Outlaw John Shaw, deceased yet defiant, reportedly savored his final whiskey as the Arizona sun ascended over Canyon Diablo cemetery, encircled by fifteen rugged cowboys. This seemingly impossible scenario – a dead man’s drink – firmly plants itself in the realm of Wild West legend. However, unlike mere folklore, this tale of John Shaw is substantiated by both photographic evidence and credible eyewitness accounts. This extraordinary episode perfectly encapsulates how the American West transcended mere “wildness,” often veering into the genuinely bizarre.
A Gunfight in Winslow: The Prelude to an Outlaw’s Afterlife
The saga unfolded in the early hours of April 8, 1905, when John Shaw and William Smith (alias William Evans) swaggered into Winslow’s Wigwam Saloon around 1:30 a.m. They approached the bar, ostensibly for drinks, but their attention was quickly diverted by a tempting stack of silver dollars on a nearby dice table. Abruptly abandoning their thirst, these two roughnecks brandished pistols, menacing the dice players, and swiftly retreated out the door with $271 – their original drinks untouched.
Their hasty escape inadvertently created a trail of dropped coins near the railroad depot, clues that led law enforcement to surmise the robbers had fled along the tracks, intending to hop a train. Navajo County Sheriff Chet Houck and Deputy Pete Pemberton diligently pursued the outlaws, tracking them to Canyon Diablo, approximately 25 miles west of Winslow. They sought information from Fred Volz, the local trading post operator, inquiring if he had seen the men. While Volz provided a description of the individuals he had observed, fatefully, Smith and Shaw themselves appeared, walking directly towards the depot.
Sheriff Houck issued a clear directive, “I want to look you over.”
The hot-headed John Shaw reacted impulsively, spinning around and retorting aggressively, “You can’t look me over!”
In a flash, Shaw drew his weapon and fired at point-blank range. According to reports in Flagstaff’s Coconino Sun newspaper, the discharge was so close that the powder burns singed Houck’s hand. Miraculously, the bullet only pierced the sheriff’s coat, narrowly missing him.
What ensued was a chaotic and almost theatrical gunfight, a high-stakes drama played out with raw nerves and the acrid smell of gunpowder. Four men, positioned mere feet apart, engaged in a furious exchange, unleashing 21 shots in total. When the smoke cleared, one man lay dead, while the others escaped with relatively minor injuries.
Sheriff Houck ultimately delivered the fatal shot, killing John Shaw with his last bullet. Shaw, having exhausted his ammunition, was caught off guard, turned sideways when Houck fired a bullet through his head.
Simultaneously, Deputy Pemberton’s final shot struck Smith in the left shoulder just as he was aiming at Houck. The impact threw off Smith’s aim, and his bullet merely grazed the sheriff’s stomach, crucially sparing his life.
Further details from the Sun newspaper indicated that, in addition to the fatal head wound, John Shaw sustained three other hits, and Smith also suffered multiple, though non-life-threatening, wounds. Even Pemberton received a graze wound, a consequence of his risky decision to load six bullets into his revolver, violating a common practice of carrying only five to prevent accidental discharge. However, Pemberton’s bold move to load that sixth round proved decisive, tipping the balance in favor of the lawmen and saving Sheriff Houck’s life.
“Let’s Give Him a Drink”: The Cowboy’s Post-Mortem Pity
Fred Volz provided a simple pine box from his trading post for John Shaw’s hasty burial, a pragmatic necessity before the lawmen transported the wounded William Smith to a Winslow hospital. The following evening, news of the dramatic shootout rapidly spread through the Wigwam Saloon, which was packed with cowboys from the renowned Hashknife Ranch, a significant cattle operation in Northern Arizona.
Many of these cowboys harbored checkered pasts, often involving cattle rustling, and held little respect for law enforcement. However, what truly incensed them was the detail that the ill-fated robbers hadn’t even touched their purchased whiskey before their demise. Being shot was one thing, but being denied a paid-for drink was, in their cowboy code, an outrage.
Fuelled by indignation and whiskey, fifteen cowboys became so agitated that they grabbed their own bottles and boarded the next train heading to Canyon Diablo. Upon arrival, they descended upon Volz’s trading post, pounding on his door and rousing him from sleep.
Initially angered and bewildered by their bizarre request, Volz eventually calmed down and, surprisingly, lent them shovels. He also handed the mob his Kodak box camera, explaining that Sheriff Houck had wanted a photograph taken, potentially for reward purposes.
“We stopped at the depot and had a few more drinks, and then we went and dug the grave open with the shovels,” recounted a cowboy named Lucien Creswell.
Shaw’s body, when exhumed, presented a surprisingly peaceful image. He had a “friendly grin on his face, looking very natural, his head not busted open” by the bullet, Creswell recalled. “Some of the boys almost cried when they saw Shaw lying there so lifelike,” albeit stiff as death.
J.D. Rogers, the Hashknife’s wagon boss, addressed the assembled cowboys, proposing, “Let’s get him out. Let’s give him a drink and put him away proper. Somebody can say a prayer, which wasn’t done when they shoved him into that hole.”
Two cowboys descended into the grave and “lifted the body upward into reaching hands,” as described by Gladwell Richardson in a 1963 issue of Arizona Highways magazine.
“They stood it up against the wood-picketed grave of another luckless man… and gave him a drink from a long-necked bottle, pouring the whiskey between the tight teeth, the death-fixed grin of a man who in life must’ve been easy going, happy-go-lucky,” Richardson vividly wrote.
As dawn broke over the desolate cemetery, the cowboys removed their hats and mumbled a makeshift prayer. Into the coffin, alongside John Shaw, they placed the whiskey bottle from which he had symbolically “drunk,” before finally returning the outlaw to his earthen rest.
Prison Yard Parallels: The Aftermath for the Survivors
The peculiar tale of John Shaw’s posthumous drink extends into an equally strange epilogue.
Eight months after the violent gunfight in Canyon Diablo, a drunk Deputy Pemberton, consumed by anger over gambling losses in Winslow’s Parlor Saloon, shot and killed town marshal Joe Giles, firing five bullets into him. Pemberton was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to Yuma Prison. There, he found himself incarcerated alongside William Smith, who was already serving time for the Wigwam Saloon robbery.
History remains silent on the nature of the prison yard conversations these two men might have had, reflecting on their shared gunfight and its bizarre aftermath in the Canyon Diablo Cemetery. However, one can only imagine the darkly ironic and perhaps rueful exchanges between the lawman who killed John Shaw and the outlaw who witnessed his unbelievable last drink.
“I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, and I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people and I require the same from them.” – John Wayne in “The Shootist”
