John Clinton, known to family and friends as ‘Jack’ couldn’t escape the land war. While he managed to avoid the worst of the Irish Land War of 1879-82 by emigrating with most of his siblings to the USA from rural County Meath, he fell victim to an equally vicious agrarian conflict in his new Arizona home in 1915.Jack Clinton
In the interim Jack had survived a ‘real’ war, the Spanish-American conflict of 1898 when he enlisted in the US Army. However, he did manage to contract dysentery during his service in the Philippines, a disease that would continue to incapacitate him from time to time for the rest of his life. In 1903 he married an Irishwoman, Delia Varley from Mayo. Within a year their first child, a daughter named Rose was born. A year later the family moved to Arizona where Jack filed a claim for federal land under the 1863 Homestead Act and moved his wife and child onto their new 160 acre ‘ranch’.
That was when he first encountered the Boquillas Cattle Company, an outfit that dwarfed his holding and that of all his fellow homesteaders in the San Pedro river valley of Cochise County, an area just a short distance from the Mexican border. The Boquillas Cattle Company – which was in possession of a land grant once owned by George Hearst, the ruthless and entrepreneurial father of William Randolph Hearst – owned land and laid claim to grazing rights on thousands of acres of the relatively well-watered valley of the San Pedro River.
One of the many things the beneficial owners of the Boquillas company (mostly based in California) didn’t like was homesteaders. They thought of their struggling neighbours as ‘squatters’ who put up fences to mark off property – legitimately acquired from the federal government – where Boquillas cattle had once been allowed to roam free. These prosperous ‘cowmen’ suspected – or at least volubly claimed to suspect – that the new arrivals were rustling Boquillas cattle. And in the American west there was only one penalty for rustling. The perpetrator of this most heinous of cattle country crimes seldom had to wait for sanction from any legally constituted authority. The Boquillas Cattle Company was more than willing to deal with suspected rustlers themselves, and didn’t expect to be challenged if they were forced to take harsh measures against suspected cattle thieves.
Jack Clinton was a real thorn in the side of the industrial-scale ranchers of southern Arizona. He was smart, well-educated and an outspoken advocate of the rights of the Cochise County homesteaders. He hadn’t taken long to establish himself in the Hereford-Palominas area of the San Pedro valley. By 1915 he had become an official cattle ‘brand inspector’ tasked with establishing the legitimate ownership of steers sold at auction in Wilcox, a town half way between Tucson and the New Mexican border. This gave him the right to query the provenance of any beast presented for sale. On 18 June 1915 he had exercised that right and rejected a number of cattle sent to the auction by the Boquillas company.
To the cowmen having someone like Clinton as a brand inspector was like giving a burglar the keys to the back door of your hacienda. A squatter/homesteader with a veto was like a slave with a gun.
Jack Clinton and his wife, Delia aka ‘The Tombstone Strangler’.
Whether by coincidence or not, that night two cowboys employed by the Boquillas company, Ed Scarborough and Calvin Cox, showed up at Clinton’s ranch and demanded to talk to him. The discussion, witnessed by young Rose Clinton, did not last long. Cox never even dismounted from his horse and Scarborough only did so for as long as it took to fire four bullets into Jack Clinton’s body. He left a widow and three young children, a fourth was born a few months after his death.
It didn’t take the Arizona authorities long to catch Scarborough and Cox. Both were held on remand in Tombstone put on trial separately in the county seat of Bisbee. When Cox was being transferred to Bisbee for a preliminary hearing the local sheriff’s officers offered to give Jack Clinton’s sister Annie a lift. At some point in the journey, she had to be hauled off Cox as she attempted to strangle him with her bare hands. Cox wasn’t finished with the Clinton women either. At a bail hearing in Tombstone Delia Clinton spotted an opening. She sprang from her seat in the courtroom and lunged at Cox in the dock. According to the Bisbee Daily Review ‘She sought his throat and it was some minutes before court attendants could force her to release her hold from the accused man.’
Because young Rose Clinton testified that he had remained mounted throughout the fatal assault on her father, Calvin Cox was acquitted. Ed Scarborough was not so fortunate, although, by most civilised standards, he got off lightly. He could have been sentenced to death for first degree murder, instead the judge in the case – who may not have been keen on homesteaders himself – opted for the minimum tariff, a term of ten years in the state penitentiary. With time off for good behaviour (something for which Mr. Scarborough was not renowned) he was likely to serve only six or seven years for the murder of a man in his moccasins, carrying no weapon, gunned down in front of his eldest child.
As it transpired Ed Scarborough served only a year for his brutal crime. On 25 May 1917, barely twelve months after he had begun doing his time in Arizona State Prison in Florence, Scarborough somehow managed to break out of jail. He was one of three escapees, but he was the only one to remain at large after four weeks. Scarborough fled to Mexico and remained there, bar the occasional covert trip across the frontier to visit his mother and sisters.
Despite their personal tragedy the Clintons stayed on in Cochise County. One of Jack Clinton’s grandchildren remains there to this day. There is no record of a female Clinton having attempted to choke anyone in more than a century.
Myles Dungan is an author and broadca ster. He presents the weekly History Show on RTE Radio 1, has written more than a dozen books on Irish and American history, is a former Fulbright scholar and holds a PhD from Trinity College, Dublin.
