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Primarily called home
to
cowboys, cattle ranchers and railroaders, the settlement soon took
on all the vices of a typical
Wild
West town, complete with a
saloon
called the Bucket of Blood. Law and order were non-existent,
gambling was popular, and
painted
ladies far outnumbered "proper women.”
In 1883, four
men by the names of Baca, Pedro Montano, F. W. Smith and H.H. Scorse
owned the land around the depot and filed a plat map laying out the
streets of Holbrook, which remain
essentially unchanged today.
Before long,
Holbrook became a trade
center for northern
Arizona, where cattle,
sheep and wool were shipped out on the railroad. On May 17,
1884, the first issue of the Holbrook Times was published,
which contained advertisements for clothing, hotels,
saloons, grocery stores and
several other businesses.
In 1884, the
Aztec Land
and Cattle Company, better known as the
Hashknife
Outfit, began operations in Holbrook. The second
largest cattle ranch in the U.S., the cattle company had some 60,000
head of cattle, and employed hundreds of
cowboys.
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Members of the posse who caught up
with four
outlaw members of the
Hashknife Outfit
involved in robberies at
Canyon Diablo, photo courtesy
Sharlot Hall Museum, Prescott,
Arizona.
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Holbrook
initially welcomed the money of the cattle company and its
associated
cowboys,
until they saw what they were in for.
The
buckaroos
of the outfit quickly
gained the unsavory reputation of being the "thievinist, fightinest bunch of
cowboys” in the United States. Many of the
cowboys working for the
Hashknife Outfit were wanted men and on two occasions, they
were linked to train robberies at
Canyon Diablo.
The sudden presence of so many
cowboys also gave rise to rustling, robbery and gunfights. Much of the rustling was done against the
Hashknife Outfit itself.
One
such story has it, that a cowboy took off with a bunch of the outfit’s
cattle and headed to
Colorado. There, he set up a
saloon with
his profits. However, he was soon without money again and rejoined
the outfit once more.
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