Cover image: Members of the Notorious Wild Bunch Gang. Sitting (L-R) Harry Longabaugh, alias Sundance Kid; Ben Kilpatrick; and Robert Parker, alias Butch Cassidy. Standing: Will Carver; and Harvey Logan, alias Kid Curry.
Outlaws murdered my great uncle, Frank LeSueur. Frank was serving in a posse of more than a dozen men, but due to a series of missed trails, bad decisions, and even worse luck, by the end of the day only Frank and his friend, Gus Gibbons, remained on the outlaws’ trail. All of the other posse members, including the sheriff, had returned to their homes. A search party sent out early the next morning found the young men’s bodies riddled with bullets, their faces mutilated by gunshots fired at close range while they lay dead or dying.
“The sight was horrifying to the senses,” said Gus’s uncle Dick Gibbons, a member of the search party. “For them to be ambushed and shot down like dogs, without even a chance to fight for their lives, made me sick. It was murder in its worst form.”
The murders took place on March 27, 1900, about twenty miles outside of St. Johns, Arizona, a dusty frontier community with a population of about 800 people consisting of Latter-day Saints and Mexican-Americans in about equal numbers. Frank’s murder was well known to my family, but my grandfather, Karl LeSueur, was just five years old when his older brother was killed, so he recalled few details. The outlaws, five in number, had triggered the posse’s pursuit by rustling a cow, but as far as we knew, the outlaws were never identified nor was there much subsequent effort to capture them.
We were wrong. In recent years, historians of outlaws and the West began pointing to members of Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch gang as the likely culprits, and so I began my own investigation into the episode, building on the research of others. Although there remains room for disagreement regarding which gang members participated, the likely killers were Harvey Logan (alias Kid Curry); Thomas C. Hilliard (alias Tod Carver); Ben Kilpatrick; Will Carver; and Tom Capehart. We know that Butch Cassidy was not with them because, on the day that Frank and Gus were killed, Cassidy was sitting in the St. Johns jail. The sheriff did not record his reasons for detaining Cassidy, but it appears he correctly suspected a connection between Cassidy and the murderers. Cassidy, whose real name was Robert LeRoy Parker, was a Latter-day Saint whose parents emigrated to Utah in the 1850s. How a Latter-day Saint boy came to lead a murderous outlaw gang has fascinated and perplexed historians.
Gus Gibbons (far right), about age twenty-four, while a missionary in the United Kingdom. With Gus are Elder Jepson and Elder Brown After being summoned to join the posse, Gus stopped by his parents’ house, where his mother and sisters watched him retrieve his father’s rifle, kneel on the kitchen floor, and load the bullets. Gus stood and kissed each of them. “I’ll soon be back,” he said with perhaps more cheerfulness than he actually felt. His sister, Eva, said, “We watched him ride away waving goodbye.” Photo Credit: Andrew A. Gibbons photographs, Church History Library, Salt Lake City. PH 281
In writing about the Wild Bunch, Western historians play up the drama of their daring heists and violent confrontations. Their victims serve primarily as extras in the outlaws’ stories, bit players and forgotten names whose lives merit little attention. In contrast, I examine the murders and related events from the perspective of the victims and their families. Newspaper accounts of the murders, along with diaries, reminiscences, and accounts left by the families of Frank, Gus, and other residents of the tight-knit St. Johns community offer illuminating details. They tell of the outlaws’ menacing entrance into St. Johns, and of their stopping at the ACMI store where Frank’s father sold them bullets for their guns. They tell of the minor incident that triggered the call to arrest the outlaws, the subsequent organizing of the posse, the anxious waiting for the men to return, and the missteps that left Frank and Gus alone on the trail. Their accounts also describe an aftermath filled with heartache, bitter second-guessing of the sheriff, and an aching desire to find meaning in the young men’s deaths.
Americans are generally familiar with the Saints’ central role in colonizing in Utah but relatively less so with their pioneering efforts in Arizona. My research into these events brought an eye-opening recognition of the extreme hardships and challenges faced by the colonizing missionaries called to settle along Arizona’s Little Colorado River corridor. Consequently, my book provides a window into understanding the Latter-day Saint-Arizona colonizing experience.
When the Mormons began exploring the Little Colorado River territory for future settlements, one man described the region as “the most desert looking place I ever saw,” while another explorer called it “an inhospitable and forbidding waste.” The Little Colorado River was filled with so much silt and sand that it was unfit for human consumption. One colonizer described the river as a “running stream of mud.” However, these and similar reports did not discourage church leaders. In response to such reports, George Q. Cannon, one of Brigham Young’s counselors, said, “Good countries are not for us. The worst places in the land we can probably get, and we must develop them. If we were to find a good country how long would it be before the wicked would want it and seek to strip us of our possessions?”
Starting in 1876, hundreds of Latter-day Saint families accepted calls to settle in St. Johns and other locations along the Little Colorado River. They sold their homes and land and pulled up stakes to move to one of the country’s most unforgiving regions. I tell this part of the story through the lives of the LeSueurs, Gibbonses, and other colonizing missionaries.
