Arizona School Yearbooks by County
The legendary Sheriff Owens of Apache County has been called "Saint George with a six-shooter," and is credited for cleaning up Holbrook in its wildest, wooliest years. Stories and tall tales abound concerning showdowns and gunfights between the young lawman and frontier outlaws in Northern Arizona.
Commodore Perry Owens was born July 29, 1852, on the anniversary of Commander Perry's victory over the British fleet in the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813. He was named for the American naval officer his mother admired.
Perry, as he was called, was raised in Tennessee and Indiana, but ran away from home at the age of 13 to work on ranches in Oklahoma and New Mexico.
Dana Coolidge, a Western historical writer, wrote that Owens arrived in Arizona in 1881, when he was 28 years old, to work as a ranch foreman. He later worked as a guard for Army cavalry horses in Navajo County. After many attempts to kill him and scatter the horses he guarded had failed, he earned a reputation among the Navajo as the "Iron Man." In one such attack, he supposedly single-handedly held off 100 Navajo warriors at the stage station at Navajo Springs.
It is unclear just when he began to let his blond hair grow, but Owens wore it shoulder length and coiled up under his Stetson. According to one author, he would let it stream out behind him as he hunted.
Arizona author Jo Jeffers, now Jo Baeza, wrote that Owens homesteaded about 10 miles south of Navajo Springs, built a two-room shack with a dirt floor, and named the ranch the Z Bar Ranch.
She wrote that Owens was a quiet man, not from any superior intelligence as portrayed in Hollywood's image of a sheriff, but because he was of a simple, practical turn of mind.
The lawman wore his twin .45 pistols in hip holsters, but with an individual quirk. They were turned so that he had to cross his arms to draw. Even so, he was known as a fast, accurate marksman who once impressed a group of Navajos at Keams Canyon by shooting a squirrel off a cliff a mile away with his single-shot Sharpe. In the notorious Blevins shootout in Holbrook, he carried a Winchester repeater and fired a total of five shots, which killed or wounded four men in a matter of seconds.
In 1886, Perry Owens was elected sheriff of Apache County, a jurisdiction of 20,940 square miles which had practically no law enforcement until his arrival.
Unlike his predecessor, J.L. Hubbell, who, according to Jo Jeffers, was violently anti-Mormon, Owens was well-liked and had a reputation as a sober and courteous gentleman. Owens was honest with the money entrusted to him as sheriff and assessor at a time when Apache County government was slipshod and corruption was common.
The Blevins shootout in September 1887 proved to be a turning point for the sheriff. He did not run for re-election the next year, reportedly because of controversy in Holbrook over the four shootings. He took a job in 1888 as a train guard for the passenger run on the Santa Fe line between Albuquerque and Seligman.
In 1895, Owens was appointed, not elected, the first sheriff and assessor of Navajo County when it was formed that year. He served until Frank Wattron was elected to the post in 1896 and began his term on Jan. 1, 1897.
A portrait of Owens hangs in the Navajo County Sheriff's office today.
In 1900, when he was 48 years old, Owens moved to Seligman and opened a saloon, although some writers state that he neither drank nor gambled. In 1902, he married Elizabeth Barrett, 23, when he was 50. The couple had no children.
Robert S. Thompson of Bellevue, Wash., was in Holbrook in February 1981, and brought news of Perry Owens' surviving relatives in Seligman. Thompson's mother's sister, Elizabeth, had married Owens, and Thompson's grandfather was Owens' brother, as well.
Thompson, who received all of Commodore Perry Owens' personal effects upon the death of his "Aunt Elizabeth," Perry's wife, said, "Something's been dragging me to this area, and the people have been fabulous." In Seligman, he met Dorothy Gilliam and her sister, Helen Morse, who were seven and eight years old when Perry Owens died in their home in 1919.
"The more I follow it, I find he was a good man," Thompson said. "I think he did the country a service. He was sort of a stern person, like all the Owens were, but he really was a good man. These ladies said they remember his keeping wild animals in his backyard in Seligman, behind the house in a fenced pen. He kept wild foxes and coyotes, and he'd take the girls in there with him, he had them tamed so well. Of course they remember that very well," he added.
Owens had a saloon and grocery store in Seligman, and two of the buildings he had constructed are still standing there, according to Thompson.
Thompson and his wife also visited Owens' homestead near Navajo Springs, about 10 miles south of I-40 on the huge Spurlock Ranch. "The Spurlocks should be given a lot of credit; they've kept it just as it was the day he walked away from it. It's just a little dugout in the ground, but it is still there on their ranch," Thompson related. Owens reportedly suffered throughout the later years of his life from paresis of the brain, a disease of the central nervous system and characterized by dementia and paralytic attacks.
One story has it that during his last few days, he saw the Blevins brothers he had shot 22 years before, and was very troubled by the hallucination, though he understood it was not real.
Owens died May 10, 1919, at the age of 66, and was buried in Flagstaff.
