold his half of a painting business in Prescott, and besides the ranch in Pleasant Valley, owned the Skull Valley Ranch and railroad station. In the 1901 'Portrait & Biographical Record of AZ', something of an Arizona 'Who's Who' of its day, the agricultural exploits and achievements of H.B. Crouch are reported with near rhapsodic passion.
Not all was fine and fair for Crouch, however. There was a range war raging in Pleasant Valley. The Tewksbury-Graham feud had been going on for eight years. Also called the Tonto Basin War, the Wikiepedia article on the conflict contends that the struggle really didn't end until the last Tewksbury murdered the last Graham with a long-distance rifle shot in the back. That's an oversimplification, but whatever it was called, the Pleasant Valley War would be the sighted reason, some say the excuse, for Arizona being denied statehood for twenty years.
Hulbert B. Crouch would spend the month of March pursuing his three stolen horses, garnering a posse along the way, not of hired cowboys or detectives, but the sheriff of Maricopa County and as many as three of his deputies, ultimately chasing the Fox brothers more than three hundred miles before intercepting them in Carrizo Wash, San Diego County, California.
The question then, is why? Three horses, at most two hundred dollars, worth a month of time and a horde of lawmen?
After stealing the horses, the Fox boys hit Phoenix, forging the signature of Bert Spencer, a prominent businessman, on a check for thirty-five dollars that they passed off at Harris' second hand store.
Meanwhile, a cattle drive had moved out from the Empire ranch. Owner Walter Vail had recently leased the Warner Ranch in San Diego County, planning to ship his cattle back and forth via the railroad between his two properties, expanding his grazing area. The railroad had chosen this time to raise its rates by about twenty-five per cent.
Vail decided to skip the railroad and herd cattle from the Empire Ranch's Pima County headquarters to Yuma, then follow the old stagecoach route until they reached Warner Ranch in the mountains of San Diego, passing through Carrizo Wash.
With Tom Turner the ranch foreman in charge, and with 917 head of cattle, seven or eight trusted Mexican cowboys and a Chinese cook, the large cattle drive started out on January 29, 1890, actually before the Fox brothers had stolen Crouch's horses.
This was a test run, to determine the feasibility of a cattle drive, and to be able to recommend improvements for any drives that followed. Ed Vail, Walter Vail's brother, went along and kept a daily diary with that in mind. It took six weeks to get from the Empire Ranch to the Colorado River. With difficulty Turner got his charges across the winter-swollen Colorado, and around March 17th, laid up for a couple of days to prepare for the very dry desert ahead.
Two young men rode into the Empire Ranch camp, with 'three skinny horses', introduced themselves as William and Frank Thompson, and asked if they might tag along across the worst part of the desert. Turner acquiesced, but told them they'd have to earn their place at the chuck wagon by pitching in with the herd. The boys readily agreed.
It took eleven days to get to Carrizo Wash.
Crouch might not have been looking for his stolen horses all this time, but word must have gotten to him about the Fox brother's location. Some time after the Empire drive left Pilot Knob, thus committed to the desert crossing, a posse made up of Crouch, Sheriff William Thomas Gray and Deputy Sheriff John Slankard, as well as possibly two other deputies, arrived in Yuma. The two unnamed lawmen stayed in Yuma, perhaps to make sure the horse thieves didn't double back. Its logical for Slankard to be going. In 1879 he had been a trail guide from Yuma to San Diego. He knew the route the cattle drive was taking well.
The now three-man posse had to have been mighty sure where the horse thieves were, to take the route they did. Catching the train from Yuma to Temecula, California, the three men then rented a buggy and hired a driver that Ed Davis contends was Slankard's brother-in-law. From there they went to Warner Ranch, the terminus of the cattle drive. Instead of waiting, though, they continued on, another sixty-five miles of hard trail, to Carrizo Wash, arriving on the fateful day of March 29, 1890. The whole trip, from Yuma to Carrizo Wash, could not have taken any less than three days to make.
Sheriff Gray had been a deputy before becoming Sheriff, served two years of his four-year term, and then simply disappeared. In the Arizona Republican, November 20, 1890, a short blurb reads; 'According to the Democratic organ, Sheriff Gray, who has been a most excellent official, is one of the poorest officers Maricopa County ever had. Sheriff Gray refused to be dictated to by the organ and its colony.' Local party politics reared its ugly head.
Slankard, sometimes spelled Slankert, had a lot of history in Phoenix. His brother Marion had been the 'captain' of the one and only lynching in that city.