In addition to their struggle to scratch out a living in this harsh environment, Latter-day Saint colonizers faced the challenge of maintaining law and order in a violent frontier plagued by cattle rustling, horse stealing, stagecoach robbing, and vigilante justice. Numerous criminal gangs operated in Apache County, where St. Johns was located. An associate of one of these gangs said of Apache County that “of all the places I have ever been [and] in all my association with bad men, I had never seen as bad a collection as was in Apache County.” James LeSueur, Frank’s older brother, said the cowboys overseeing the vast herds of cattle in the region also proved troublesome, particularly those who worked for the Aztec Land and Cattle Company. “Their cowboys would ride through the town shooting and yelling,” LeSueur said. “They set up gambling dens and bawdy houses in St. Johns and Holbrook. Drunkenness together with its attendant crime flourished in the very doors of the Saints.”
Confrontations with suspected lawbreakers were not infrequent, nor was it unusual for the county sheriff to form posses to pursue suspected criminals, though this was apparently the first time that either Frank or Gus had been summoned to join one.
Frank LeSueur (right), about age nineteen, with his friend Will Sherwood. When the tiring horses of other posse members forced them to abandon pursuit of the outlaws, Frank was determined to press forward. “The sheriff is ahead and will need our help,” he told the others, not knowing the sheriff had already left the chase and returned to St. Johns. “He knew nothing of fear,” his parents said of their brave, impulsive son. “And we never could impress upon him the necessity of caution.” Photo Credit: Family History Center, St. Johns, Arizona.
Frank, who was nineteen years old, had been called to a foreign mission just a month earlier and was awaiting a specific assignment when the sheriff requested his help. Frank was “inclined to be wild” as a youth “and at times [neither] his mother nor no one except myself can control him,” said his father, John T. LeSueur, who sent Frank to a military academy in Missouri to “learn discipline.” However, during his two years of study at Brigham Young Academy in Provo, Frank matured and became a valuable contributor to his family’s various enterprises. In fact, his father intended to turn over management of his vast sheep herd to Frank when he returned from his mission. In a letter to President Lorenzo Snow accepting his mission call, Frank said, “I feel grateful to my Heavenly Father for the privilege of being called to perform a mission for our Grand and Noble Church and I hope and pray that I may go and be able to fulfill an honorable one.”
Gus, then twenty-six years old, had returned from a two-year mission to the United Kingdom just four months earlier. He had married Priscilla (“Pearl”) Smith, a daughter of Snowflake Stake President Jesse N. Smith, in November 1897, and then promptly left for the mission field. Upon his return, he worked as a day laborer as he settled back into frontier life. Married for just one month and then separated for two years, Gus and Pearl were still like newlyweds, exploring life together and carving out a niche for themselves in the St. Johns community.
The outlaws themselves are tangled in myths that attached themselves to bandit gangs and gunfighters, many of whom were romanticized even in their own time. Many popular writers portrayed the outlaws as social bandits and “good badmen,” champions of the little guy and symbols of an unsullied frontier making its last stand against encroaching industrialization. Modern popular culture perpetuates many of these themes. For example, the 1969 movie, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” portrays the two outlaws as affable rogues. In this telling, Butch is as quick with his wit as Sundance is with a gun. Butch eschews violence and aims his larceny primarily at those whose wealth makes them deserving targets.
Common motifs also portray western outlaws as misunderstood and basically honorable men whose station or circumstances have led them to a life of crime. In the case of the Wild Bunch, regardless of what may have initially motivated their turn to crime, we can add one more character description. The men who murdered Frank LeSueur and Gus Gibbons were stone-cold killers. They were not looking for a fair fight. They preferred ambush over direct confrontation, and they were not opposed to shooting unarmed men in the back.
Apache County Sheriff Edward Beeler led posses that chased the murderers across five Western states and territories. Blamed for the deaths of Frank and Gus, he engaged in dogged, Ahab-like pursuit aimed at retribution and restoring his reputation. “The boys that these cowardly villians [sic] shot to pieces in the south were my friends and sacrificed their lives to assist me, and I will even up the score,” Beeler told a newspaper reporter. Photo credit: Marlin and Nonie Harmon
The murders also rippled through the community in other ways. Prior to the murders, Apache County Sheriff Edward Beeler was a popular lawman who was known to be aggressive and yet fair in dealing with suspected criminals. But Beeler was roundly criticized for decisions that left the inexperienced LeSueur and Gibbons alone on the trail of the outlaws, and so the embattled sheriff did not run for reelection. Following the murder of his nephew, Dick Gibbons ran for the Arizona Territorial Legislature on a platform calling for the establishment of a company of Arizona Rangers that could track down and eliminate criminal gangs. Once elected, Gibbons played a key role in the formation of the Rangers in 1901.
Also of note, just a few months after Frank’s death, his older brother James reported having a vision in which he saw Frank preaching to deceased family members in the spirit world, where Frank’s proselytizing voice was needed. James’s account of his vision, which was published in church magazines and books, sparked a lifelong passion for genealogical research and made him a leading proponent of genealogy work among the Arizona Saints. His son, James K. LeSueur, said regarding his father’s enthusiasm for tracking down ancestors: “How well I remember his coming home after a long day of genealogical research and joyously saying, ‘I found a new ancestor today’ with more happiness than if he had found a million dollars.”
My book focuses on Frank and Gus and their murders, but I titled it Life and Death on the Mormon Frontier because it entails more than just the murders. Ultimately, it’s a story of faith, hardship, and perseverance; of greed, violence, and death; and of finding joy in community, comfort in faith, and meaning in death as well as in life.
