Yuma Territorial Prison
Recently, we visited the site of the Yuma Territorial Prison in Yuma, Arizona. Yuma was incorporated as the county seat of Yuma County in 1871; the Arizona Territorial Legislature approved funds for a prison at Yuma in 1875; and ground was broken on the site at the historic Yuma Crossing area of the Colorado River in 1876. The first prisoners, some of whom were among the prison labor used in construction of the facility, moved into their new residence on July 1, 1876.
In the thirty-three years of the prison's operation, a total of 3,069 prisoners were incarcerated. Crimes committed by these inmates were varied, including
1,287 for burglary
473 for assault, mayhem, &/or riot
249 for forgery &/or fraud
217 for murder
170 for manslaughter
164 for selling liquor to Indians
143 for robbery
42 for rape
27 for adultery
11 for polygamy
4 for obstructing the railroad
3 for seduction
1 for prize fighting
278 for miscellaneous other offenses
A bit of clarity on various crimes: Polygamy, adultery, and seduction were hot topics of the day. While only a handful of inmates were incarcerated for these crimes, the salacious undertones kept these crimes in the headlines. The Edmunds Anti-Polygamy Act of 1882 made polygamy a felony, made cohabitation unlawful, and prohibited polygamists from voting, serving on juries, or holding political office. The Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act of 1862 was already in existence, and by the time the Edmunds Act was passed, many polygamists had chosen to move further & further into the desert wilderness to avoid religious persecution and legal prosecution. All eleven of these incarcerated polygamists were men, and were recidivists who, upon their release, did not change their manner of living. They just moved their families further away from the eyes of the government and hoped they would not again be arrested. Further, married men who consorted with prostitutes were not considered adulterers, but anyone who otherwise had sex outside the marriages was subject to arrest for the crime of adultery. Likewise, a man who lured an unmarried woman into immoral acts could also be prosecuted. The crime of selling liquor to Indians was also a hot topic. The issue was addressed in several statutes and edicts along the way, but the primary federal statute was actually issued by the Department of the Army in 1897. Alcohol was historically used by non-Natives as both a gift to pave the way for trading and an actual item of trade; making it illegal was a blatant attempt to exert control over Native populations. Historians argue everything from simple economics to racism and intolerance as the bases for the laws. The simplified version, however, is that they believed the consumption of alcohol changed the temperament of otherwise docile Natives, and the temptation of and subsequent addiction to alcohol drew Natives away from their reservations. These laws are most certainly the precursors of Oklahoma's 3.2% beer law (in effect until 2018), states' temperance movements, and the freedom-restricting laws that eventually led to nationwide prohibition via the 18th Amendment. At any given moment at Yuma Territorial Prison, rapists and killers were housed side-by-side with polygamists, white-collar criminals, and adulterers. And, get this! a few of them were women.
Hollywood fiction is just that. Fiction. The “wild west” didn't have women gunfighters or lawmen. Women rode sidesaddle, and it was only with the increased popularity of the bicycle (velocipede) that women adapted their skirts to split skirts or “pedal pushers,” and another decade would pass for women to ride astride saddle in public. With the obvious exception of prostitutes, women did not own businesses or hang out in saloons, and they certainly didn't drink, play poker, smoke opium, or have multiple sexual partners outside of marriage. They certainly didn't dress like men, rob stagecoaches, kill their lovers or family members, or harm their own children. It simply wasn't behavior that interested the fairer sex. Or, ummmmmm, wait. Sometimes, it was.
