I'm here in Young Arizona
or what used to be called Pleasant Valley.
What you're about to see is a movie
about the Pleasant Valley War.
It'll be told in two forms,
documentary interviews and traditional narrative filmmaking.
We filmed many of these scenes
in the places where this war actually happened,
where these people were really killed.
This is the story of the Grahams and the Tewksburys.
Two families who turned against each other.
The Pleasant valley War,
the bloodiest feud in American history.
It cost far more lives than the battle between
the Hatfields and McCoys or
the gunfight at the O.K Corral combined.
Yet somehow this tale like many of its kind
is fading away into the pages of our country's history.
Let us not forget.
Here they come now.
John, I'm glad you made it.
Yeah. It's beautiful here. Just like in Holbrooks.
Jim Roberts, this the man I told you about.
My good friend John Graham.
Well, welcome to Pleasant Valley Mr. Graham.
Thank you.
Ed says you're from Ohio?
Yes.
In the year 1881, John Graham and his brother,
Tom Graham met the Tewksburys for the first time
in a bar in Globe, Arizona.
They wouldn't have come to Pleasant Valley
if it hadn't been for that meeting.
Now you have to remember
the Grahams and the Tewksburys were friends.
In fact, the Grahams moved to Pleasant Valley
at the recommendation of the Tewksburys.
So what happened that turned such close friends
into the fiercest of enemies.
Now this man James Stinson comes to the Valley
and he brings with him near 1200 head of cows.
So he'd been a judge.
So he knows the law and a man that knows the law
knows how to manipulate the law.
So think about this,
Stinson wants to be the cattle king in this region,
but his brand is just a simple T symbol.
Now, anyone that knows a thing about cattle brands
or cattle rustling, will you that that brand
is way too easy to manipulate and therefore steal.
So why would he do this?
He's a smart man.
Why would he set himself up to be wrong?
Unless that's what he wanted to happen.
Maybe he thought that was a good way
to get rid of the competition.
I don't know how we're gonna make it in cattle out here.
Seems like every time we gather three out of five head
got that Stinson brand on them.
Yeah, he does swing a money-wise loop for a newcomer.
He thinks he's some kind of cattle Baron.
He does have an awful lot of cows.
Maybe more than he needs.
Now, Stinson, he's got his T brand, right?
Well, suppose we just add an E to it, dominant.
You're not talking about cattle rustling.
No, no.
They hang people out here for that.
I ain't saying we go out looking for them.
I'm just saying if a couple of Stinson's
cows wander around our spread,
why not add that E?
Like you said, three out of five are his.
What the hell he ain't gonna miss a couple of cows gone.
That's right, brother.
By all accounts, both the Grahams
and the Tewksburys stole cattle.
It wasn't hard.
You have to remember this area was open range,
so there were no fences for miles.
The cattle herds would all blend together
and then be separated at branding time.
So it was really easy to accidentally gather up
some of your neighbors cows
as they wandered onto your spread,
or if a neighbor's cow had a calf on your property,
it was really easy to adopt that calf into your herd
and brand them accordingly.
Now, according to Jinx Pyle, he was not a violent man.
He was married to a devout Mormon
and he never took any violent action
against the Tewksburys or the Grahams
even though he knew they were stealing his cattle.
He was trying to let the law
take care of this problem for him.
But some of his Cowboys had other ideas.
I know that them Grahams and Tewksburys
are stealing our cattle,
but Mr. Stinson won't listen.
That's a pretty big accusation uncle John.
You gotta be sure about before saying such things like that.
Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure.
I bet you if we rode over there right now,
we'd find Stinson bees in their holding pen.
I think we do what Mr. Stinson say.
He tell you leave alone.
Now, what kind of foreman would I be
if I did not look after my boss's interest?
Well, nothing we can do today.
The hell we can't.
We can ride over there right now.
Mr. John this is bad idea.
I think we do as told by Mr. Stinson.
Either you saddle up and go over there with me right now
or collect your pay.
And what about you?
You coming?
I'm with you uncle John.
That's a good boy. Let's go.
Good morning boys, what are you looking for?
You. You son of a bitch.
Uh, come on lets go.
You'll be fine.
Go ahead and drop the wagon.
We'll take him to his folks' place to heal.
Well, that's the story that Ed and his friends told.
