By Lorraine Rygiel

In memory of my grandmother, Edith Duncan, and her two sisters, Helen Voller and Elsie Dougherty, this article is dedicated. They were all born and raised on the Shupp Ranch in Skull Valley, as was their father before them, Chester Shupp. Their oral interpretation and written memoirs have given me valuable insight into my family’s past. And from them, I have surmised that the pioneer women in my family were of no less character than the men who ventured out West. They encountered bad weather, lack of food and water, hostile circumstances and loss of life.

My great-great-grandmother, Josephine Shupp, was born in the year of 1850 in St. Louis, and like most pioneer women, had endured many challenges throughout her life. At an early age, smallpox took the lives of all six of her siblings, leaving herself, mother and father to carry forth into the future. Saddened, her father left St. Louis and traveled to San Francisco, during the Gold Rush, to establish a new life for his family. A few years later, he opened a tin shop business in Petaluma. Shortly after, he sent for his wife and daughter.

In 1859, at the age of nine, Josephine and her mother began their journey towards San Francisco, traveling down the Mississippi River by way of steamboat from St. Louis to New Orleans. They were both strong supporters of President Lincoln, and with the political unrest-taking place in the South, they felt uneasy. Fortunately, they both made it unharmed and safe.

Once in New Orleans, Mother and Daughter bought passage on a ship and sailed to Panama, and from Chorgres Panama, they traveled sixty miles by train, up over the Isthmus into the jungle towards Panama City. They both experienced humidity, mosquitoes, palm trees, orchids, monkeys, and natives. Furthermore, they had little contact with other women. After arriving in Panama City, they booked another passage on a ship to San Francisco where they met Josephine’s father.

Eight years later in 1867, at the age of seventeen, Josephine married a rancher named Blackburn. Together they worked a one hundred sixty acre homestead in Fresno, California. Sometime in the eight-year period that she lived on the homestead, her father died and her mother came to live with her. Additionally, she gave birth to three healthy children, fulfilling her life with content and happiness. However, sometime between 1874 and 1875, Josephine’s husband got gold fever and persuaded her that Prescott, Arizona was an opportunity that they could not afford to pass up.

Within a few months, they traded the homestead for a team of horses and a prairie schooner. Traveling in the party were their three children, Josephine’s mother, a minister and his wife. As the wagon train rolled south, left behind were Josephine’s memories and domestic comforts; yet, she often joked that it was the minister who complained the most about the uncomfortable conditions.

After several months on the trail in 1875, the Blackburn party finally arrived in Arizona, settling in a mining camp called Walnut Grove, south of Skull Valley. Two years later, with little success at finding gold, Blackburn moved his family six miles, south of Prescott to a camp called Aztlin Mill. It was here that he found employment and a paycheck. Yet and once again, life would commence towards a different direction for Josephine, incurring heartbreak and the loss of security. She was pregnant with her fourth child when Blackburn left her and the children for another women, taking with him all their money and stealing bullion from the mill.

In order to survive, Josephine had no alternative but to accept the only respectable employment that the Atzlan Mill owner provided, working as the camp cook. Historically in western mining towns, jobs were limited and hard to come by for women, generally they ended up in domestic service or prostitution. This experience must have been frightening for Josephine, living in an unfamiliar place bursting with men; it is no secret that mining camps were often uncivilized establishments.

In 1879, soon after the birth of her child, Josephine and her family moved into Prescott where she established a business, taking in boarders and sewing. However as the months passed, she agonized with worry, realizing that her situation needed to change. It became necessary to find a safe and stable environment for her children, and eventually, marriage became her best alternative. One year later, September 23 in 1880, Josephine married Alfred Shupp. He was a forty-four year old bachelor, and one of the original members of the Walker Party, who discovered gold in 1863 on the Lynx. He owned a homestead in Skull Valley and was the eleventh homesteader in the state of Arizona in 1870. He had been farming on it for ten years prior to their marriage.

Josephine and Alfred’s wedding reception was a festive and honorary event that was reported in The Weekly Arizona Miner. The article described: People traveled from miles around to participate in the twenty-four hour festivities on the Shupp ranch. There were delicacies to eat and the dancing did not end until early morning. At midnight the second supper was served, and at two a.m., the bride and groom cut their cake. No guest longed for sleep or complained of weariness, and the morning came all too soon. The bride fixed a splendid breakfast, sending the guests regretfully home.