The Yuma Territorial Prison provided better conditions for its inmates than the town of Yuma did for its law-abiding residents. The prison library was extensive and the facility had electricity and running water when most homes in town still did not. Food for the prisoners was also of a higher quality than most law-abiding citizens could afford or acquire. But even with these progressive and modern amenities, this prison was not built with women in mind. The facility was often described as hell, because the summertime temperatures were brutal, and snakes and scorpions were often one's bunkmates. When the first female prisoner arrived in 1878, cohabitation with the male prisoners was certainly not an option, and even a “private” cell among the men's cells was considered inappropriate. Early female prisoners were housed in a guard tower or solitary confinement. Further, early female prisoners were often pardoned or paroled ahead of schedule because the extra work required to house and attend to a woman in an otherwise male prison was deemed excessive. Later a separate women's wing was created. Women inmates were allotted feminine civilian clothing, musical instruments, and games, and early paroles and pardons among women inmates became far less common. But understand, all twenty-nine of Yuma Territorial Prison's women inmates committed serious, quite un-feminine crimes.
Lizzie Gallagher was about 20 years old in 1878 when she stabbed and killed a drunken soldier at a dance hall just outside Yuma. Her indictment was for murder, but she was allowed to plead to manslaughter and received a one-year-three-month sentence. After ten months in Yuma county jail, she was moved to Yuma Territorial Prison. Two short months later, she was pardoned by the Governor. Her inmate number was 26, implying that only twenty-five men had been incarcerated in the prison before her.
In late 1882, May Woodman read in a Tombstone newspaper that her love-interest, Billy Kinsman, intended to propose marriage to her. Apparently this was a prank of some kind, because Billy himself ordered a printed a retraction, saying he did NOT intend to propose to May. May read the retraction, and, well, you know the saying about a woman scorned. Packing a loaded gun, May set out to find Billy, and find Billy she did. She shot him dead as he was standing outside a Tombstone saloon (coincidentally, it was the same saloon owned by Wyatt Earp). Her 1883 conviction for manslaughter got her a five-year sentence at the Yuma Territorial Prison. At sentencing, she screamed at the judge, “May God curse you forever!” After ten months there, she was given a “conditional pardon” - the condition being that she go far, far away and never return.
In 1886, Allegracio de Ortega was fined $100 and given a sentence of two months for two convictions for selling liquor to Indians. Compared to the ones that came before her, hers was a minor crime. But consider it in context. This woman was an entrepreneur in an all-male business world, on the black market no less, and her product was alcohol.
Manuela Fimbres gave birth to a son in November, 1889 while imprisoned in Yuma. She and her co-conspirator Juan Enriquez were both convicted for the murder of a Chinese man named Sullivan in March, 1889; Juan's sentence for murder was thirty years, while Manuela's for accessory to murder was only fifteen. Another woman was charged as a co-conspirator but was acquitted. Manuela was far from a model prisoner, but was pardoned in 1892 for the welfare of the child. Several accounts indicate that Manuela herself was just plain mean. She was absolutely horrible to guards and other inmates, and all who knew her were delighted at her release. The child, however, was much loved at the prison and was greatly missed. While no reference to the baby's progeny can be found in the newspapers of the day, it is interesting to note that the child was born exactly nine months to the day from Manuela's initial incarceration date.
Jennie McCleary was sentenced to eighteen months for attacking another woman with a straight razor. Her 1893 conviction was for aggravated assault. Jenny served only about a year of her sentence at the Territorial Prison before she, too, received a gubernatorial pardon.
Morphine addict Georgie Clifford was probably the only innocent woman ever housed in the Yuma prison. Medical records indicate that she was under treatment for her addiction at the time she was accused of killing a man by poisoning his drink. Later analysis of the case indicates that another woman fled the scene, and that Georgie, because of her mental instability, was made the fall guy. She was pardoned after serving eleven months of her three-year-six-month sentence, but was later committed to a mental institution and also occasionally served additional jail time for other minor offenses.
A nineteen-year-old named Isabella Washington was convicted of manslaughter in 1885. Isabella, unequipped to handle the social scrutiny of being an unwed mother in an era ruled by Victorian mores, threw her newborn baby into an irrigation canal near Tempe. She served her entire one-year term.