The other side of it, it's not much different
except for a few details,
and you know, the devil is always in those details.
The other side was Elijah didn't even raise his rifle.
He was trying to get away and Ed shot him in the back.
That would not surprise me one bit
because ED was known to be a man with a hot temper
and also to be an excellent marksman.
If he did that might've been the moment
when the Graham started to question
their allegiance with the Tewksburys.
The aftermath of this first fight,
didn't occur in the backwoods of Pleasant Valley,
but in the Quarter, Prescott in the winter of 1883,
Ed and John traveled with their brother Frank,
a frail man to begin with, they were accused of murder,
but this was a pretty hard charge to make stick
when the man they supposedly killed was still alive.
It may have seen for a moment
that all the trouble had been resolved,
but on this journey, another life was lost.
Frank, you okay?
Give him some water.
Frank?
Frank died during those cold months
and though it wasn't a bullet that took his life,
his brother still blamed Stinson and Gilliland for starting
this whole mess in the first place.
Sad thing is Frank wasn't even at that first gunfight,
he was actually off running errands with his brother John,
but he wasn't the last innocent
by standard in this range war, far from it.
Gentlemen, sit.
What can we do for you, Mr. Stinson.
A lot of my cattle have come up missing lately.
Yeah we heard about that.
A lot of cattle.
As you know cattle theft is a very serious crime out here.
They hang men for it.
I am hiring you both as range detectives.
Us? Detectives?
I already know who's stealing my cattle,
proving it is another matter.
You will find evidence that will incriminate the Tewksbury.
For your testimony I will give you 25 cows and 25 calves,
and I will forget about the fact
that you were involved in these incidents.
Oh, we have nothing to...
Your T E brand is shared between you
and the Tewksbury, isn't that right?
Well yeah.
Well, it's not registered.
Which means that you have no legal right to those cattle,
neither you nor the Tewksburys.
I suggest that you register that brand in your name
and your name only.
I expect you to accept this offer within the next 24 hours,
or if you choose to reject my proposal
I will draw my own conclusions
and meet out my own justice.
Goodnight gentlemen.
The truth be told, we don't know how it happened.
We can't tell the reason why the Graham's
decided to betray their friends,
and neither can the historians who researched
and wrote books about the war.
It remains the ultimate mystery of this story.
Could it really have been the cattle they received?
That's hard to believe something had to have happened
to cause the Graham's to betray them.
Some have speculated that it was an affair
with one of the family women that drove them apart,
but that's an even harder sell,
especially since the Tewksburys had no idea
they had lost an ally until it was too late.
What the hell are we gonna do?
I don't know.
Maybe we could talk to Ed.
Ed? No, we can't do that,
he's a damn hothead.
There's no telling what he'll do.
Ed is my friend I can talk to him.
Yeah. You saw how your friends started shooting
when Gilliland and the other ones come out,
he's plumed off his rocker.
Huh? What are we gonna do? Work for Stinson?
John, he knows we're stealing his cows.
Did you hear him in there?
Did you get his meaning?
It's just a lot of people to consider here,
family, children.
What about our families?
What he said was we either hand over the Tewksburys
or we hang alongside them.
I wish we could ask Tom and John Graham now,
but they're long gone along with anything
that could lead us to the truth.
One thing for sure,
these men once called themselves friends,
they were best of friends,
but now enemies.
The stage has been set.
The war has begun.
Deputy Hawk.
Morning Ed.
Morning Jim.
I have a warranty or for your arrest.
For what?
For cattle wrestling.
This is more of Stinson's crap.
No, this warrant was signed by Tom and John Graham.
What?
No.
Now I'm not gonna have any trouble
bringing you boys in, I'm I?
No, deputy, we don't give you any trouble.
We'll answer the charges.
The Tewksburys defended themselves in court again,
but this tactical move by the Grahams and Stinson
actually ended up backfiring against them.
See the treaty of war as Dawn to Derek calls it
was a public record,
and the jury soon realized that these men
were framing their rivals for a price.
Not only were the Tewksburys acquitted,
the Grahams faced charges themselves.
But as you'll see, time and time again in this story,
the courts were not effective
in bringing either side to justice.
This story has the breadth
and depth of a Russian novel.
It could be a Western version of warm piece
and it might take 10 hours to tell it all.