Charles, another of John's brothers, also a deputy sheriff for Maricopa county, would become a county supervisor, hunt for Pegleg Smith's gold as cover for tracking a murderer along the Mexican border, then end up in mine speculation all through Arizona. The San Francisco Call described Charlie, hunting for Pegleg, as 'a tall, lean, desert browned fellow, with keen eyes and a record for daring that is not stained, like many others, by stories of dishonor or fraud.' But this might actually be a description of John, as the Arizona Sentinal reported the same incident, but attributed John as the Pegleg gold hunter.
Why would at least two lawmen drop all their other duties to lay chase to two horse thieves, travel totally out of their jurisdiction, and probably spend more money for travel expenses than the horses were worth, stolen from another county, also out of their jurisdiction?
It could be a simple answer, but it needs explanation. The Republican Party.
During the Civil War, Arizona Territory favored the south. The furthest western battle of the Civil War had been at Picacho Pass. After the war, the territory was a bastion of Democrats, and the staunch Republicans saw themselves under siege by Confederates. One of the reasons that the Pleasant Valley War might have been more of an excuse than a reason for denying Arizona statehood was it most certainly would have put more Democrats in Congress. Without admitting their partisan reasons, the Republicans could honestly point to the Tewksbury-Graham feud and say, "you want people like that to have two votes in the Senate? Really?"
In that 'Portrait & Biographical Record of AZ' from 1901, Crouch proudly proclaimed himself a staunch Republican.
Slankard, besides being active as a poll watcher, in 1896.allowed himself to be arrested, to set a precedent in the Federal courts, for some minor Republican point on the power of the Federal Government over public lands.
Sheriff Gray had run on the Democrat ticket for Sheriff, and would participate in Democrat party activities for the rest of his life. As Sheriff, however, he refused to knuckle under to the party machine.
Crouch, who appears to have been something of a self-promoter, probably couldn't find a lawman in Gila county interested in stolen horses when posses under different courts were hunting each other down. Pursuing the Fox brothers himself, and arriving in Phoenix, he could have invoked the Power of the Party to Slankard, who dragged Gray along. The bad check the boys passed would have given some justification. Besides, Bert Spencer was also a Republican.
The cattle drive reached Carrizo Wash March 28th, 1890. It had been eleven days of desert, the last forty miles waterless, but with experienced vaqueros and good weather, they had made it, only losing a handful of cattle.
The Thompson boys had never failed to help. They always had a smile. They spoke fluent Spanish, a plus with the cowboys, all Mexican, older men, who may very well have had sons around the Thompsons' age. The boys had become the favorites of the drive.
Ed Vail had nothing nice to write about Carrizo Wash. In Phil Brigandi's article on the incident, Vail wrote:
' When we reached Carrizo we found a shallow stream of water in a wash, the banks of which were white with alkali. Not only the stream, but the hills, barren of all vegetation, were full of the same substance. I never saw a more desolate place in my life. In all of Arizona there is nothing to compare with it that I know of.'
I disagree.
Carrizo Creek is a desolate lonely, lovely place. Maybe you have to be a desert rat to truly appreciate Carrizo and its cienega. To the north are the well-named Badlands, vast stretches of the scorched former bottom of a shallow ocean, dried to mud stone, a brutal landscape. To the east is the Yuha Desert that the Empire herd had just crossed, sand and greasewood, and very little else, especially little water. Further south is the Coyote Mountains, noble in their granite ruggedness. The west was promising, Palm Spring, Agua Caliente, Vallecito, Mason Valley, Sentenac, and finally San Felipe Valley and Warner Ranch. But here, at Carrizo Creek, was water, and all the life that crowds around the precious liquid, defying the perceived wasteland that is the desert. In its many grades of green, Carrizo is a shockingly aesthetic place. Still, though there’s water, no white man had ever settled without the promise of commerce, and that had blown away with the end of the stagecoach line, the train tracks to the north making the agonizing stage trek mercifully obsolete. The place was utterly deserted in 1890.
So imagine Turner’s surprise when a buckboard pulled up from the west with four men. Everyone there must have switched their focus to the newcomers in wonder. Three of the strangers dismounted the buckboard, approached Turner, who recognized one man as Sheriff John Gray of Maricopa County. The fourth man stayed at the reins of the buggy.