Another incredibly young woman was imprisoned on manslaughter charges in 1896. Maria Moreno, who was later determined to be “demented,” shot and killed her own brother after a heated discussion about her inappropriate behavior. Maria was convicted at age sixteen and served less than a year. She never received treatment for her mental issues, and died before turning twenty-one. She was likely a victim of abuse by her brother, but no evidence of any mitigating circumstances was ever introduced at her trial.
Exie Sedgemore's was an unusual case. In late 1897, she was tried and convicted of assault with a deadly weapon, and sentenced to three years in prison. Lillian Harmon accused Exie of firing three pistol shots with the specific intention of harming Lillian. While Exie never denied firing the weapon, she denied that the shots were fired at Lillian. A petition for her pardon was circulated immediately after her conviction. Signatures on the petition included many Tucson businessmen and prominent citizens, including eleven of the convicting jurors and the district attorney who prosecuted her. She was pardoned almost immediately and never had any other brushes with the law.
Lillie Naomi Davy, alias Pearl Hart, was quite the character. Her sentence in the Yuma Territorial Prison was the result of a robbery conviction. Lillie used several different aliases, including assuming the surnames of her various lovers, some of which were also aliases. (So, if you assume a lover's last name without actually marrying him, and that name happens to be an alias of his, is that alias-squared?) She also made up multiple and varied stories about her past. Thus, her true life story is very difficult to track. Thanks to the research by John Boessenecker, published in his book Wildcat, we now know that Lillie came from a tumultuous household, with an abusive father, and led a lifestyle steeped in crime. She and her siblings witnessed gang rape of her mother, and her father was himself a convicted rapist. Well before adulthood, Lillie and one of her sisters dressed as boys, and together they hopped trains and committed petty crimes all over the Midwest. At various times in her life, she was a prostitute, an actress (one of her sisters had some notoriety as a playwright and actress, and Lillie was periodically involved in her sister's productions), and a traveling salesman. She was a morphine/opium addict, a drinker and a smoker, a jailbreaker, a bigamist, and the lover of many men whom she did not bother to marry. She was a mother and a grandmother. But the thing that made her famous was that she was a stagecoach robber. She was dubbed “Arizona's Girl Bandit” and the publicity she received by posing with weapons while dressed in men's clothes launched her into stratosphere of public fascination. An interview that appeared in the fledgling Cosmopolitan magazine furthered America's fascination with this taboo-breaking woman, and jailbird Pearl Hart's fictional accounts of her past fueled an already hot flame of interest this gun-toting, stage-robbing woman. Her co-conspirator in the stage robbery, Joe Boot (likely not his real name), received a thirty-year sentence in Yuma Territorial Prison, but he escaped after about a year behind bars. Pearl/Lillie was sentenced to five years, but was pardoned well before the end of her term. So very much of what has been written about Lillie, even much of what she told about herself, has now been disproved, but one important thing attributed to her is absolute fact. When she reported for court on the stagecoach robbery charge in 1899, she said, “I shall not consent to be tried under a law in which my sex had no voice in the making.” This woman dressed as she wanted, slept with who she wanted, smoked cigarettes and opium, rode fully astride saddle, hopped trains, robbed a stagecoach, and uttered the best possible quote for a woman of her generation. No wonder a prudish America was captivated by this early feminist.
Elena Estrada was charged with manslaughter in 1900 and given seven years for stabbing a man. Her defense was that in the dark, the man just fell into the knife. The likely truth is that Elena used sex to lure him into that dark alley with the specific intent of killing him. Local legend holds that the man was her lover, and when she realized she had been wronged, she stabbed him in the chest, cut out his heart, and threw his still-beating heart at his face. As still happens today, horror stories grow as they are repeated, and Elena herself likely encouraged such exaggerations to inflate her reputation while in prison. She certainly seemed to relish her prison nickname, “Heartbreaker.” In spite of her propensity for fighting while behind bars (she was once exiled to the prison's “dark cell” for three days), Elena was paroled after serving just over four years.