As the fight began, more players entered the game.
There was the hash knife outfit
who according to one source brought with them
many of the worst men that ever left Texas,
they sided with the Grahams.
The Daggs brothers were in the sheep business
hated by a cattleman,
they made an allegiance with the Tewksburys.
The list goes on and on of men who joined up
and fought on various sides of this war.
For now, we will focus on the central conflict.
It is important however,
to acknowledge certain characters
who would play a significant role in this bloody history.
William Graham, the half-brother of Tom and John
didn't arrive on the scene until 1884.
Andy Blevins, sometimes known as Andy Cooper
showed up with his brothers,
Hamp and Charlie and their father Martin.
What followed then was an array of rumors of crimes
they'd committed in Texas and Oklahoma.
When they got here,
they took over a house owned by a Mormon family
who were away at the time when the family got back,
Andy refused to give it up and the family did not have
the guts to take it back from them,
I got to say, I don't blame them.
Then there was Commodore Perry Owens
He was a legendary war man, a killer of Indians.
Sometimes they say without provocation,
believe it or not he ran with Andy Cooper,
that shows the fine line in his days
between cop and criminal.
Commodore Perry Owens will play his biggest part
in our story a little later on.
Now what happens next is a little confusing.
According to some sources on July 24th, 1884,
is when John Tewkesbury paid John Graham a visit,
there were also some Stinson's cowboys present.
This was the last goodbye between friends.
Treacherous bastard.
Hey, stay out of this.
Can't believe you do this to your friends
you low life scam.
Get off my land.
Nah, I ain't leaving til I say what I have to say.
Fact, next time I see you, I'm gonna kill you.
Don't do it.
But what we can't figure out is that
a similar incident happened the day before.
So on July 23rd, 1884.
According to these stories,
this is where John Tewkesbury pays a visit
to the Stinson foreman.
This story says John Tewksbury
was accompanied by William Richards,
Ed Rose and George Blaine, a character
with the sorted history who recently showed up in the area.
Now these stories paint a different picture
and what transpires next is a lot more violent.
The Tewksburys are coming.
What do you want?
You're playing in the rodeo.
We're still on the board.
You're not welcomed here, except him.
The rest of you clear out.
That's no way to treat your neighbors.
You should be more hospitable.
Like I said, Mr. Rhodes can stay,
the rest of you get going.
Who do you think you are?
Just because you're Stinson's boy it don't matter to us.
The story of this war is full of such mysteries.
And the closer you look, the more confusing it gets,
who killed who is not always cut and dry.
And members of both sides of this fight
seemed to crossover to the other,
motivations aren't quite clear.
I'll give you an example.
One day a Mexican sheep herder was shot.
Some say it was done by the Blevins family,
but author Jinx Pyle is certain
it was done by a man named Bill Concord.
Now bill was actually friends with the Tewksburys,
so why would he kill the sheep herder that they'd hired?
Well, I guess Bill wasn't so crazy
about sheep being on his land.
He also though did not want to piss off the Tewksburys.
So he did it and made it look like it was the enemy's doing,
the killers trail led straight back to the Graham ranch.
So many historians try to make sheep
the main motivation for all this violence.
Okay. So yes, anyone that owned sheep
was a direct target of the cattlemen,
but it was just one of many factors,
and it really didn't become a factor
until the war had already begun.
Now one of the sources in Jinx Pyle's book says
both factions in the Pleasant Valley War were cattlemen.
The sheep that were brought into the valley
under the protection of the Tewkesbury guns,
were only in incident intended to harass the Grahams.
Now, sheep herders were not exactly
the most popular guys in Pleasant Valley.
Another one of them named Samuel Shul
got the big fist fight with Hamp Blevins.
After giving Blevins a beat down,
he went back to his home where he was soon shot
in the face with a shotgun.
Shul?
It's never been proven,
but it's quite possible that Hamp Blevins
was the one who did it.
The reason that the Pleasant Valley War escalated
to the point that it did was because
it wasn't just the Tewksburys
and the Grahams families that were killed or killing people,
people that were just passing through,
Cowboys going from one point to another were being killed,
some were found, others just went missing
because wild animals, lions, hogs,
would eat their bodies and they'd be gone.