Two years later, Josephine delivered her last child. She and Alfred had a son, named Chester. Eventually in Skull Valley, she became the community’s nurse and midwife; most everyone called her, "Grandma Shupp…with the gift for healing". In 1899, Alfred died, leaving Chester to inherit the ranch at the age of seventeen. Josephine lived with Chester and his family for the rest of her life, dying at the age of ninety-five, August 24, 1945.

Today, Josephine is also memorialized among the beautifully reigning roses of the Territorial Women’s Memorial Rose Garden at the Sharlot Hall Museum. Undoubtedly, my great-great-grandmother was a true pioneer woman.

(Lorraine Rygiel is a frequent researcher at the Sharlot Hall Museum Archives)

Our readers’ thoughts…

my grandfather arthur edward blackburn mother was josephine stombs
shupp, , i,m her dead look like to see me her side by side you think we
were sisters,



Anonymous
February 27, 2008

By Leo Banks

(this is the second of a two-part series)

A curse seemed to follow the men in Gabe’s (Gabriell Dollie Wiley) life.

The first one, Ernest Presti, was an Italian-born gambler and prizefighter who boxed under the name Kid Kirby. He and Gabe were married in the gold mining town of Congress, Arizona on October 6, 1909.

But in May of 1911, Presti was shot in the back in broad daylight on a Prescott sidewalk by Bill Campbell, a shoeshine man. The two had argued over a $20 blackjack debt.

After Presti came Topp. Then Gabe married Bernard Melvin in Orange County, California in 1919. They split after six months and were legally divorced in 1923.

Just before Christmas 1922, Gabe traveled to Los Angeles to have Melvin arrested for embezzling $2,000 from her. Her return to the city of her acquittal was big news, only this time it was Melvin giving sensational interviews from behind bars.

"I didn’t steal that money from her. She gave it to me," Melvin told the L.A. Times. "We loved each other once, but we’re through now, and she hates me. She hated Topp and she killed him. I’m in jail. The man pays, I guess."

Melvin’s last years were bizarre. He lived in a shack at the Prescott dump, where he worked as caretaker, refusing to communicate with anyone. He had no family and hadn’t received mail in 20 years. In 1927, according to Yavapai County probate papers, he was attacked at the dump and beaten to within a whisker of his life by several shadowy men. They made off with the $800 in life savings that he stashed there. The crime wasn’t pinned on Gabe, but it was never solved either. Melvin died a pathetic loner in 1929 at age 70. The official cause: pneumonia.

Gabe’s next husband was a barber and manicurist named Everett L. Fretz. Something went haywire in his head, too, and in 1935 he was committed to the Arizona State Asylum. He raved through terrible nights about his gold mine near Prescott, demanding to be deputized to protect it. But the mine existed only in his imagination.

A month later, he died of what state records cryptically describe as "general paralysis of the insane." He was 40.

Four men shot, poisoned or dead under mysterious circumstances. Four that we know about.

Gabe’s own nephew, Gil Layral, a retired food service worker in California, believes there might’ve been twice that many. "It’s hard to say how many there were. Maybe eight?" Layral said in a phone interview. "Rat poison, eh. That was her preferred method."

Gabe’s last husband was George Wiley. They were married in Prescott in what must have been a sight: an old hooker, plump, glistening with diamonds, standing beside a grinning ex-bootlegger with a tomato for a face, and the ceremony performed by Yavapai County Judge Gordon Clark, who stood three-and-a-half feet tall in his cowboy boots.

The midget judge, as he was called, joined the happy couple in matrimony on July 31, 1937. Adopting her longtime nickname, Dollie, Gabe Fretz moved to Salome, Arizona and became Dollie Wiley.

She and George operated a combination liquor store, cafe, auto court and gas station on the highway to California. But little else had changed. The madam still ran girls out of the cabins behind the cafe – and people around her kept winding up dead.

On November 23, 1940, George got into an argument at the cafe with Mae Grisson, one of Dollie’s girls. When he lunged at Mae, she fell off her stool and hit her head on a water cooler. Two weeks later she died in the Wickenburg hospital and George was charged with murder. The trial was set for early the next year, but it never took place.

On January 10, 1941, the 59-year-old Wiley was found dead on his kitchen floor. He’d worked at the cafe from midnight to 9 a.m. After Dollie relieved him, he went home and drank from a water glass on the kitchen counter that police say was filled with cynogas, commonly used to poison rats.