The woman Elena chose to fight was co-inmate Rosa Duran. Rosa ties Maria Moreno as the youngest female to be incarcerated at the Territorial Prison, at the tender age of sixteen. Don't misunderstand; sixteen was fully an adult in terms of real-life experience and legal consent to marry and bear children, and “demented” Maria Moreno was far from tender. But, evidence suggests that Rosa Duran still lived in her family home at the time her grand larceny in 1901. Supposedly her theft of over $50 in value was the means by which to either feed her family or escape it. Even though Rosa also served time in the solitary confinement of the “dark cell” for fighting, she was paroled after just over a year into her original three-year sentence.
The crime of adultery is an interesting one. Straying outside the marriage was male behavior, and women of the time considered sex an obligatory task, not a fun one. And, on the rare occasions that a woman was caught having sex without the benefit of marriage, as was the case in polygamous households or adulterous relationships, the man, not the woman, was considered the responsible party and thus was arrested and prosecuted. Two notable exceptions were housed in the Yuma Territorial Prison, both convicted for violations of the Edmunds Act. Alfreda Mercer, a thirty-seven-year-old married woman, was the aggressor in her relationship with eighteen-year-old Fred Crossley. Convicted of adultery, Fred was sentenced to and served a six-month term. Intentional delays in prosecution were used as a cooling-off period, with the idea that Fred's absence would quell Alfreda's carnal desires and ultimately the case against her could just fade into oblivion. However, upon Fred's release, Alfreda began “making overtures” to Fred again. Prosecutors determined that only way end to this “disgraceful situation” and “save the boy” was to put Alfreda away. Alfreda was eventually tried and convicted for adultery, and served five months of her six-month sentence at Yuma Territorial Prison. Notes uncovered by her descendants in 2013 indicate that Alfreda's husband and children stood by her and welcomed her home at the end of her imprisonment. Similarly, Kate Nelson was also a convicted adulterer. She is remarkable only in that she served her entire eighteen-month sentence at Yuma Territorial Prison without being paroled or pardoned. Not much detail of her 1904 conviction and incarceration remains. Perhaps by the time she was tried, the public and the press were less shocked by the behaviors of wild women and their actions had become literally unremarkable.
In 1902, nineteen-year-old Jesus Chacon was convicted of arson. Her story is similar to all the others, in that intentional destruction of property wasn't a particularly feminine action. Her story is different in one critical way. Within days of her arrival, she was diagnosed with smallpox. Smallpox wasn't a new thing to Yuma. As a matter of fact, in 1878 the mayor of Yuma actually died from smallpox in a major outbreak of the disease. But to have smallpox in such a confined space, among a population that was literally confined, was quite an issue. The prison staff took “progressive” and “extreme” measures to eliminate the disease within the prison walls. However, I couldn't uncover just what these measures were. The Biologics Act of 1902 was enacted to control the distribution of biological material used for smallpox vaccines across state lines. Even though the first smallpox vaccination occurred in 1796 using a variation of the non-lethal cowpox virus, widespread vaccinations did not occur until the early 1900s, after the so-called smallpox vaccine farms across the country were regulated under the Biologics Act. Although the terms “progressive” and “extreme” spin my mind off to the nefarious, I think it's safe to assume that the Yuma Territorial Prison was the first institution of its kind to rely on a vaccine to stop the spread of a deadly disease. I'm personally not a fan of using incarcerated humans as test subjects, but at Yuma Territorial Prison, many of those who contracted smallpox while incarcerated did survive, and many did not never ever contract the disease. Jesus did survive smallpox and went on to serve a full ten months of her one-year sentence. Her name will forever be associated with what by all rights should have been, but was not, a smallpox epidemic behind those thick adobe walls.