The new arrivals had come to arrest the two boys for stealing horses. They pressed Turner to assist them to avoid violence, since both boys were ‘well healed’, armed with revolvers. How it is that the two brothers didn't recognize the man they'd stolen horses from nor either of the law men, but the law somehow recognized them, is yet another question. Perhaps Crouch identified his horses, but that's not mentioned in any of the tellings. Indeed, Crouch is never mentioned by name in any version I've ever read, even Brigandi's.
Turner was urgd to tell Frank and Billy that the strangers were mining engineers scouting the area. The guests were invited to supper.
Though Frank and Billy seemed suspicious, at some point they were at either end of the chuck wagon, and that’s when the lawmen made their move. Sheriff Gray fell on Billy so suddenly, he had the eighteen-year old disarmed and in shackles before anyone could react. Slankard didn’t do as well. Even with help from the fourth man, he only succeeded in stripping the fifteen year-old of his side arm. Frank struggled from the grown man’s grasp and ran out into the wash up a hillock. Slankard pulled his weapon even as he gave chase.
Lester Reed has Ed Vail chasing after Slankard yelling for him not to shoot.
Frank was on foot, unarmed, and there was nowhere to go.
Slankard drew a bead and put a slug in the fifteen-year old’s back.
Frank dropped and never moved again.
Now Billy wrestled away from the Sheriff.
The scene must have been chaotic to the vaqueros standing about the scene, a jagged jolt from the bucolic peace of the moment before. Their boss, a man they trusted, apparently aware of what was transpiring. Yelling, running, a gunshot, the kid that had become a compadre, collapsing onto the sand and rocks. Billy now running. Where did the manacles come from?
The other stranger had drawn his weapon, ordering Billy to stop.
“Shoot me if you like,” Billy challenged, “but I am going to my brother!”
Surely these men who had befriended these boys closed on the scene, Turner quickly explaining to them it was the law, over the cries of anguish as Billy realized his little brother was dead.
For a moment the situation there in that lonely amphitheater of the desert must have reached a crescendo.
Something I’ve noticed in my time in the desert, emotions ratchet up to the power of ten. Not instantly, but in time, you love deeper, take offense easier, and forgive quicker and more sincerely. Maybe it’s the smell of wet creosote after a rare rain, or the slow pulse of thickening blood in your neck at a hundred fifteen degrees. Maybe it’s the lack of distractions, so quiet you can hear the beat of your soul. That’s why I’m surprised those old cowboys didn’t pull their revolvers and blow those two lawmen away. Considering all the variables, it was probably for the best they didn't.
There in that lonely place, dead brother at his side, Billy told his story. Their name wasn’t Thompson, but Will and Frank Fox. They’d fallen in with a criminal gang some months ago, after witnessing one of the group’s depredations. The gang had stolen some horses, but when the press of the Law made their chances of getting across the Mexican border slim, the gang scattered, and that’s when the boys had joined the cattle drive.
Billy Fox was arrested for horse theft and hauled to the buckboard. When one of the vaqueros challenged the lawmen, demanding what they were going to do about Frank Fox, Deputy Slankard is reported to have answered, “Oh, he’s all right. He ain’t goin’ nowhere”.
The men of the cattle drive wrapped the boy in his saddle blanket, and they buried Frank not far from where he’d been shot. Shortly after that, some cowboys from the Warner Ranch rode out, only to find that the local scavengers had tried to dig the poor boy up. They rounded up stones to mark the crypt, and thwart the coyotes’ depredations. The mound of stone became large, a crude memorial.
And that’s where the monument was when Ed Davies wrote the story for Desert Magazine, ‘just a few hundred feet west of the stage station, not far from the road where the Butterfield drivers swung their rigs around the bluff as they headed for the next relay at Vallecito’. A headstone had been added: 'Frank Fox Killed April 1st, 1882'. The story of the headstone, more accurately, headstones, is a story in and of itself.
Usually, the story ends just about now. Still, what happened to Billy Fox? To Slankard? To Crouch? What gang had the boys fallen in with?
After the buggy had pulled out, the vaqueros there at Carrizo Creek considered going after the party and freeing the boy, fearing that Slankard would murder him before they made Phoenix, but nothing ever came of it, just talk.
In fact, Billy made it to the courts of Maricopa County, was tried, and found guilty -- of forgery, that bum check. He was not charged with horse theft, possibly because the horses were stolen from another county. Billy's lawyer argued that since Billy had been arrested outside the jurisdiction of the arresting officers, all charges should be dropped. The much less serious crime might have been a compromise.
