The Hashknife Outfit
Near Holbrook, Arizona
In eighteen eighty-four, a group of investors formed the Aztec Land and Cattle Company and purchased a million acres of rangeland from the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad along the Little Colorado River basin. They stocked it with longhorn cattle brought up from Texas and hired cowboys to manage the range. The cowboys called themselves the Hashknife Outfit, a nickname drawn from the shape of the brand their cattle wore, a blade that resembled the crescent knife used to chop hash in a camp kitchen.
The Aztec Company started out with about thirty-two thousand head of cattle brought up from Texas, across a territory the size of a small state, and it employed some of the most notorious range riders in Arizona Territory. Trouble started almost immediately. The land the company claimed overlapped with the homesteads of Mormon settlers along the Little Colorado, who accused the Aztec cowboys of intentionally destroying crops and fences.
The cowboys accused the settlers of rustling cattle. Violence followed. In the late eighteen eighties, some of the company's early cowboys were among the men killed in range feuds such as the Pleasant Valley War.
The company eventually sold off its cattle and began leasing its grazing land to local ranchers. But the Hashknife brand lingered as local identity. Holbrook adopted it as a kind of civic pride, and the Navajo County Sheriff's Posse still calls itself the Hashknife Outfit today, carrying the name of that brief and violent era into the present.
