The Southern Pacific express, westbound, was robbed at Cochise southwest of Willcox in . Two men flagged the train at midnight, overawed the train crew with six-shooters, dynamited the safe, and escaped with $10,000. Sheriff Scott White with a posse, of which Burt Alvord was a member, pursued the robbers into the Chiricahuas, where the trail was lost. No clue to the identity of the bandits was discovered. They had vanished into mystery, and the Cochise robbery passed into history as one of the most skilfully managed criminal enterprises that had ever occurred in Arizona. It was not until six months later that Jeff Milton turned the light of a blazing shotgun on the secret history of this interesting affair.
Jeff Milton of Fairbank, a famous fighting man of the Tombstone country, was born in Florida in . He has been a part of the Southwest since his youth, as Texas Ranger, chief of police of El Paso, cattle association detective, railroad detective, and shotgun messenger, and for years immigration agent and customs inspector along the border between Arizona and Mexico. Gray of hair and moustache, the old fire-eater is still a gallant figure and, for all his years on the frontier, still retains the manners, speech, and kindly courtesy, touched with a certain courtliness, that belong to the tradition of the Old South.
The train from Nogales to Benson pulled into Fairbank at dusk on a February day in . Jeff Milton, express messenger, was leaning in the doorway in the side of the express car, his shotgun in the crook of his arm. He smiled when he saw a half-dozen citizens lined up on the station platform with two cowboys behind them with drawn six-shooters. The idea of a train robbery did not occur to him. It was pretty dark, and he thought the cowboys, half-tipsy perhaps, were having fun with some tenderfeet. He chuckled aloud when one of the cowboys shouted, “Git up your hands.” But when he saw a cowboy, using the row of citizens as breastworks, point a six-shooter in his direction, he woke up. That gun looked a little like business. Maybe, after all, this was the real thing.
“Come out of that car,” yelled the cowboy.
“If there’s anything in this car you want,” Milton flung back, “come and get it.”
Flame leaped from the cowboy’s gun. The bullet shattered the bone in Milton’s arm and knocked him over on the car floor. The cowboy rushed for the door. He was climbing in the car when Milton got to his knees, one arm dangling like a rag, and raising his shotgun with one hand, fired. The robber tumbled back on the ground with a load of buckshot in his body.
“Look out, boys,” he shouted, “this fellow’s shootin’ to kill. He’s got me.”
“I slammed the door shut and locked it,” said Milton. “Then, as there was no way for those fellows to get in unless they dynamited the car, I staggered over to a piece of baggage and sat down. An orchestra began to play. Thinks I, ‘That’s the most beautiful music I ever heard in my life.’ The next thing I knew, a setter pup was licking me in the face and Baca, the engineer, was standing over me.”
Milton’s heroic duel saved a valuable treasure in the safe and ended the train robbery. The man he had shot was Three-fingered Jack Dunlap. The other bandits were Bravo John Yoes, Bob Brown, and Jack and Lew Owens. Three-fingered Jack was being held in the saddle when the robbers rode off in the darkness. Milton was rushed in a caboose drawn by a special engine to Tucson where surgeons removed several inches of bone from his upper arm. The wound left him a cripple for life.
Sheriff Scott’s posse found Three-fingered Jack, half dead and abandoned by his comrades, at Buckshot Springs in the Dragoons and took him to Tombstone where he was placed in the hospital. Bob Brown and the two Owens brothers were arrested a few days later. Bravo John was taken at Cananea in Mexico. Three-fingered Jack died six days after his capture. On his deathbed, he told the story of the Cochise train robbery. Burt Alvord and William Downing, he declared, had planned the crime; Billy Stiles, a constable at Pierce, and Matt Burts, a cowboy, had committed the robbery. Alvord, Downing, and Stiles were soon in jail at Tombstone, and Burts was arrested in Wyoming. For a time Willcox and Tombstone refused to believe two such respectable citizens as Alvord and Downing were implicated in a train robbery. Then Billy Stiles confessed. He and Burts, Stiles said, had turned over the $10,000 taken at the robbery to Alvord and Downing. These “master minds” of the conspiracy, according to Stiles, had made a masterful division of the spoils, giving Stiles only $480 as his share. This niggardliness had rankled with Stiles, and his confession was the outcome of the grudge he had nursed.
But having betrayed his accomplices, Stiles suffered from remorse. Permitted a certain amount of liberty as a state’s witness, he held up the Tombstone jailer, whom he shot in the leg, and getting possession of the keys, released Alvord and Bravo John. Arming themselves with guns taken from the sheriff’s office, the three men rushed from the jail. At the door they met Matt Burts, back from Wyoming in custody of a deputy sheriff. Burts joined them, and the four outlaws galloped out of town on stolen horses. Downing had refused to join in the jail break.
Stiles, Bravo John, and Burts were recaptured, and after two years of liberty spent in Sonora, Alvord surrendered to Sheriff Del Lewis, an old friend, at Naco. But, tiring of imprisonment, Alvord and Stiles escaped from the Tombstone jail a second time in by tunnelling through the walls. Both were recaptured, and at last