Billy spent a year in the Yuma Territorial Penitentiary, Prisoner number 668, and went so far as to petition Territorial Governor Irwin for a pardon, for the purpose of restoring him to citizenship, which the Governor granted to him, as well as many others who had petitioned. While the Arizona Library archives have the records for Prisoner #667 and #669, the records of Prisoner #668 have disappeared.
Some would have it that Fox swore by his brother's corpse that he would return the favor on Slankard, and there are stories told about Fox coming to the Empire Ranch on a winded horse, switching out and running again, or that the men of the Empire convinced him to end his vendetta, that he became the foreman on a Mexican ranch, married and had a family.
Deputy Sheriff John W. Slankard had a long illustrious life. He would be convicted of assaulting a former editor of the Tombstone Epitaph in 1891, yet go on to become a Federal Deputy Marshal. At one point he led a posse that hunted that supposed last Tewksbury after he'd murdered that last Graham, the other members of the posse not willing to list their names for fear of the friends of Tewksbury. The last time he appears in an Arizona newspaper is in 1911, identified as the watchman at the construction site of the Arizona National Bank in Phoenix.
The cattle drive was declared a success. Shortly after that, the railroad dropped its rates back to where they'd been. There would be no more major cattle drives between Arizona and California.
One could speculate that perhaps the incident in far-off Carrizo Creek was an extension of the Pleasant Valley war. Crouch, being aligned with the Tewksburys, four miles up the valley from his spread, could have been following some retaliation when he chased down the Fox boys. Jinx Pyle, a recognized expert on the War, doesn't think so. Though aligned with the Tewksburys by nearness to their ranch, Crouch had four step-children and three of his own to worry about. Pyle is of the opinion that the killing of Frank Fox 'was another horse thief who got nailed.'
By 1891, only a year after the killing of Frank Fox, Gila County had Crouch's Dry Creek Ranch up at auction for unpaid back taxes. On August 28th, 1894, Crouch shot and killed Abundio Leon over contested lands and water rights at his new ranch near Phoenix along the Gila River. Crouch would be charged, tried and exonerated by the end of 1894.
Could it be that Hulbert B. Crouch was just an over-the-top kind of guy, steal something from him and he'd hunt you down like Captain Ahab and his whale?
In 1901, the same year the 'Portrait & Biographical Record of AZ' heaped praise upon H.B. Crouch, the Federal government sued him and others along the Gila and Salt River for violating Indian water rights. By 1906, Crouch was referred to as 'the veteran Phoenix butcher' when he announced he was opening a 'creamery', the third in the city. The National Census of both 1910 and 1920 had Crouch and his wife living in Pasadena township, California. Twenty-two years after selling his interest in Prescott, he listed his occupation as 'painter'.
In early 1894, the Santa Fe train was robbed at Roscoe, California, now called Sun Valley, the train derailed when the thieves broke the lock on the switch, sending the train off the track, killing two people.
The two men who were ultimately convicted of the robbery were Alva Johnson and William 'Kid' Thompson.
At first, except for sharing the alias name of Billy Fox at the time of the Carrizo Wash incident, and coming from and fleeing to Arizona after the train robbery, there's nothing to link William 'Kid' Thompson to the Fox brothers, until a New Mexico Deputy Sheriff named Bradley positively identified Thompson as one of the members of a gang that robbed an Albuquerque bank where a clerk was killed.
In following interviews, Thompson vehemently denied any involvement in the robbery, adding that the bank in question wasn't in Albuquerque anyway, but in San Pasqual. He volunteered he knew who had robbed the bank, though, was an acquaintance of the man, Billy Fox.
In interviews with at least three different newspapers, Kid Thopson told three outrageously different stories. The Fox brothers had been rustling cattle in Salt River Valley, heading west into California when they got into a running shootout with a lawman named Slanker, ultimately 'leaving Frank for dead'. The surviving Fox brother and Thompson escaped back into Arizona, then into New Mexico.
The Fox brothers were working at Warner Ranch when a lawman named Slank fell on them and killed Frank.
Billy Fox, after robbing the New Mexico bank, had tried to escape into Mexico, but was intercepted by the posse and killed. Chronology is not Thompson's ally. That would have been in 1889, the year before Frank Fox was killed, but there were no bank robberies in New Mexico that match Thompson's or Bradley's description in 1889.
The Fox brothers' real name was Taylor, the Fox brothers and Thompson were cousins, one of their gang members was called Long, but whose real name was Short.
