‘It has always been the custom of our family to kill anyone who kills any member of the family,’ Frank Marion King wrote in his 1935 book Wranglin the Past.’
The king family was a rough outfit. Frank Marion King made that clear in Wranglin’ the Past, written 70 years after the author’s father, Samuel Houston King, participated in a sensational early Los Angeles shootout in the barroom of the Bella Union Hotel. Frank’s grandfather, the patriarch Samuel King (1806-55) was a native of Washington County, Virginia, who by 1828 had reached Tennessee, where he married young Martha Mee (1814-86). The newlyweds traveled on to Lumpkin County, Georgia, where King served two terms as sheriff (1834-36; 1838-40) and where their daughter Mary Ann was born. Three sons, Andrew Jackson (“Jack”) King, Samuel Houston (“Houston”) King and Francis Marion (“Frank”) King would follow in due time. The Kings then settled briefly in Phillips County, Arkansas, before the peripatetic family headed for Santa Fe, New Mexico Territory, where Samuel contracted to cargo food to various government forts. In 1852, and still in quest of greener pastures, Samuel led a group of pioneer colonists to Los Angeles, California. The family settled at El Monte, about 12 miles east of the “City of the Angels,” where trouble soon developed.
Seated in an El Monte saloon on Sunday afternoon, January 8, 1855, one of Samuel’s sons overheard Micajah Johnson pin the label “scoundrel” on the patriarch of the King clan. The Los Angeles Star confirmed Johnson’s repeated use of “many vile epithets which it is useless to mention.” The newspaper, unfortunately, chose not to reveal the cause for the outburst, but Frank M. King, the Western writer, later asserted that Johnson and his grandfather “had exchanged shots several days previously.”
Samuel King’s son told Johnson that he would not take up the quarrel as he did not consider himself “man enough for Johnson, but…would find one who would.” He raced home, raised the alarm and soon returned with his father and brothers in tow. Johnson mounted his horse in a futile attempt to get away, but it was too late. A bullet from the elder King’s gun struck him, and Johnson tumbled from his mount. As the wounded man retreated toward a house, he turned and fired. A slug tore into Samuel’s breast, ripped through his left lung, and exited his back. Samuel deliberately dismounted, lay down on the ground, told his sons that he was dying, and urged them to avenge his death.
Johnson, meanwhile, continued to flee, but was caught, knocked down and pummeled by the furious brothers. He somehow broke loose, raced into a nearby house and barricaded the door. Not to be denied, the King boys broke through the barrier, forced their way inside and shot him. Johnson died almost immediately from bullets to his head and side. The Star determined to “forbear dwelling on this painful occurrence, as doubtless there will be legal proceedings instituted”—an accurate assertion. The county held an inquest and exonerated the Kings. Author Frank M. King later glorified the tale and wrote that his father, 17-year-old Houston King, followed Johnson to Tehachapi Pass, north of Los Angeles, where, in a pitched gun battle, he shot Johnson “fulla holes.” King almost certainly knew his account was false— evidently he employed a measure, and in this instance an ample measure, of literary license to enliven his story. The thrust of the yarn, however, remains straightforward. Johnson had killed the leader of the King family; the family, in turn, took its revenge. Their action should have served as a warning, but violence continued to track them.
The historic Bella Union Hotel served as a social and political center of mid-19th-century Los Angeles. New Englander Isaac “Julian” Williams, owner of the 46,000-acre Ranch del Chino, had built the adobe in 1835 as his home. Purchased by Pío Pico, Mexican California’s last governor, it served briefly as his capitol before American occupation forces seized it in 1847 and converted it into their headquarters. The building opened as the Bella Union three years later, and, on October 7, 1858, the first Butterfield Overland Mail stage from St. Louis to Los Angeles reined in at the hotel’s front door.