Mark Blevins, the head of the Blevins family,
brought his boys up from Texas
running from the Texas Rangers.
He joined the hash knife cattle drive to hide his trail
and to get three square meals a day driving cattle.
And they landed in the lush tall grass of Pleasant Valley.
What a Haven for cattle and what a Haven for rustling,
and rustle they did.
In July of 1887, Mark Blevins disappeared.
Some say it was the Tewksburys,
but no one really knows for sure.
Morning Mark, where are you headed?
Maybe out scalp hunt.
What?
Don't play dumb.
We know your boy Ed put up $50 each for a Tewkesbury scale.
I don't know nothing about that.
Get out of my way.
I've got work to do.
You're a liar.
You Blevins are all in it together.
You guys don't keep secrets from one another.
Yeah. Like killing our shipper,
I suppose you don't know nothing about that either.
Nobody calls me a liar,
especially to a half breed Tewksburys.
Mr. Reynold, the Blevin boys blame the Tewksburys
for the disappearance of their father.
And they sent out on a mission
along with the hash knife cowboy buddies
to find their father or to kill Tewksbury.
How are you Tom?
Busy today?
Not really.
Where are you boys riding too?
We're out hunting.
You boys got murder in your eyes.
We're hunting Tewksburys.
I'd love to give you one of them bastards.
Wait up I'll come along.
They met in a saloon,
and then in a drunken boisterous manner
they said the phrase,
let's just start a little war of our own.
That became the title of a book written
by the late Don Dedera.
That best describes what happened in Pleasant Valley.
The boisterous talk was overheard,
and when they showed up at the Middleton Ranch
to kill Tewksburys, they were expected.
Hello in the house, Mr. Newton?
It's us Blevins boys, we just want something to eat.
Get the hell out of here.
Whoa wow Ed, we're just here for a meal.
This ain't a a boarding house.
Turn your horses and get.
Okay. Okay. Just calm down.
Once again, no one knows who took the first shot,
but it's a damn good guess that it wasn't the Blevins gang.
It was not an ideal situation that they were looking for.
Regardless, bodies of both men and horses fell.
Hamp Blevins was shot in the head.
Ed Tewkesbury nearly shot by John Payne.
Payne's running for cover,
and he shot Ed Tewkesbury with Jim, Robert took both.
Tom and are both wounded.
Glasby walks 30 miles before he finds help.
And without a single casualty,
the victory goes to the Tewkesbury side.
Jinx Pyle writes in his book,
that right after the shootout,
a band of Apaches on the war path come down
and they look at the bodies and they see the guns
out the ports and they take off as fast as possible.
The defeated then comes back in a couple of days,
they buried their dead.
The ranch house had already been abandoned,
but they burned it down anyway.
Now you're probably wondering
where was the law in all of this?
Well, they were in Prescott to be exact,
a good distance away.
So trying to stop a blood feud in Pleasant Valley,
wasn't quite like taking a walk down to the O.K Corral.
I'm looking for the Tewksburys,
I understand you gentlemen
are just the ones to help me find them.
No tiny law dogs, it's something about them.
How do you mean?
They've been running a rough shot all over
this valley, he ain't held in no new account.
Well, he know Prescott is a long ways from here,
and if no one reports it,
then how do we know what's going on out here?
They're thieves and murderers,
you got to take them all in.
You know, with claims like that,
I'm gonna need some hard facts.
And if they're true, I'll go after them.
Oh, I'll give you the facts.
Sheriff, wake up, the horses are gone.
What?
The horses, all of them.
The Tewksburys got them.
They left this note with our man at night watch.
They got the drop on them.
We've found your horses wandering loose
with all the rustling going on in the area,
we took them for safekeeping.
You can come by our ranch on your way out
of Pleasant Valley to reclaim them, Ed Tewksbury.
Which one of you is Ed Tewkesbury?
I'm Ed. You must be sheriff Mulvenon?
Damn right I am. And how dare you still our horses?
Those are some mighty strong words.
It's the truth, you even left a note with my man.
Your man could have woke up with his throat slit.
What?
That's what a rustler would do, or an Indian.
Fact is your whole posse coulda woke up
with their throat slit.
Lot of dangerous men lurking around in these parts.
Are you threatening me?
I'm the law.
You're the law in Prescott,
up here we don't have much use for such titles.
