Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Arizona's Deadliest Gunfight: Draft Resistance and Tragedy at the Power Cabin 1918

Arizona's Deadliest Gunfight: Draft Resistance and Tragedy at the Power Cabin 1918

Osselaer, Heidi J.

Hardcover

20th Century United States HistoryRegional: SouthwestWorld War I

ISBN10: 0806160012
ISBN13: 9780806160016
Publisher: Univ Of Oklahoma Pr
Published: May 3 2018
Pages: 312
Weight: 1.25
Height: 1.20 Width: 6.30 Depth: 9.10
Language: English
On a cold winter morning, Jeff Power was lighting a fire in his remote Arizona cabin when he heard a noise, grabbed his rifle, and walked out the front door. Someone in the dark shouted, Throw up your hands! Shots rang out from inside and outside the cabin, and when it was all over, Jeff's sons, Tom and John, emerged to find the sheriff and his two deputies dead, and their father mortally wounded.

Arizona's deadliest shoot-out happened not in 1881, but in 1918 as the United States plunged into World War I, and not in Tombstone, but in a remote canyon in the Galiuro Mountains northeast of Tucson. Whereas previous accounts have portrayed the gun battle as a quintessential western feud, historian Heidi J. Osselaer explodes that myth and demonstrates how the national debate over U.S. entry into the First World War divided society at its farthest edges, creating the political and social climate that lead to this tragedy.

A vivid, thoroughly researched account, Arizona's Deadliest Gunfight describes an impoverished family that wanted nothing to do with modern civilization. Jeff Power had built his cabin miles from the nearest settlement, yet he could not escape the federal government's expanding reach. The Power men were far from violent criminals, but Jeff had openly criticized the Great War, and his sons had failed to register for the draft.

To separate fact from dozens of false leads and conspiracy theories, Osselaer traced the Power family's roots back several generations, interviewed descendants of the shoot-out's participants, and uncovered previously unknown records. What happened to Tom and John Power afterward is as stirring and tragic a story as the gunfight itself. Weaving together a family-based local history with national themes of wartime social discord, rural poverty, and dissent, Arizona's Deadliest Gunfight will be the authoritative account of the 1918 incident and the memorable events that unfolded in its wake.

1 different editions

Also available

Also in

Regional: Southwest

View All