On the evening of May 19, 1899, Traynor and off-duty bartender Henry C. Taylor sauntered into Tom Fulghum’s Elite Saloon on Maley Street. Traynor failed to notice Downing, seated against the wall on a barrel near the middle door that separated the bar from the gaming room. Taylor and the former Rough Rider headed for the bar, where Traynor struck up a conversation with bartender W.L. Van Leer. Taylor, meanwhile, spied Tom Burts, seated on a barrel beside Downing. “Come up, Tom, and take a drink,” he called out. As Burts rose, so too did Downing. “Come on, Downing, and have something,” Taylor invited.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Wild West magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

When Taylor called to Downing, Traynor dropped his hands from the bar and turned left to face Downing. “I had not reached the bar at that time but was standing to the left of [Traynor] and partly behind him,” Burts later testified. As he approached the bar, Burts continued, “Downing grabbed me by the left arm and jerked me around and back nearly facing him and said something which I did not understand. Downing then fired. I thought when he fired the first shot that he was firing at me and also thought so when he fired the second shot. I think there was four shots fired. During the shooting, the room was full of smoke and the firing very close and just in front of me, and I did not know who he was firing at unless at me.” In reality, he was firing at Traynor.

Downing later claimed that he had accepted Taylor’s invitation to take a cigar. “As I answered, [Traynor] whirled around as though he went after his gun. As I stepped up to the bar, I was watching him on account of the threats he had made, and I looked outside. I thought it was a life-and-death matter and drew my gun and jerked Thomas Burts back so as not to shoot him and commenced shooting. Am not certain as to how many shots I fired.” Evidently no one checked Downing’s revolver, but Constable Alvord’s report revealed that Traynor’s body bore wounds from three bullets. One had torn through his breast and exited his shoulder; the other two had penetrated his skull.

Traynor, in turn, had not fired or even yanked his six-shooter. “I took the pistol and belt off the person of the deceased,” Constable Alvord testified. “I found the pistol loaded with five cartridges and one empty chamber. The pistol was in the scabbard when I took it off the deceased.” Even so, the coroner’s jury found that “W.F. Downing was acting in self-defense and was justified.” Mort Wein argued what most locals knew: “It wouldn’t have been self-defense, because Traynor wouldn’t shoot him without ‘Probication.’”

Several months later, Alvord and Downing conspired with two of the constable’s sometime deputies—William L. “Billy” Stiles and Tom Burts’ brother Matt—to hold up the Southern Pacific’s westbound No. 10. Late Saturday night, September 9, 1899, Downing tended the horses as Stiles and Burts stopped the train at Cochise Station (11 miles west of Willcox) and seized between $2,000 and $3,000. Little more than five months later, on February 15, 1900, Jesse “Three-Fingered Jack” Dunlap, Tom “Bravo Juan” Yoas, Robert Brown, and George and Lewis Owings attempted a holdup of the New Mexico & Arizona’s northbound No. 1 on the Nogales-to-Benson line at Fairbank. Jeff Milton, who had a long career in law enforcement, served as the Wells Fargo express messenger that day. He thwarted the attempt, although a bullet struck him in the left arm between the shoulder and elbow, shattered the bone and left his arm useless. Evidence later revealed that Alvord and Stiles had planned the heist.

Eventually captured and indicted for his role in the Cochise Station train robbery—a capital offense in Arizona Territory—Downing came to trial on December 10, 1900 (Territory of Arizona vs. W.F. Downing, case No. 745A). By the afternoon of the second day, nearly 170 potential jurors had been examined and disqualified on the death penalty clause. “While many believed in capital punishment,” the Arizona Daily Citizen (Tucson) reported, “they would not apply such a penalty in cases where no lives were lost.” With a jury finally impaneled, Downing confederates Stiles and Matt Burts testified for the prosecution. Even so, Judge George Russell Davis’ final instruction obviously impacted the jurors: “The punishment [death] is provided by the statute, and you, gentlemen of the jury, cannot fix the punishment. And if you find the defendant guilty as charged in the indictments, the Court has no other discretion in the matter than to impose the death penalty.” Jury foreman L.A. Smith announced the not guilty finding on the evening of December 12. “The fact is that members of that jury were firmly convinced that the defendant was guilty of train robbery,” The Bisbee Daily Review later asserted, “but not withstanding the Arizona statute making the offense punishable by death, they refused to return a verdict of guilty.”

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to