Dan Dowd and Red Sample, rough-looking customers in their cowboy paraphernalia, stood in front of Goldwater & Casteñeda’s store at half past seven o’clock on the night of . The Christmas shopping season was in full swing and Bisbee’s main street was bright with street lamps and the light shining from store windows.
“All set?” asked Dan Dowd out of the corner of his mouth.
“Yep,” replied Red Sample.
“Then let her rip.”
Whereupon these two hard-looking customers slid six-shooters from the scabbards at their sides and one shot up the street and the other shot down.
The street a moment before had been, in a manner of speaking, full. A moment afterward, the street, as you might say, was empty. Shoppers on the sidewalk ran into the stores. Shoppers in the stores, though curious, stayed there. Dan Dowd kept on firing up the street, and Red Sample kept on firing down.
As their bullets were singing Christmas carols on the sidewalk, three friends and business associates, Tex Howard, Bill Delaney, and Dan Kelly, were inside the store doing their Christmas shopping with six-shooters. While proprietors, clerks, and customers stood lined along the walls with hands in the air, the trio rifled the cash drawers, ransacked the safe, looted the show cases of watches and jewellery, and scooping everything into a sack, rejoined their companions in the street.
Meanwhile, Dan Dowd and Red Sample had been having a busy time. When their first shots had sent the street crowds scurrying, John Tapiner had been a little slow in getting inside a saloon, and a bullet knocked him over dead in the barroom door. Mrs. Anna Roberts, a restaurant keeper, was slain accidentally, it was said, with a bullet meant for a fugitive man. J. A. Nolly was wounded and lay crumpled on the sidewalk, dying later. Deputy Sheriff D. Tom Smith and James Kriegbaum, indignant that five bandits should overawe an entire town of able-bodied citizens, stepped out in the street and for a while turned the one-sided affair into a battle. Smith was quickly killed. Kriegbaum wounded Red Sample in the arm. With three citizens dead and one dying, the five robbers swung on their horses and went galloping down the canyon, terrorizing the lower town with revolver shots. When they rode out of the mountains at the south end of the canyon, they turned east and headed across Sulphur Springs Valley for the Chiricahuas.
This affair was known in the chronicles of the period as the Bisbee massacre.
While the rattle of shots in the lower canyon was still in his ears, Kriegbaum leaped on his horse and in a mad Paul Revere ride across the mountains, reached Tombstone in an hour and a half. Automobilists who travel the up-and-down road today think they are doing pretty well if they cover the distance in fifty minutes. Kriegbaum’s news threw Tombstone into a furore. Deputy Sheriff William Daniels and a posse were soon riding hard for Bisbee. They found the mining town wild with excitement, its streets swarming with armed men. Several posses were already out scouring the country. A number of citizens joined Daniels. Among them John Heath.
Heath had been stirred to the depths of his soul by the red-handed atrocity. Among all the voices lifted against the perpetrators, his was the loudest.
“Damnable outrage,” he declared. “Them fellers deserve no mercy. Track ’em down. Hang ’em to the nearest tree. Them’s my sentiments.”
Where the trail of the robbers turned east at the south end of the canyon, Heath led the posse south.
“Here’s the trail, boys,” he shouted. “They’re headin’ for Mexico.”
The posse clattered after this lynx-eyed fellow who could read a trail in the dark.
Close to the Mexican line, Heath turned west.
“This way, boys,” he called out. “The trail’s gittin’ hot. We’ll ketch them fellers before noon. You bet.”
When morning came, Heath was spurring hard on a trail no one else could see. But no criticism of John Heath, mind you. This honest lad was plainly doing the best he knew how. The posse thought he was wrong—that was all—and back it rode to the mouth of the canyon. Now that it was daylight, the trail of the robbers was plain. It led east.
Somewhere around Soldier Holes in Sulphur Springs Valley, Heath announced that the trail turned north. The others saw that it still ran east. Again Heath was overruled. But merely with deprecatory smiles. He meant well. His mistake was evidently due to his over-anxiety “to ketch them robbers and string ’em up.”
Before the posse reached the Chiricahuas, Heath attempted to lead it off on several other false scents. Vague suspicion gradually took form. It began to look as if a pretty crafty gambler was overplaying his hand.
In the Chiricahuas the five horses the robbers had ridden were found dead at the bottom of a chasm. When the animals had given out from hard riding, the bandits had driven them over a precipice after stealing fresh mounts from a ranch. The tragedy of the five horses was a heartless piece of deviltry. The animals could have been turned loose with no danger to the robbers. A little deeper in the mountains, the pursuit ended. The fugitives had scattered.
When Heath had returned to Bisbee, he was still vociferous in anathema.
“Them bandits didn’t have no call to kill citizens the way they done,” he said. “Ef I’d run on to ’em, I’d shot ’em down like dogs.”
After one of these tirades, Frank Buckles measured Heath with cold eyes.
“Those five fellows,” said Buckles, “stopped at my ranch in Pole Bridge Canyon two nights before the robbery. And, Mr. Heath,” he added, “you were with them.”
Heath was arrested and placed in jail at Tombstone. It was established later that