The July 5, 1865, marriage of Caroline Newmark to Solomon Lazard was one of that year’s social highlights. That Wednesday evening, the Bella Union’s upstairs ballroom hosted the reception party, “one of the most pleasant and numerous assemblages ever attended in Los Angles,” in the judgment of the city’s Tri-Weekly News. As the hour neared midnight, Robert S. Carlisle and Jack King, now the county’s undersheriff, crossed paths in the downstairs bar. Some, including Undersheriff King, suspected that cattle rancher Carlisle was a swindler, if not worse. Houston King, according to his son’s later account, had been in the cattle business and had also “engaged in a sheep deal with ex-governor J.G. Downey.” But cattle and sheep apparently had little to do with the trouble ahead. A sequence of convoluted circumstances was behind the suspicions that had set Carlisle and Jack King at odds.
Isaac Williams, the building’s original owner, had died in 1856. He left his large estate to his two daughters—Maria Merced, the wife of John Rains; and Francisca, the wife of Robert S. Carlisle. In 1858, when John and Maria Rains bought the Rancho Cucamonga, Carlisle bought out his sister-in-law’s interest in her father’s Ranch del Chino. The Rainses then purchased the old Williams adobe—the Bella Union Hotel. On November 12, 1862, however, John and Maria mortgaged the ranch and the hotel. John was murdered five days later as he drove his wagon toward Los Angeles.
It was no secret that Rains disliked Carlisle; some Angelenos, including Jack King, believed that Carlisle was his killer. Others evidently shared the opinion of the county sheriff, Tomás A. Sanchez. He suspected Manuel Cerradel, who stood convicted of another crime. When Sanchez took Cerradel to the nearby Wilmington Harbor for the voyage up the coast to San Quentin Prison, an angry mob stormed the tug Cricket, seized the suspect and lynched him. To further confuse the matter, Cerradel, moments before his death, implicated José Ramón Carrillo in the Rains killing.
Carrillo “was a rough and reckless fellow,” according to historian Hubert Howe Bancroft, “often in bad company, but not regarded as a bad man by those who knew him best.” Sheriff Sanchez arrested him based on Cerradel’s word, but Judge Benjamin Hayes discharged Carrillo for lack of evidence. Carlisle announced his continued displeasure with the investigation into the murder of John Rains, as well as the outcome of Carrillo’s hearing, and focused his anger on Jack King. Carrillo was ambushed near Cucamonga in May 1864; he had feared death at the hand of Carlisle, but his murder went unsolved. Carrillo’s assassination, moreover, did nothing to mellow Carlisle’s mood with regard to King.
One year after Carrillo’s death, on May 18, 1865, Judge Samuel Bell McKee stripped Carlisle of his power of attorney over Maria Merced Rains’ estate and transferred it to Jack King. Carlisle’s hatred of the undersheriff, which had continued to fester, now was ready to erupt, leading to the confrontation of July 5, 1865, at the Bella Union.
On the night of the Newmark-Lazard wedding reception, Carlisle spotted King as the latter approached the Bella Union’s bar. He hurled a string of curses at the undersheriff and threatened to kill all three King brothers. King reacted by slapping Carlisle across the face. The two grappled. After bystanders separated them, King stalked out of the bar and climbed the stairs to the ballroom. A few minutes later, Carlisle followed and again engaged King in an argument. It was “not a fitting place for a quarrel,” King insisted. As the lawman turned to leave, Carlisle lashed out with a dirk and sliced King’s right hand; errant strikes also penetrated King’s coat and left an unnamed bystander severely cut. Carlisle then drew a six-shooter and fired. He missed. King retreated toward the door, then suddenly turned and, with his uninjured left hand, reached for his derringer and fired back. His bullet also went astray. As though nothing had happened, Carlisle then strolled out and returned to the bar. King, however, had suffered a serious knife slash. Fortunately, Dr. John B. Griffin, one of the guests, stopped the bleeding and probably saved King’s life.
