Wagons West Chronicles October Issue 2016 October Issue | Page 18

October 2016

18

ARIZONA’S
RUSTLER KING
ACQUITTAL OF THE MAN
WHO KILLED HIM IN
COLD BLOOD.
Charleston’s Toughest
Days–Justice Dispensed by
Jim Barnett With
A Couple of Revolvers in
His Belt and a Ride Behind
Him.
April 30, 1899, Post-Intelligencer,
Seattle, Washington Territory — On
July last Jim Burnett was shot down
on the main street of Tombstone.
In the district court of Cochise
County William Greene, his slayer,
was acquitted the other day with all
honor and all Tombstone congratulated him as he stepped free,
from the prisoners’ dock. Greene
is a plain, ordinary farmer with a
ranch on the San Pedro River. To
him little interest attaches. He was
simply the instrument that ended
the career of one of the most noted
characters of the Southwest in the
days that were bloodiest. When the
deed was done he stood over his
work with yet smoking pistol, and,
with uplifted hand and utter lack
of self-consciousness, intoned the

Rustler King Jim Burnett.

words: “Vengeance is mine, saith
the Lord; I will repay.”
Burnett’s appropriate fate had
overtaken him. “The King of the
Rustlers” he had been called; he
was a border chief of outlaws. He
had met his death by the violence
he had so often dealt out to others.
Yet Greene had a personal
motive to kill him. He was not
wholly one called to make return
for community wrongs. Last summer his daughter, a girl of 18, was
fishing in the San Pedro, near her

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home. With her was a young girl
friend from Bisbee. They did not
return at the appointed time and a
search found their lifeless bodies
on a sandbar far down the stream.
Further investigation disclosed the
fact that Greene’s dam, thrown
across the river at the point where
he diverted the water for his farm,
had been blo wn out with dynamite.
In the rush of water the girls had
been caught and drowned.
Burnett’s farm was just below
Greene’s. There had for years
been enmity between the men.
The father, who had been absent,
soon reached home. He satisfied
himself that his neighbor had
struck the blow. He saddled his
horse, rode to Tombstone and rested not until the corpse of his
enemy lay at his feet. And he has
been acquitted, though it was
shown that if Burnett blew up the
dam it was by proxy, and, further,
that Burnett accidentally happened, when he met Greene in
Tombstone, to be temporarily destitute of his shooting tackle. But
what was the difference? Greene
was recognized by public and jury
alike, as simply an agent of
Providence, even if he did have to
use up all the chambers of a big
revolver in dispatching his mission.
Burnett came to Arizona from
Texas about 1877. He was a New
Yorker of fair education and good
mental ability. He located at
Charleston, on the San Pedro, just
about the time that Tombstone, a
dozen miles away, was started, the
mining excitement bringing to the

Wagons West Chronicles

region miners and adventures, to
score thousands of them. But
Burnett was not a miner; he found,
it more profitable to be a butcher.
He owned hardly one head of
stock, yet his business grew and
immense were his dealings. Then
he was elected Justice of the Peace,
and in that office, between the
years 1829 and 1882, attained the
wealth of his fame.
But no delineation of Burnett
would be complete without more
than a passing reference to his
home. Tombstone at the start had
very little water, so the ores were
freighted down to Charleston for
reduction. Around the mills grew
up a town that had 2,500 inhabitants and, by actual count, sixty
saloons. It had the usual crowd of
red-shirted miners, who made it
lively when fortune favored them,
but the crowning glory of the place
was in its cowboys. They called
themselves cowboys, the bespurred fraternity who rode their
horses through the streets and
filled the gambling halls at night.
It is probable that most of them, at
one time or other, had been cattlemen, but at the time with which
this article deals there were few
long-horns
in
Southeastern
Arizona, and the grassy meadows
and deeply turfed valleys gave no
warning of the droughts of later
years. A cowboy of the class
referred to was locally called a
rustler, which, in Western parlance, means a mounted individual
who makes a living by picking up
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