Also in 1902, thirty-seven year-old mother of three, Bertha (aka Bettie) Trimble, was convicted of rape. The story is a horrible one, in that Bertha restrained her own twelve-year-old daughter so that her husband, the child's stepfather, could rape her. One newspaper suggested that the child simply could not be hers, solely because a mother simply could not do such a horrible thing to her own child. Bertha and her husband were both sentenced to life in prison, but Bertha was released by order of the Supreme Court just one year after her conviction. Her husband, the actual rapist, was pardoned unconditionally in 1905. Immediately after the incident, Bertha's daughter was accepted into a loving home. There is no indication that her mother or stepfather ever saw her again. The only record I can find of Bertha's other two children is a 1902 quote in the newspaper from Bertha's oldest daughter. She said she married and left the family home at age thirteen so that her stepfather could not “ruin” her. It is assumed that, upon release, Bertha returned to her native Texas while her husband returned to his native Missouri.
Pearl Eiker (or possibly Eikler) was sentenced to a three-year term for manslaughter in 1907. Pearl pleaded self defense in her shooting of Lewis Clark. The jury at her trial voted six to six, and the newspaper reported that the words “hung jury” scared poor Pearl into thinking she herself would be hung. She was later retried and convicted. Less than a year into her sentence, she died of bowel obstruction and is the only woman inmate buried at the Yuma Territorial Prison.
Two other women were accused, tried, and convicted for attacking their men with knives. The first, Francisca Robles, was a known troublemaker who had been before the local judge a number of times. In 1907, she caught her lover with another woman and attacked them both with a knife. Her defense was not that she didn't do it, but that they deserved it. She was found guilty of assault with a deadly weapon. The second, Eulogia Bracamonte, was a former prostitute who married a less-than-upstanding man named Refugio. In 1908, she attacked Refugio with a knife, and was quoted by the newspaper as saying she absolutely intended to make herself a widow. Like Francisca, Eulogia stated that her man was a horrid person and deserved whatever he got from her, but quite unlike Francisca, Eulogia pleaded guilty. After her conviction, as Eulogia was awaiting transport to the Yuma Territorial Prison, her intoxicated husband came to the jail to see her. In the process of detaining him for drunkenness, the jailer discovered several items of stolen property in his pockets, and Refugio was jailed on the spot for an entirely different reason. Both Eulogia and Francisca served their full sentences, and, upon release, both women reunited with the men they had attacked.
Saferina Garcia was a jailbreaker, and jail breaking was a felony in 1908. Not much else in known about Saferina. The limited information I could find indicates that she was “a Mexican of the pauper class” who got caught trying to break a loved one (husband? brother?) out of the Graham County, Arizona jail. Committing a nonviolent crime for the love of a man is decidedly the most feminine of all the crimes committed here. But it was still a crime, and Saferina was sentenced to a year and a day at the big house in Yuma. She served ten months and had no further documented run-ins with the authorities.
The last two women to enter the Yuma Territorial Prison before it closed, Pinkie Dean and Frannie King, had a few things in common. Both their crimes were most certainly alcohol related. Pinkie, twenty years old at the time of her incarceration in 1908, slashed and stabbed prospector Billy Hennessy when he entered her tent at a mining camp. Frannie, nineteen years old at the time of her incarceration in 1909, slashed and stabbed a woman while fighting over a man. (Both Frannie and the woman she knifed were married to other men at the time, but neither was arrested for adultery.) Both Pinkie Dean and Frannie King were given two-year sentences, and both women were moved to the new prison in Florence, Arizona when it opened in late 1909.
The great majority of women in the late 1800s and early 1900s were law-abiding citizens with a sense of what was socially proper, expected, and appropriate conduct for their gender. In the years of the Yuma Territorial Prison, we know of twenty-nine Arizona women who were definitely not in that majority. While some went on to lead clean or only slightly-criminal lives, some did not. Many simply dropped out of sight – moved on to other jurisdictions to start over or stayed under the radar of law enforcement. For some, like Pearl Hart, the Yuma Territorial Prison provided the means for education and sobriety, which meant some degree of rehabilitation. For some, it was just another chapter in the book of hellish life on earth. For me, what remains of the Yuma Territorial Prison is a physical place, a touchstone, to connect with the human element of our wild-west American history and to learn what it was like to be a woman in such a unique time and place.