Jack King’s brother Houston, on his way to Wilmington Harbor with a wagonload of wool, passed through Los Angeles the next morning, July 6. When he stopped by the sheriff’s office to see Jack, he learned of the fight and of Carlisle’s threat to kill the brothers. Jack remained under Dr. Griffin’s care; Houston turned to Frank, who stood guard over the wounded undersheriff, and said, “Let’s go call on Carlisle and see is he goin’ to do it.”
About noon, as people bustled about the hotel, Houston and Frank King approached the Bella Union. Accounts vary as to what followed. Harris Newmark, a prominent Los Angeles merchant and the father of the bride, recalled that the Kings passed by the Bella Union’s barroom and, “seeing Carlisle inside, entered, drew their six-shooters and began firing at him.” Lending credence to Newmark’s account, the Los Angeles Tri-Weekly News, which labeled the Kings as the “assailants,” described “a most terrific fight—with six-shooters—[that] occurred in the bar-room of the Bella Union Hotel.” In contrast, Houston King’s version, as later related by his writer son, had it that “when on the sidewalk across the street from the hotel, Carlisle stepped to the door of the barroom part of the hotel and opened fire.” There was no dispute as to what happened next—the shooting became general.
According to Harris Newmark, Frank emptied his revolver as he moved toward Carlisle, who gave as good as he got. Frank suffered a mortal wound and died almost instantly. Houston, who had yet to pull a trigger, lunged at Carlisle and fired repeatedly. Carlisle crumbled, riddled with bullets from Houston’s revolver. King then approached the prostrate man and struck him across the head with his revolver. Carlisle, however, was not quite ready to cash in. It took both hands for him to raise his six-shooter, but he fired one last effective shot—Houston took a bullet through the lungs. During the melee, a bullet struck onlooker J.H. Lander in the thigh, and according to Newmark, “Some eight or ten bystanders had their clothes pierced by stray bullets; and one of the stagehorses dropped where he stood before the hotel door.”
Observers carried Carlisle into the billiard room and laid him out on one of the tables. He died about 3 o’clock that afternoon. His funeral took place the next day, July 7, at the Bella Union. At a special meeting, the local Masons resolved that Carlisle, “struck down in the bloom of manhood and torn from the bosom of a beloved family, at a time when life seemed peculiarly desirable,” be mourned for a period of 30 days. Frank King’s funeral followed on Saturday, July 8 at the home of his brother Jack. Thought to have suffered a mortal wound, Houston surprised everyone and fully recovered.
The Tri-Weekly News, reporting on the “murderous affray,” proclaimed: “Language is palsied—we are unable to describe, fully, the horrors which have been conferred upon the mind by the sad events of the week. We shrink from the subject.” But Houston’s son Frank M. King did not shrink from the subject. In his later account, attributed to his father, he reversed the roles of Frank and Houston, and added a fourth person to the melee, “a friend of Carlisle, whose name I will not mention on account of his relatives in Texas being prominent and not knowing about this.” The younger King credited his uncle’s death to the mystery figure.
Houston King was tried and acquitted on a murder charge during the October term of the First Judicial District Court. A couple of repercussions remained. “Stimulated, perhaps, by the King-Carlisle tragedy,” Harris Newmark reflected, “the Common Council in July prohibited everybody except officers and travelers from carrying a pistol, dirk, sling-shot or sword; but the measure lacked public support, and little or no attention was paid to the law.” Houston’s son Frank later revealed what might have been another repercussion: “As soon as my father could get arrangements made, several years later, he loaded his wife and babies into a dead-ax wagon, with six California range horses hitched to it, and left in March, 1873, for Texas; across the plains to find the friend of Carlisle who had left for Texas before father was released from jail.”
Given the temperament of the King men, that he eventually “evened the account which he had crossed the plains to settle” is certainly believable. Yet the written account of the younger King raises questions about the story’s veracity.
