Flagstaff has always struck me as a town of many faces. The early settlers hit the jackpot: a mountain town at the base of a mountain, with clean air, green fields, four seasons, and by 1882 a stop along the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad. With the trains running and the lumber mill sawing, a new breed of entrepreneur showed up, a little more sober and maybe more educated than the crowd that had settled here in the late 1870s. This post is about the other group. The rougher, tougher, hard-drinking pioneers, and what the town did to some of them.
Did Flagstaff really have a hanging tree?
Yes, and at least one photograph of it survives. Flagstaff sometimes seems to hide its outlaw period, those twenty-odd years before the town wrestled with blue laws and taxes, but this area was every bit as wild as Tombstone or Deadwood. I found the proof while thumbing through Platt Cline's They Came to the Mountain, where a photo of a nondescript tree caught my eye. The caption reads: "Flagstaff's 'hanging tree' on which the bodies of nine outlaws were found hanging by their necks one morning in the mid-eighties after a night's work by a local vigilante committee. The tree stood near the west end of Cherry Street in what is now the City Park."
One hanging tree, or two?
Locals and various written accounts also place a hanging tree just north of the library, near the west-side parking lot. That version makes sense too. The jail circa 1900 stood close by, and accounts say condemned prisoners did not have far to walk. My working theory is that there were two "official" trees, and the one on west Cherry was used for that mass hanging. I am still digging. Either way, that patch of downtown around the library and Wheeler Park carries far more dark history than its picnic tables suggest, and some of it comes up when our guides walk Flagstaff's haunted downtown after sunset.
A word on sources: Cline never shied away from Flagstaff's least respectable citizens, especially in They Came to the Mountain. The book is a window into the daily lives of the people forming this mountain town, from the first settlers to the vigilance committees that decided, one night in the mid-1880s, to empty the jail their own way.
Walk this story
Vigilantes, outlaws and the graves they filled are regular company on the Flagstaff Haunted History Tour, our original ghost walk through the historic downtown. It runs nightly at 7 PM, with an extra 8 PM departure Fridays and Saturdays, 75 minutes, $29 for adults. What became of the nine, and who may have looked the other way, gets told on the tour.