What we're trying to say is take your men
and go back to Prescott while you can.
What are you saying to me?
You're a smart man,
what kind of risk you think these posse members
are willing to take?
What to say some of our friends come along
and stop you as you're trying to take us back to Prescott.
What would you do?
I have a warrant out for your arrest.
I'd take your man and go home.
Go back to Prescott.
We'll be along eventually.
Well, I'm gonna need my horses back then.
I'll have them taken over the backend store.
Now, this wasn't the first time
that Mulvenon was told to stay away,
months earlier he made his first attempt
to calm the conflict.
Don't turn around.
I'm Sheriff Mulvenon, and I'm...
I know who you are and who you're looking for.
Leave Pleasant Valley or you will be killed.
He was warned by not just one, but both sides.
I'm Sheriff Mulvenon, and I'm looking at...
I know who you are and who you're looking for,
leave Pleasant Valley or you'll be killed.
So for the time being,
there was no law in Pleasant Valley
except what each man made for himself.
The sheriff, he smartly decided to return to Prescott.
John?
Before the boy died,
he confessed that it was Ed
who was the one who had done it,
but a man by the name Jim Hawk
took the blame for his murder.
Jim claims that he was there looking for John Graham
with a warrant,
and mistook Billy by mistake,
and he states that Billy opened fire on him,
and he said that he just had to put a bullet in him.
The only thing that came from this murder
was just more hatred between these families.
After Ed got away with what the Graham's believed
to be the murder of William,
they in their allies were more united than ever.
They came back at the Tewksburys with a vengeance.
On September 1st, 1887,
well, Ed was in the house with John Rhodes,
his friend and the women.
John Tewkesbury and William Jacobs went out that morning.
Jacobs was shot in the back.
John Tewkesbury was shot in the back of the neck.
One source in Pyle's book says that
John Tewkesbury was found with clumps
of his own hair in his hands,
proving it must have been a very painful death.
In their next step of retaliation,
the Graham's laid siege to the Tewksbury cabin.
I'm David Graham.
Where's my brother?
He's dead, so is Jacobs, you're next.
Let us come out and take care of the bodies.
No, we gonna feed you to the hawks,
just like you did to my dad.
That was my husband, you're son of a bitch.
I'm gonna kill every goddamn Graham that walks the earth.
You see anything?
Nothing.
They ain't going away.
We need some help.
Then I should sneak out and get some.
As soon as it's dark.
I seen him not Sloan again...
Jim they have raided the Tewksbury's farm,
we need your help now.
You don't hear him ride the patient, get them all now.
Go.
Hey, we got John Rhodes, we're coming in don't shoot.
After the siege on the Tewksbury's place,
Andy Blevins Cooper made his way up
to Holbrook with some of his brothers.
Now, Holbrook was not exactly a haven of peace either,
according to one source in 1886,
they were 26 shooting deaths there,
to put that in perspective,
the entire population of the town was only 250 people.
While there, Andy did a whole lot of bragging
about the killing he'd done in the war,
and soon enough, the pressure
was on the sheriff of Apache County
to do something about it.
The sheriff at the time Commodore Perry,
don't forget, Harry and Andy had been friends,
as Pyle writes in his book,
they had ridden together, killed Indians together,
drank whiskey together, and even courted the same girl.
Maybe that's the reason it took Perry so long
to catch up with Andy.
Regardless on September 4th,
that's exactly what he did.
Now what you see behind me is the actual Blevins house
where Commodore Perry Owens
and the Blevins brothers had their gun fight.
As you can tell, it's changed a lot throughout the years
and the city of Holbrook has grown up around it.
But it was important to us to film on the actual site
and be authentic.
This is the building where it all went down
and this is the street where Commodore Perry Owens
walked down to finally capture Andy Blevins.
Andy?
What do you want?
I have a warrant for your arrest.
What's that warrant for?
For stealing them horses.
We talked about this before, are you ready?
No, give me a minute.
Andy don't do it. Andy?
That version of the gunfight is how both witnesses
and sheriff Owens describe it.
I'm now gonna read you an actual transcript
from Owen's testimony from the inquest.
I says to Cooper, I want you.
Cooper says, "What do you want with me Owens?"
Says, "I have a warrant for your arrest."
Cooper says, "What warrant?"