On April 16, 1860, Houston King had married Jacqueline “Linea” Biggs (1844-87), the daughter of David Biggs and his Cherokee wife, Martha Chisholm (sister of famed trail breaker Jesse Chisholm). It is evident that the opportunity to register his wife and children as Cherokee Indians, and thereby to lay claim to land in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), was Houston’s motive for the move. The departure, moreover, took place almost eight years after the deadly King-Carlisle battle, hardly the swiftness with which most vendettas unfold. Frank King, nevertheless, claimed that his father finally encountered Carlisle’s friend “just west of Waxahachie, in Ellis County [Texas], and shot it out.” That the shootout coincidently took place in Ellis County, the birthplace of Houston’s wife, also raises the eyebrow of credulity. Yet Frank King was adamant that it had always been his family’s practice to settle their own scores and that Houston had indeed avenged his brother’s death.
By 1879, Houston, Linea and the children—Francis M. (“Frank”), Samuel H., Mary, Edith and Anna (“Annie”)—had settled at Santa Fe, New Mexico Territory, but the family soon moved on to Arizona Territory. There, the murder of daughter Mary would cause the Kings’ next act of retribution.
Mary King had married Joseph J. Burns, and the couple settled at Somerton, 12 miles south of Yuma, on a farm that belonged to Mary’s sister and brother-in-law, Annie and John Powell. The Powells, in turn, had entered into a deal to sell the place to Frank Miller, recently arrived from Wisconsin. The Burns family, however, was unwilling to leave.
On Thursday morning, February 8, 1901, Joe Burns traveled into Yuma. During his absence, 24-year-old Constable Marion (“Mike”) Alexander, accompanied by Miller and William Fain, rode to the Burns farm to serve an eviction order. It was not Alexander’s first effort; he had tried to serve the papers the day before. Mary had bluffed him away with a Winchester. This time, the eviction party found her in the field, unarmed and with her children. An argument broke out. According to the official report, “Alexander became enraged, took a double-barreled shotgun from a scabbard on his saddle, deliberately firing both barrels at Mrs. Burns…the shot taking effect in the abdomen.” Mary died instantly.
The three men returned to Yuma, and, to save themselves from a possible lynching, they surrendered at the territorial penitentiary. “Alexander’s reputation in Yuma had been very good until now,” the Arizona Republican (Phoenix) reported, “so that it is the general opinion that he got rattled and did not know what he was doing.” A coroner’s jury found that Mary Burns had come to her death at the hands of Alexander “under circumstances not entirely excusable.” The facts, in the opinion of many, led to a straightforward conclusion—the constable had murdered Mary Burns. The grand jury concurred and indicted Alexander on a charge of murder; Miller and Fain were held as accessories.
Mary’s father, Houston King, with her brothers Frank and Sam, reached Yuma on February 13. Unexpectedly, the senior King, though heartbroken over the death of his daughter, informed Mrs. Miller that he did not hold her husband responsible for his daughter’s death and hoped “nobody would get excited.” The Republican added: “The course of Mr. King has occasioned a great deal of surprise. Though a good citizen, he has been known to be a dangerous man when roused.”
William Fain recognized that danger. Six days after the King party arrived, he escaped custody. The Kings trailed him down the Colorado River, but he eluded them. After five days of hiding amid the brush and logs of one of the river’s sloughs, Fain reversed himself and decided that he was safer in confinement; he turned himself in.
The trial of Marion Alexander took place during the April term of the Second Judicial District Court before Judge Webster Street (1846-1908). Of Quaker lineage and named for the famed statesman Daniel Webster, Street also served as chief justice of the Arizona Territory Supreme Court (1897-1902). He had garnered a reputation for his especially well-organized opinions. The trial, however, presented little that was complicated. The jury arrived at a verdict on Monday night, April 8, after the adjournment of the court, and the sealed verdict was to be delivered the next morning. The residents of Yuma expected the jury to find Alexander guilty of Mary Burns’ murder.
