Volume 44- No. 13
March 28, 2013
Frontier Justice Rough n’ Ready
by lyle e davis
The wheels of justice today move mighty slow. Wasn’t always that way.
Back in the Wild, Wild, West, frontier justice was administered rather quickly. Sometimes impulsively. More often than not, the justice applied was correct . . . but if, on occasion, the wrong person was hanged . . . well, the frontier had to move fast and rough.
That was probably of little comfort to the person who had been hanged in error, but it was a fact of life back then.
A number of historical events demonstrate how life was “in the good old days.” (We leave the reader to decide if all was “good.”) One example:
On May 3, 1917, James Ray Gibson, a 34-year-old traveling salesman and his 36-yearold wife, Florence, had visited his parents in Globe and were headed back to their Tucson, Arizona, home. The Apache Trail was the way back to The Paper - 760.747.7119
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Tucson. It was a primitive dirt road full of dangerous curves and switchbacks. In those days, not many people risked driving at night. The Gibsons made camp near Week's Station, which was about 24 miles east of Mesa. People traveling long distances always kept camping gear and provisions with them. Shortly after dark, a young man named Starr Daley approached the camp on horseback and asked for a drink of water. Suddenly, Starr opened fire on James Gibson with a .32 rifle, shooting him six times, the last two at point-blank range in the head killing him.
According to the Arizona Daily Star, "Mrs. Gibson spent the whole night on the Apache Trail with her husband's murderer, her clothes taken from her and under the threat of death, subjected to every whim his seemingly degenerate mind could think of."
At sunrise, Daley forced Florence to cook breakfast and load up the car while he used the dead man's razor to
shave off his mustache in an attempt to disguise his appearance. He told her they were going to leave James' body there, get married, sell the car and go to Oklahoma.
Thinking quickly, she told him he would have to kill her before she would leave her husband's body in the desert. She said if he wanted to marry her, he would have to take her husband's body to a mortuary in Mesa for a proper burial. Surprisingly, he agreed.
Daley wrapped the body in a blanket and put it in the back seat of the Dodge touring car and covered it with camping equipment.
As they entered Mesa [suburb of Phoenix now], which then was a small Mormon farming community, the car ran out of gas on East Main Street. That is when Daley made the mistake that cost him his life. He left Florence with the car as he set out to find a gas sta-
tion. It was early in the morning when a local resident named H.S. Phelps came by while riding his bicycle to work. Florence hysterically told him what had happened and Phelps immediately rode his bicycle to the home of City Marshal Tom Peyton and relayed Florence's story. Peyton grabbed his .45 and handed Phelps a shotgun and the pair raced back to the Dodge. As they approached, they saw Daley pouring a can of gasoline into the tank. They arrested him without incident. Florence was taken to a doctor and Daley had a preliminary appearance before a Mesa judge before being transferred to the Maricopa County Jail in Phoenix. When newspapers across the state headlined the gruesome murder and heinous assault on the victim's wife, emo-
“Frontier Justice” Continued on Page 2