Klondyke’s cemetery sits high on a ridge overlooking the broad sweep of Aravaipa Canyon, about 35 miles west of Safford. Prickly pear cactuses and a handful of grave markers rise from its tall, tawny grasses. Among the latter are those of the Power family, who made their home in the remote, rugged canyons of the Galiuro Mountains, about 15 miles south of here.
Dozens of books and articles have been written about the shootout at the Power cabin, and the accounts include a memoir by Tom Power. Tom’s brother John, in many ways Tom’s opposite, was a man of few words. This cemetery, a lovely, lonely spot, is the only place he ever recorded his version of that history. “Shot down with hands up in his own door,” reads his father’s headstone. “Poisoned by unknown person,” his sister’s reads. Those few words sum up all John ever said about what happened. And he etched them in stone.
More than 100 years later, the circumstances surrounding those deaths remain hotly debated. What’s beyond dispute is that on February 10, 1918 — a few months after the death of his daughter, Ola May — Jeff Power was killed in a dawn shootout at his home, as were three lawmen who went there to serve a warrant.
The incident led to one of the largest manhunts in the state’s history and helped bring back the death penalty in Arizona. Tom and John Power served more than 40 years in prison as the slain lawmen’s 19 young children grew to middle age. Many still argue passionately about what happened. And those who knew for certain have carried the truth to their graves.
Restless and ambitious, Jeff Power was born in Texas during the Civil War. After his parents parted ways, his mother, Jane, joined her 24-year-old son and his nascent family as they moved to New Mexico. Jane stood 5 feet tall, but what she lacked in stature, she made up for in spirit. According to family lore, she once chased her husband out of a bar with a horsewhip.
Jeff was working on the roof of a new home when it collapsed, injuring his mother and killing his wife. A widower at 28, Jeff drifted, working odd jobs, while Jane took care of his four young children. They were nearly all grown by the time the family arrived in the Klondyke area around 1910.
John, then 20, was quiet and serious, unlike his gregarious 18-year-old brother Tom. Dark-haired and pretty, 16-year-old Ola shared John’s shyness. Charley, the oldest, was aspiring and entrepreneurial; the 22-year-old had begun buying cattle as a teenager and had bought a mining claim at a former goat ranch on Rattlesnake Creek.
“They were the scabbiest-lookin’ outfit I ever did see,” a Klondyke rancher recalled of watching the family roll into town. “Old wobbly wagons and skinny stock and old plow horses.”
Wherever Jeff went, the best land was already taken, and Klondyke proved no exception. Local ranchers harassed the interlopers’ cattle and did their best to make the Powers feel unwelcome. With few options, the family moved into the Galiuros, settling on Charley’s claim.
While beautiful, their “garden place” was a tough spot to raise cattle. Charley soon gave it up and moved back to New Mexico. But on account of their closest neighbors being prospectors, Jeff caught gold fever and started investing in mining claims in a neighboring canyon.
For the back-breaking work of building a road to the mine, he enlisted the help of U.S. Army veteran Tom Sisson. Sisson had practically become part of the family by 1915, when Jane was killed in a buggy accident. After her death, Jeff sold his cattle and holdings in Rattlesnake Canyon, moved closer to the mine and threw everything he had into it.
In 1917, the U.S. entered World War I and Congress passed the Selective Service Act, which initially required men ages 21 to 30 to register for the draft. Arizona Governor Thomas Campbell declared June 5 a state holiday so eligible men could sign up. Kane Wootan, a member of a prominent local ranching family, registered 32 men from the Klondyke precinct that day, but John and Tom weren’t among them. A butcher shop owner later said Jeff told him, “We don’t want nothing to do with your war.”
That December, Jeff found his daughter lying across her bed in convulsions and sent for neighbors. She died before they arrived. Jeff claimed Ola said she’d been poisoned. The autopsy — conducted on a neighbor’s table, using a pocketknife borrowed from Wootan — was inconclusive, but a vertebra at the base of her spine was dislocated. Rumors flew, and Graham County Sheriff Frank McBride harbored his own suspicions. He and Jeff nearly came to blows at the coroner’s inquest.
A devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, McBride ran for sheriff on a campaign of good character and clean habits. In his book, McBride’s son Darvil wrote, “I can truly say that I never knew a more perfectly honest and sincere man.” Elected in 1916, McBride passionately pursued bootleggers and draft dodgers. Incensed by the “rough-necks” and their refusal to register, after Ola May’s death, he pursued federal warrants for the Power brothers with single-minded determination. Once he got them, he also secured state warrants related to Ola May’s death for Jeff and Sisson.
Deputy U.S. Marshal Frank Haynes was dispatched to arrest the Power brothers. He was told to take McBride and to defer to McBride’s choice for a third posse member. McBride deputized Wootan. The state warrants authorized an additional man, and McBride chose undersheriff Martin Kempton. An alfalfa farmer and LDS member, Kempton had no prior law enforcement experience. He’d taken the largely administrative position while recovering from an injury that left him unable to farm.
The posse went to Klondyke on Saturday afternoon, eating supper at Wootan’s brother-in-law’s ranch and setting out for the Powers’ cabin long after dark. They arrived just before dawn, as it began to snow.
