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Transcribed by Wilola Follett
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The Bisbee Massacre On a winter night late in 1883 five men rode into Bisbee and robbed the Goldwater and Castaneda store, the largest in town, to which the payroll for the Copper Queen Mine invariably was consigned. After Joseph Goldwater handed over the little money in the drawer and opened the safe, the robbers forced his partner, Jose Maria Castaneda, from a sickbed and found a sack of money and a watch under his pillow. As two robbers left the store, their three companions outside indiscriminately and excitedly began firing at everybody on the street. Three men and a woman were wantonly killed. The robbers rode into the night. Posses were organized to hunt them down. In the process a local saloonkeeper, John Heath, was revealed as an accomplice as he tried to lead the posse on a false trail. He had helped the killer plan the holdup. The five men were rounded up: two in Mexico, one in a Deming, New Mexico, barber shop, and two more at Clifton, where one had given the watch taken in the holdup to a lady-friend. Brought to trial, the five who actively participated in the crime were sentenced to death. Their associate, who had cowered behind the bar in his own saloon during the shooting, was given a long prison term. The county seat and jail were at Tombstone, across the mountains from Bisbee. The following morning a crowd converged at the jail, took Heath from his jailers and hanged him to a telephone pole. Dr. George E. Goodfellow gave as his legal medical opinion that Heath had died of emphysema of the lungs (lack of oxygen) "self induced or otherwise." The pattern of lynch law was more or less constant in Arizona. Citizens rebelled against the slowness of the law, so took it into their own hands. Lynching was a measure employed only in the case of brutal crimes. Even after statehood, some lynchings occurred. Ref: Arizona Pageant - A Short History of the 48th State, by Madeline Ferrin Pare with the Collaboration of Bert M. Fireman. Arizona Historical Foundation Tempe, 1875, pages 231-231 |
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