The coroner’s jury, aware of Dollie’s past, suspected she left the glass out for him. Others found it more than strange that Grisson’s death came just hours after Dollie had paid her a visit her in the hospital. But officials ruled that Grisson had died of natural causes, and Wiley by suicide.

Now well-off and with a business of her own, Dollie might’ve spent the remainder of her days in relative peace. But her radar for trouble was always working.

On August 15, 1962, a 36-year-old service station operator named Bill Gabbard shot and killed a man while hunting rabbits outside Salome. The Gabbards rented a home Dollie owned, right next to her own, and she threw herself into his defense.

She helped his wife, Birdie, hire a top Yuma lawyer, and even put up bail money. Gabbard’s trial opened in Yuma on December 12 and lasted four days. The jury believed Gabbard’s claim of self-defense and delivered a verdict of not guilty. Ironically, Gabbard’s case looked much like Dollie’s back in 1915. Both involved a shooting, a claim of self-defense, the defendant receiving unexpected help, and ultimate acquittal.

Either way, it was the perfect coda to her crime-novel life.

Five days after the verdict, on December 21, Dollie fell at her home. She was admitted to the hospital in Wickenburg with a broken hip and pneumonia. Knowing the end had come, she telephoned Prescott and asked old friend, Lester Ruffner, a funeral home operator, to contact the Episcopal minister and hurry to her bedside to administer last rites.

The two men rushed to Wickenburg, making it in time to square her with God. Dollie was about 72 when she died, Christmas Day, 1962. The body was cremated and the ashes were buried in Prescott beside E.L. Fretz, the husband who raved about his gold mine from his bed at the asylum.

"I remember that 4-by-8 foot cell down there in Yuma [while awaiting trial in 1962]," says Bill Gabbard from his home in Tennessee. "The jailer come and opened the door and I said, ‘What’s going on?’ And he said, ‘You’re going home.’

"I went out to the front, and there was my wife and Dollie standing there. Dollie didn’t say nothin’, and she was bent over and shakin’, but she was smiling that little smile she always had. I tell you, if it wasn’t for her I’d still be in that jail. She sure was a fine lady."

Dollie Wiley’s business in Salome is still open today. It’s called the Free Lunch Cafe.

(Leo W. Banks, a Tucson-based writer, is a frequent contributor to Arizona Highways magazine. He also has written several books of history for Arizona Highways’ book division. These include Never Stand Between a Cowboy and his Spittoon [2001] and Rattlesnake Blues [2000].)

Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(pb136f8i1). Reuse only by permission.

A curse seemed to follow the men of Gabriell Dollie Wiley life, shown here visiting the Granite Dells in the 1930s (the face rock tumbled over years later). She had been a madam at the time. Late in life she moved to Salome and ran a restaurant with her last husband .who died mysteriously.

By Leo Banks

(this is the first of a two-part series)

Prescott’s most notorious prostitute had a small problem with the men in her life. They kept winding up dead, usually after drinking rat poison.

But she had her bad points, too.

The story of Gabriell Dollie Wiley lends itself to such dark thinking. She was, after all, one of Arizona’s great noir characters, a real-life crime-novel dame who did whatever it took to survive in early Prescott, brooking no interference from such trifles as the law or common morality.

Gabe, as she was known, came to town about 1909 to work as a Whiskey Row prostitute, and she was a darn good one. Her local renown went national in 1915 when her man, Leonard Topp, left Gabe for another woman, stealing her fortune in diamonds.

She tracked him to a Los Angeles liquor store. Clad in silk and furs, and with a pistol stuffed in a muff, Gabe walked up behind Topp. "Hello, Leonard," she hissed.

He spun around. Without removing the gun from the muff, Gabe fired into Topp’s chest. The bullet nicked his heart, giving him a few seconds to live. He used them to knock her down and repeatedly smash her head against the floor.

When she passed out, Leonard staggered to his feet and said, "Well, I guess I’m about through for good," then fell over dead.

Topp’s death and Gabe’s subsequent trial caused such a sensation in Southern California that on some days it knocked World War I off the front pages. Some called it an American folk murder trial, a real-life version of the popular ditty, Frankie and Johnny.

She killed her man because he done her wrong.

"I killed him because I loved him," cried Gabe from the lockup.

She presented herself to the jury as a woman adrift in a cruel world. Her mother, she said, vanished in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, leaving Gabe alone at 15. She survived by making the rounds of Nevada’s gold camps, working in hash houses in Reno and Rawhide during the day, and turning tricks for miners at night.

