Sheriff Perry Owens and the Gunfight on Commerce Street
Near Holbrook, Arizona
On September fourth, eighteen eighty-seven, Apache County Sheriff Commodore Perry Owens arrived at a house on Commerce Street in Holbrook to arrest a man named Andy Blevins, also known as Andy Cooper, who was wanted for horse theft and for connections to the ongoing range violence tied to the Hashknife Outfit. What happened next took less than two minutes and became one of the most discussed gunfights in the history of Arizona Territory. Owens wore his hair long enough to reach his shoulders and carried a Winchester rifle.
When he knocked on the door, exactly what unfolded is disputed in detail but documented in outcome. When the shooting stopped, four men had been hit. Three of them died.
Owens was uninjured. He had faced Andy Blevins and three other men, firing through a doorway, around a corner, and then after a fleeing figure, changing direction and weapon with what witnesses described as extraordinary speed and calm. The Blevins family had connections to the broader Pleasant Valley War, a feud between the Graham and Tewksbury cattle families that had been killing people throughout the Tonto Basin for years.
The Commerce Street gunfight did not end the range wars, but it marked their turning. The Aztec Land and Cattle Company began to pull back. The era of unchecked violence on the Holbrook range was nearly over.
Owens left the sheriff's office in eighteen eighty-nine and in time faded from public life, spending much of his later life in Seligman.
