February 15, 2024
Volume 54 - No. 7
Frontier Justice Rough n’ Ready
by lyle e davis The wheels of justice today move mighty slow. Wasn’t always that way. Back in the Wild, Wild, West, frontier justice was administered rather quickly. Sometimes impulsively. More often than not, the justice applied was correct . . . but if, on occasion, the wrong person was hanged . . . well, the frontier had to move fast and rough. That was probably of little comfort
to the person who had been hanged in error, but it was a fact of life back then.
One example:
was the way back to Tucson. It was a primitive dirt road full of dangerous curves and switchbacks. In those days, not many people risked driving at night. The Gibsons made camp near Week’s Station, which was about 24 miles east of Mesa. People traveling long distances always kept camping gear and provisions with them.
On May 3, 1917, James Ray Gibson, a 34-year-old traveling salesman and his 36-year-old wife, Florence, had visited his parents in Globe and were headed back to their Tucson, Arizona, home. The Apache Trail
Shortly after dark, a young man named Starr Daley approached the camp on horseback and asked for a drink of water. Suddenly, Starr opened fire on James Gibson with a .32 rifle, shooting him six times,
A number of historical events demonstrate how life was “in the good old days.” (We leave the reader to decide if all was “good.”)
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the last two at point-blank range in the head killing him. According to the Arizona Daily Star, “Mrs. Gibson spent the whole night on the Apache Trail with her husband’s murderer, her clothes taken from her and under the threat of death, subjected to every whim his seemingly degenerate mind could think of.” At sunrise, Daley forced Florence to cook breakfast and load up the car while he used the dead man’s razor to shave off his mustache in an attempt to disguise his appear-
Justice
See Page 2