Arizona's Deadliest Gunfight

This is a meticulously researched story of one family's often-failed struggles to wrest a living from land in the Southwest—mostly West Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona—culminating in an event the author labels “the deadliest single instance of draft resistance during World War I” (p. xi). That event was also, the book's title tells us, “Arizona's deadliest gunfight,” which, Heidi J. Osselaer thinks, “should have taken its place long ago among those better-documented incidents,” such as the 1881 shoot-out at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona (p. xi). Osselaer names three major goals: in light of existing flawed accounts, to give the most accurate account possible of the events related to the gunfight; to “determine the ethos that guided this frontier family” and resulted in their failure to support the nation's war efforts (p. xiii); and to explain why lawmen in Arizona felt that it “was necessary to travel for miles into the backwoods in the middle of the night and in the dead of winter to arrest men wanted for non-violent crimes” (p. xiv

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