Downing didn’t talk about his past, and his acquaintances didn’t ask a lot of questions

William F. “Bill” Downing was an ornery man with a mysterious past, much like a character in countless Hollywood Westerns. Downing, though, was real if unsung. He is best known for joining Burt Alvord in a turn-of-the-century train robbery at Cochise Station, Arizona Territory, and for shooting a man named Slim in Willcox’s Elite Saloon. Recently uncovered documents suggest that Downing was not just another train robber and not just another killer issued a questionable verdict of “self-defense.” He was, in short, a real bad hombre. By the time quarrelsome Bill Downing tangled with an Arizona Ranger named Speed, an entire town was clamoring for his death, with not a single friend to help him even the odds.

Some contemporaries insisted Downing was really Frank Jackson, a onetime key member of Texas’ notorious Sam Bass Gang. Almost certainly they were wrong; the vital statistics of the two men reveal major physical differences. Other old-timers recalled that Downing arrived in Arizona Territory with the handle Fate Hudson. Evidence supports the possibility that he may, in fact, have been Lafayette Hudson, a habitual Indian Territory offender who took “French leave” and disappeared from the Fort Smith, Ark., jail hospital on June 22, 1895.

Regardless of what troubles he might have had in the past, the man eventually known as Bill Downing drifted into Cochise County with his wife in the late 1890s. Like many other men who appeared in the Western territories, Downing didn’t talk about his past, and his acquaintances didn’t ask a lot of questions. He and his wife settled near the small Sulphur Spring Valley mining town of Pearce, and Bill went job hunting at nearby ranches. But if he had come to the Sulphur Spring Valley to turn over a new leaf, he failed. His past might not have come back to haunt him, but bad habits did, and new troubles lurked just around the corner.

On August 8, 1883, New York natives John A. Rockfellow and Walter E. Servoss, joined by hardened Kentucky adventurer A.J. “Jack” Spencer, rode into the Sulphur Spring Valley and established Esperanza Ranch (NY brand) at the mouth of a canyon leading to Cochise Stronghold on the east side of the Dragoon Mountains. For the rest of the century, the ranch thrived amid rustlers, outlaws and renegade Apaches, and there was generally work for experienced hands. Downing hired on at the NY. Valley locals like Dos Cabezas cowhand Mort Wein at first judged him to be a “very friendly, nice-talking fellow,” but soon discovered that “he’d get more-less quarrelsome” when he was around a bottle. “Downing wer a verry dangeros man,” Pearce rancher Jesse James Benton recalled, “and all wais ready to tell oun the other feller and never wer liked among the cowboys for that.”

The Downings soon moved to nearby Willcox, where Bill joined the band of cronies associated with Albert R. “Burt” Alvord, the precinct constable. Downing quickly gained notoriety when he tangled with William S. “Slim” Traynor, a onetime outlaw, mine guard and veteran “Rough Rider” of the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry.

Mustered out in September 1898, Traynor had returned to Arizona Territory, where cattle inspector Edwin Russell Hooker hired him to look after his father Henry Hooker’s Sierra Bonita range interests. A man whom Wein insisted “wadn’t afraid of anything,” Traynor operated out of Willcox and “suspicioned” Downing of brand burning. “[He] was so sure that Downing was one of them that he accused him openly, and until that time, why, he and Downing had been the best of friends,” Wein recalled. “But…[Traynor's] friends looked the same to him as anybody else—if they stepped over the line and broke the law. So he met Downing and told him just what he thought about him. Traynor hadn’t made no talks in regard to killing Downing, but Downing had, in drinking, sometimes when he’s drinking, well, he had made some kind of threats about what he was going to do.”

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