Kid Thompson was an old-style prevaricator of the Pegleg Smith Liar's Contest variety, wallowing in the attention being lavished on him, each reporter getting a wilder story than the last one. The only thing that was consistent in all of them is the presence of the Fox brothers, especially Billy Fox.
If there was a gang that the Fox brothers ran with, William Thompson identified them as, besides himself, Dave Murray, Haulappi Bill, 'Mysterious' Dave Taylor and some guy called Long, whose real name was Short. The first two men in 1894 were in San Quentin when Kid Thompson told this story to the Los Angeles Express. Nowhere but in Thompson's interviews does this gang appear in the papers of the day.
For the longest time I wondered if Billy Fox and Kid Thompson was the same person, but a simple double-check of the Yuma Territorial Prison records disproves that. William H. Thompson was indicted in June of 1889 for Grand Larceny, stealing a saddled horse with personal valuables in saddle bags. If he’d been indicted for horse theft, that could have gotten him hanged. As it was, the judge expressed remorse for sending him off to prison, on account of his youth, twenty years old, and his ‘apparent lack of intellect’.
If Fox and Thompson didn’t know each other before, they met at Yuma, and Thompson must have felt strongly about the killing of Frank Fox, as he would go out four years after the killing, and convolute one story after another about it.
If either Billy Fox or Kid Thompson had robbed a bank in New Mexico, I suggest it was after they got out of Yuma Territorial, some time between late 1891 and 1892, when Thompson turned up in Los Angeles, and other haunts in California.
The problem here is, there’s no record of a bank being robbed in the Albuquerque or San Pasquel, an Indian pueblo that didn't even exist anymore, either in 1889 or the years of 1891 through 1893. There’s no record of a New Mexico lawman named Bradley either. That’s a whole new mystery.
There was, however, a robbery of a 'private bank' and general store in San Marcila, New Mexico, November 23rd, 1892, where a nineteen or twenty year-old known by so many aliases its staggering, but one being Billy Taylor, walked into the store, at gun-point calmly put eight men up against a wall, pilfered twelve hundred dollars worth of gold coin, then rode off without a hitch. No one was hurt or killed. Better known as James Taylor, the thief ended up in Snowflake Arizona, for reasons still unknown, staying at a local boarding house. Charles and James Flake, both young Mormon businessmen and sons of one of the founders of the town, received word that the bank robber of San Marcila was staying at Mrs. Hulls'. The two brothers approached Billy/James, and the ensuing shoot-out left Charles Flake and Taylor dead, and James Flake wounded. There were seven notches on the grip of Taylor's gun, suggesting he had killed seven people in his nineteen or twenty years. He also was reported to have had a brother killed "While resisting arrest".
There’s one more possible fate for Billy Fox. June First, 1892, a train was robbed at Red Rock in the Oklahoma Territory, and then July 25th, there was an attempted robbery of a train just inside Texas. The same gang, or elements of that gang, then robbed a post office in Oklahoma. The first of this bunch to be captured was named Billy Fox. The Wichita Daily Eagle crowed that this was proof that the Dalton gang hadn’t robbed the train in Red Rock, since Billy Fox wasn’t known as a Dalton Gang member.
Of course, the Daltons did hold up the train at Red Rock. The Daily Eagle published one more article on the gang that probably tried to hold up the Texas train and did rob the post office, saying that they knew the monikers the criminals under arrest were operating under were aliases, but that ‘they will do for now’. No more mention of Billy Fox or this gang is mentioned in any of the papers of the times again.
I’ve read or heard the story of the Fox Brothers at Carrizo Wash most of my life, in all its different versions, nothing less than a tragic cowboy tarradiddle, Fox’s grave a shrine of tribulation, inequity and stoic suffering.
The hills are still crusty with white alkaline, the water, now ringed with reeds and everything that browsing cattle might have once mowed down. Today the pile of stone marking Frank Fox’s grave also has an impressive black marble marker next to it, placed there by unnamed ‘Clampers’, (The Ancient And Honorable Order of E Clampus Vitus), telling the story.
If you should find yourself out in the Badlands, looking for the old Stage Coach Station, or the Graves ranch, or the other lonely graves on the bluff nearby, you might want to search out Frank Fox's last resting place, but you might want to remember, if you recount the story to neophyte desert rats, 'when the myth becomes the truth, tell the myth'.
UPDATE: The Clampers' marker has disapeared, leaving Frank's grave all alone there. I have another article here, 'Who Killed Charles Flake'. Please check it out.