Sheriff Gus M. Livingston ushered Alexander into the courtroom to hear the verdict, and indeed it was guilty. Ominously, none of the Kings were present to listen to Judge Street hand down the sentence—life in prison. The judge directed the sheriff to escort Alexander to the penitentiary. Livingston first took him to his office. Then, joined by Deputies Robert Hatch and A. Molina, he walked the handcuffed prisoner toward the prison, only a short distance away. It occurred to Livingston to send Hatch back to ask the judge if they should bring Miller, indicted as an accessory, down from the penitentiary for his trial. The procession came to a halt at the railroad tracks, and Hatch started back to the courthouse. Livingston and Molina waited with the prisoner.
Suddenly, Alexander slumped as the crack of a rifle rang out. A bullet tore into his back and ripped what was described as a “terrific and rough channel” though his liver and bowels. “I’m not hurt much,” he wrongly asserted. In the opinion of the doctor who was summoned, the former constable “didn’t have a chance,” and Alexander died late that evening.
The assassination surprised few; many had predicted an unnatural death for the killer. “The Kings are members of an excellent family and all of them, father and sons are peaceable,” the Republican informed its readers, “but it is known that when provoked they do not estimate human life highly.” During the trial, Mary’s brother Frank had been particularly “expressive,” and local law officials had disarmed him the day before the shooting. Their brother Sam, who had traveled to Yuma from Mexico, where he was a line rider with the customs service, had remained quiet, and his weapons had not been seized.
Almost instantly, Sheriff Livingston determined that the fatal shot had been fired from an old house south of the Levy Company’s store. As he ran toward the house, the sheriff spied Sam King, unarmed, hurriedly walking across the open lot. Livingston took Sam into custody, and Deputy Hatch rushed to arrest his father (Houston) and brother Frank. Yet “all the sentiment in Yuma” was on their side. “Considering the circumstances and the great distance it was, the consensus of opinion at Yuma is that it was a fine shot,” the Republican reported.
Many prominent Arizonans rushed to the defense of the Kings. Epes Randolph, of the Southern Pacific Railroad, sent an attorney and offered money. Well-known lawman Jeff Milton telegraphed Frank: “On my way to you. Good right shootin’ arm and $5000 cash.” Rancher John Rhodes (brotherin-law of Ed Tewksbury of the Graham-Tewksbury feud) started for Yuma with 10 well-armed cowboys. “Yuma was soon filled with friends of the King boys,” wrote George Smalley, the editor of Tucson’s Daily Citizen, “and they were in the crowded justice of the peace court room glaring menacingly at the county attorney as he questioned witnesses for the Territory.”
At the preliminary examination, the prosecutor noted the King family’s presence during the trial and attempted to introduce their reputation for exacting vengeance, but he failed to present evidence that would link any one of them to the killing. The judge refused to hold them for trial. “In truth there was no direct evidence,” opined John W. Dorrington, the editor of Yuma’s Arizona Sentinel, “but the circumstances are unmistakable. Placed in the position of a brother to a sister, father to a daughter, or husband to wife who had been shot down, murdered, one can understand the feeling of revenge that would naturally fill the human heart.” The newsman continued, “But the murderer had been tried, convicted, and was doomed to suffer a penalty, to many men worse than death, and in the interest of law and order and public safety, the act cannot be justified.” Justified or not, 34 years after what he labeled “the most deplorable tragedy that has ever happened in Yuma County,” Frank King suggestively revealed, “It has always been the custom of our family to kill anyone who kills any member of the family….”
Karen Holliday Tanner and John D. Tanner Jr. are frequent contributors to Wild West Magazine. Suggested for further reading: Wranglin’ the Past, by Frank M. King; Personal Justice on the Arizona Desert, by J. Evetts Haley; and Sixty Years in Southern California: 1853-1913, by Harris Newmark.
Originally published in the June 2006 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