I spoke to him about some time ago from stealing horses.
Cooper says, "Wait."
I says Cooper, no, wait.
Cooper says I won't go.
So I shot him.
There's always two sides to the story
when a law man shoots a criminal.
It was very different time and place,
violence and death was a constant in people's lives.
Witnesses say the gunfight took less than one minute,
which left three dead and one wounded.
And despite being shot at,
Owens escaped the battle unscathed.
Commodore Perry Owens became a legend that day,
which only further inflamed the feud.
Eva Blevins, who was also in the house that fateful morning
tells a different version of what took place.
Is Andy here?
Yes, of course.
Andy, someone's here for you.
I want you Andy.
As you can see, there are some discrepancies
about what took place that day.
Owens was never indicted for the killings.
They were all ruled self-defense by coroner's juries
that were brought in to review each death.
Although some viewed Perry as a legend,
he was soon replaced as sheriff of Apache County.
Perhaps his killing ways had served their purpose.
No matter what happened that day,
it only further but fueled on an already raging fire.
Put your hands up.
You're our prisoners.
John, why didn't you surrender?
We wouldn't have had to kill you.
I didn't know it was you.
After the failed arrest that led to their death,
the sheriff continue on to round up
as many Outlaws as that he could.
The Tewksbury well, they finally surrendered.
Tom Graham on the other hand he fled,
but he was later captured down in Phoenix.
Trials were held but nothing came of them.
The conventional law once again,
proved inadequate in stopping this war.
You see the different type of justice was necessary.
We hear you've been bragging
about making Maryann Tewkesbury into a widow.
Well, now we'll see how Lizzie Rose likes being one.
Now it's not clear if Ed was the one who killed Al Rose,
but he is confirmed to have have ridden with the vigilantes.
A fact that makes their mission more of a one-sided quest
than an objective crusade.
Al Rose was killed not far from his cabin,
because unlike Tom Graham,
who was smart enough to get out of the valley,
well, Rose stuck around and he paid the ultimate price.
A group of vigilantes was formed
to finally clean out the rustlers.
Men were hanged, others arrested.
Some fled and went on to live normal lives,
even becoming sheriffs and deputies after they turned away
from their outlaw ways, the violence did continue,
but with Tom Graham, the last of the Graham's
gone from Pleasant Valley,
it was nothing like it once had been.
However, what happens next
is the most incredible part of our story.
He's in town.
It ends now.
It was the morning of August 2nd, 1892,
when Tom Graham was killed in the city of Tempe, Arizona.
His assassin Ed Tewkesbury was accompanied by
that loyal family friend, John Rhodes.
After the killing, the two men went their separate ways.
Rhodes was arrested in the city
while Ed made his way back to Pleasant Valley.
Now many people believe it's impossible
that Ed could have killed Tom,
see Ed was seen in Pleasant Valley
on the afternoon of August 1st,
the murder occurred at 7:00 am on August 2nd,
Ed was also seen in Pleasant Valley
the afternoon of August 2nd at a dance.
So in order for him to have killed Tom,
he would have had to cover 250 miles on horseback
in less than 30 hours.
But that's exactly what he did.
Now this amazing feat of riding
would have been the perfect alibi,
except that a couple of witnesses saw him
both at the scene and on his escape route.
So Rhodes and Ed were both arrested and went to trial.
Rhodes had his own set of alibis
in the form of prominent businessmen,
that said he was with them at the time that Tom was shot.
So furious was Tom's widow at the acquittal,
she tried to shoot Rhodes in the middle of the courtroom,
and for good or bad, she was unsuccessful.
But Ed, Ed was actually convicted,
but of course, on a technicality he had to be retried.
And the second trial ended in a hung jury.
So for the final time,
the law was unable to convict any of the combatants
of the Pleasant Valley War.
Ed Tewkesbury returned home a free man, the last man.
After 10 years of fighting and nearly 50 dead,
the Pleasant Valley War was one
of the main contributors in delaying
Arizona statehood for another 20 years.
But what do we learn from this story?
Historians have researched this for years,
countless books have been written,
other films have been made,
but will we ever really understand what started this fight?
We can't know the hearts and minds
of the Grahams and Tewksburys,
and we probably never will,
but we do know one thing for sure.
If you live by the gun, you die by the gun.