Just out of bed, Jeff set about lighting a fire as the lawmen surrounded the cabin. Ahead of the more experienced lawmen approaching on the south side, Wootan and Kempton had just reached their positions on the north as Jeff walked outside to investigate a noise. Haynes heard Wootan yell, “Throw up your hands!” Rounding the corner of the cabin, he saw a man whose features he couldn’t make out holding a rifle across his chest. Then, John appeared in the doorway.
In the first exchange of gunfire, Jeff fell and Haynes retreated to the side of the house. “By this time, shooting became general,” he later testified. Unable to find a safe vantage point, he rode away to get help.
Tom, John and Sisson emerged to find three lawmen dead and Jeff mortally wounded. A bullet had grazed the bridge of John’s nose and peppered his left eye with splinters, and glass fragments were lodged in Tom’s face and one eye. Taking the lawmen’s weapons and mounts, the men rode off, stopping at a neighbor’s camp to ask him to go to the cabin.
Friends and relatives of the lawmen gathered at the cabin the next morning to investigate and reclaim the bodies. Before they left, they looted the place. The doctor who conducted the coroner’s jury didn’t examine the lawmen’s bodies until after their long journey, and he never examined Jeff’s.
Safford businesses closed for the officers’ funeral as 2,500 mourners packed the town’s largest hall. Meanwhile, Jeff’s body lay at the entrance to his mine for several days before being buried nearby without ceremony.
The manhunt lasted nearly a month. Neighboring sheriffs, Apache scouts, bloodhounds, cavalrymen and hundreds of civilians pursued the fugitives, while newspapers printed rumors and innuendo. Even Haynes stopped giving interviews, saying his words were being “distorted to an unbelievable extent.”
The men finally surrendered to a small cavalry detachment a few miles south of the Mexican border, starving and dehydrated, their clothes in tatters. John’s eye had become infected. Back in Safford, their jailer put the men on display and people waited in line for hours to taunt them.
Until the day they died, the Powers maintained that they only returned fire after their father was shot. Sisson, they said, took no part. Haynes swore the first shots came from the cabin, although he admitted the lawmen hadn’t identified themselves.
At trial, it took a jury half an hour to convict all three of first-degree murder, largely based on Haynes’ testimony and that of a neighbor who once had been convicted of perjury for giving false testimony. As Arizona had recently abolished the death penalty, all three were sentenced to life in prison. In part because of public outcry over the case, the death penalty was restored that December.
In 1952, the Arizona Board of Pardons and Paroles granted the men their first hearing. Relatives and friends of the lawmen flooded the board with letters and packed the room, carrying a protest signed by 104 Safford residents.
Darvil McBride wrote that the aging inmates elicited pity. But any sympathy evaporated at their continued claims of innocence. The men lost their bid, and Sisson died before he got another chance. Then, in 1958, Arizona Republic columnist Don Dedera — who later would serve as editor of Arizona Highways — took up the Powers’ cause.
“After 41 years, truth may be out of reach,” he conceded, but he added that in Arizona, a life sentence was usually commuted after 10 or 12 years. The Powers had served more than 40. “Why?” Dedera asked. “Was their crime so hideous, so premeditated, so vicious, that society could never punish them too much?”
Other columnists joined in. The coverage inflamed passions in Safford, but it also swayed public opinion. The Powers were granted a second hearing in 1960, and Dedera said nothing in his life was more dramatic. The hearing culminated with the fiery testimony of Lorenzo Wright, the president of an LDS stake. He rebuked his fellow church members, saying, “If you will not forgive, [God] will not forgive you.”
Then, he admonished the Powers. “If you are not men enough to ask for forgiveness and to forgive,” he thundered, “then I withdraw my support.”
“Don Dedera reports that I said, ‘We will forgive and would like to be forgiven,’ ” Tom later wrote. “I accept Dedera’s report. … We were sorry. Sorry about our father’s death. Sorry for the widows and families of the three slain officers. Sorry about our wasted lives, and sorry about Mr. Sisson’s life and death in prison.”
The board commuted the Powers’ sentence. A decade later, the brothers received a full pardon.
A t 70 and 67, John and Tom Power walked out of prison for the last time. By then, both were pretty “stove-up,” and John perpetually reeked of the citronella and Mentholatum he used to relieve his pain.
For a time, John lived at the mine or in Klondyke with members of the Lackner family. Later, too disabled to get to the mine, he lived out of an old Chevy pickup behind the Klondyke store.
Restless like his father, Tom wandered, taking odd jobs. He told friends he wanted to live long enough to vote, which couldn’t happen until the pardon came through. In 1970, the brothers cast their first votes. Tom died three days later, on John’s 79th birthday.
John buried his brother at the Klondyke cemetery, near their sister and grandmother. He moved his father’s remains there and bought headstones for all. For his own epitaph, he chose “Rest in peace,” perhaps longing for something he never felt in life.
The Power cabin is now part of a designated wilderness area, and nature is reclaiming the family’s hard-earned road. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the site has become a backpacking destination for hikers hardy enough to attempt the grueling trek.
Some of the lawmen’s descendants remain embittered. Others have found peace, seeing tragedy for all concerned. Last year, descendants of the lawmen joined friends of the Powers at Klondyke’s school for the dedication of a memorial. Designed and built by Klondyke residents Wayne and Sherral Curtis, the stone replica of the Power cabin honors all who died.