Whether any of that was true is unknown. Lying was Gabe’s special gift. What is certain is that she was born around 1890 in France, and came to this country to work as a maid for an Italian couple.

But the trial’s most effective testimony came from a friend of Gabe’s from Prescott, who said Topp beat her several times a week. Pearl Valley, described in news accounts as a "substantial blond," said one of Leonard’s favorite pastimes was to "scuff the toes of his boots against her."

The all-male jury, outraged at Topp’s behavior, acquitted her in eight minutes. The best line of the case came from newspaper reporter Adela Rogers-St. Johns, who wrote that the jury understood that with men like Leonard, "homicide was not only justifiable, but obligatory."

By 1920, Gabe had returned to Prescott and was back turning tricks, only now she’d moved into management. She became a madam, operating out of several downtown hotels, including the Mason across from the Courthouse on Whiskey Row.

In February of 1928, Gabe went to see a silent picture called The Red Kimona playing at the Elks Theater on Gurley. Boys handing out promotional flyers approached her on the sidewalk outside. "A startling expose of the white slave trade, fearlessly told!" screamed the handbills. Propped on a lobby chair was the wax figure of a woman dressed in a kimono and bathed in red lights.

When Gabe took a seat in the packed theater, she had no inkling it was her story playing on the screen. Not only did the movie mirror the details of her life, with a few embellishments, but it used her real name.

Kimona was a mostly female production, a Hollywood first. The screenplay was adapted from a 1924 short story by St. Johns and the producer was Dorothy Davenport Reid, widow of Wallace Reid, Paramount’s most popular leading man before talking pictures.

Rather than accept the movie’s sympathetic portrait, Gabe followed the handbook for crime-novel women and tried to make a big score. She sued Reid, claiming the film’s use of her past exposed her "as a woman of lewd characteristics, a prostitute and a murderess" – all true of course. She demanded $50,000.

The suit was unprecedented, even drawing coverage in the New York Times. Never before had the young movie industry been called to answer for using the facts of someone’s life in a production. The case bounced through California’s courts for five years before Reid settled for damages, losing everything, including her West Hollywood mansion.

Most remarkable, though, was the boldness of this Prescott prostitute in waging a five-year legal war against Hollywood bigshots, based on the lie that she’d shed her sordid ways – and winning again.

Whatever Gabe pocketed from the settlement, it didn’t change her life. She continued in the business to which she was born, although now she’d become a figure of great curiosity. She was rarely seen on Prescott’s streets in daylight, but when she was, her diamonds set lips flapping.

"You’d see her walking downtown wearing the nicest clothes you ever saw, and shiny diamonds," says Paul Toci, a longtime Prescott resident. "She was a beautiful woman. Unless you knew she was from the whorehouse, you’d never guess it."

Gabe’s profile rose considerably past midnight. After closing up shop on the second floor of the Rex Arms Hotel – now the Bank One building on Gurley – where she ran her business for much of the 1930s, she escorted her girls around the corner for a nightcap at the Palace. They were decked out in feathers, boas and stage makeup, but the madam was never so flamboyant.

"She wasn’t a floozy," said the late Mary Swartz, whose husband, Bob, managed the Palace then. "She was plump, pretty and usually dressed in suits. Very businesslike. But she had a different shade of red hair every time. Those dye jobs didn’t cut it in those days."

Swartz says Gabe cared for her girls, even putting several through a local business college. "One of them was a friend of mine. She did a lot around here and everybody thought she was great, except the Sunday school people. They didn’t like her much."

The men in her life thought she was great, too. Until she turned on them.

(Next week Dollie marries again and ends up in Salome, Arizona)

(Leo W. Banks, a Tucson-based writer, is a frequent contributor to Arizona Highways magazine. He also has written several books of history for Arizona Highways’ book division. These include Never Stand Between a Cowboy and his Spittoon [2001] and Rattlesnake Blues [2000].)

Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(bub8130pa). Reuse only by permission.

Dollie Wiley was a little surprise in 1928 when she visited the Elks Theatre and saw that The Red Kimona was about her life growing up into prostitution. Then again, it should not have been too unexpected since some much of her life seem to play out like a dime novel.

By Parker Anderson

Over the last couple of years this writer embarked on extensive research regarding the legendary Yavapai County outlaw James Parker for the purposes of writing a play and possibly a book. The play was subsequently performed by the Blue Rose Theatre. In doing this, I ran into a problem that bedevils most researchers at one time or another-separating truth from legend.

In nearly all cases where historical figures are well known, facts get stretched in various retellings about their lives. Hundreds of untrue or unverifiable legends exist about the Earps, for instance. In the case of Jim Parker, I encountered no less than four different, irreconcilable versions of his history. I shall examine them here.

The first version is the one I consider to be closest to the truth. Jim Parker, a cowboy and lifelong lawbreaker, came to Arizona after serving two prison terms in California for various thefts. He worked ranches by day, but by night, he had joined up with the Abe Thompson Gang, a small-time group of cattle rustlers and thieves. In February of 1897, Parker and another gang member held up a train outside of Peach Springs, but the robbery was ill planned and an Express Messenger shot Parker’s accomplice. After a manhunt, Parker was captured and lodged in the Yavapai County jail by Sheriff George C. Ruffner.

Shortly afterwards, Parker and two other convicts broke out of jail, killing Deputy District Attorney Lee Norris in the process. After a chase of several weeks, Parker was recaptured and hanged in June of 1898.

The second version of Parker’s life takes a different approach. It contends that Jim Parker was a hardworking, industrious citizen. According to this story, a train ran over two of Parker’s fine horses, and when the railroad refused to settle fairly with him, he robbed the train for revenge. Simple and romantic.

This legend can be traced directly to Jim Parker himself. He told this story to a reporter from the San Francisco Examiner two days before he was hanged. While that might sound credible, the story still doesn’t ring true. Parker’s interview is very self-serving, and he fails to even mention his friend Abe Thompson, even though he had pleaded guilty to complicity in the robbery. Furthermore, there are many credible testimonials from various first-hand sources attesting to Parker’s gang affiliations.

If Parker was trying to craft a legacy for himself, he was very successful. Fully half of the after-the-fact accounts of Parker’s life written over the years have utilized the "revenge against the railroad" story, even though in this version, his transformation from a young cowboy seeking simple justice to the mad dog killer of Lee Norris just doesn’t make sense. In his interview, Parker was obviously trying to convey the message that he didn’t deserve to be hanged.

The third version of the story seems to be widespread in Coconino County and is usually ridiculous. It alleges that Jim Parker was a member of the Butch Cassidy gang and probably Butch Cassidy’s brother. The story goes on to allege that the train robbery as a Wild Bunch operation and that a conveniently unnamed Williams cowboy was mysteriously murdered after recognizing Parker as Butch’s brother.

This story for which there isn’t a drop of evidence, undoubtedly started because Butch Cassidy’s real name was George Leroy Parker. Tall-tale spinners simply put two and two together and came up with five. The story has lived on though, because it was unwisely endorsed by Gladwell Richardson and Lowell Parker– no relation to Jim– both reputable writers of western lore who, in this instance, obviously had not done their homework.

The last version of the story seems native to Mohave County and, while active in oral folklore as late as the 1970′s, seems to have mercifully died out in recent times. The legend endorsed by writers such as Kingman’s Wilfred Babcock contends that after the train robbery, Mohave County Deputy Asa Harris captured Parker single-handedly while George Ruffner and Conconino County Sheriff Ralph Cameron were running around in circles.

The legend can be traced incredibly to Asa Harris himself. In the 1950′s, he was the last surviving member of the posse on Parker’s trail and he started telling this story to newspaper reporters. According to Harris the railroad phoned him personally, instead of Mohave County Sheriff John C. Potts, after the robbery and asked him to take the trail after Jim Parker. The railroad even sent a one-car special to pick him up and after miles of hard riding; Harris got the drop on Parker and brought him to the posse.

I am certain that Asa Harris was a very good man and it is not my wish to denigrate his memory. However, it is obvious that he felt the need in the twilight of his life to reinvent the Parker story with himself as the star. But all of the primary newspaper accounts attribute Parker’s capture to George Ruffner and the Mohave Miner specifically noted that no Mohave law enforcement personnel were around when the capture was effected.

It was not easy sorting through all of this. So, what would I advise researchers to do when working on their stories? Gather every scrap of information you can first and try to sort through it next. Be skeptical of second-hand accounts and don’t forget, as we have just seen, that even some first-hand accounts are not trustworthy.

(Parker Anderson is an active member of the Sharlot Hall Museum’s Blue Rose Theatre. He wrote the play Until the Last Dog, an account of the Parker story)

Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(rr120p). Reuse only by permission.