* Hat-tip to Henry’s Western Round-up for scouting this one out.
One of my missions with Frontier Partisans is to communicate the reality that what we think of as “the frontier” is too limited. The frontier experience is international, not just a phenomenon of the “Wild West.” And it lasted a lot longer than most folks reckon.
Over many years, the “late” frontier has come to exert a tremendous pull on me. My historical wheelhouse is the late-19th Century through World War I — the late Apache Wars, the Spanish-American War; the Boer War; the Mexican Revolution. There’s something about the frontier running like a dynamite-loaded train into the modern era (think “The Wild Bunch”) that is profoundly compelling to me. It’s the era that has the greatest resonance for me, the past I feel most present, the space where I feel most at home.
So I am delighted to discover that there is a new documentary on an obscure but significant incident of the late frontier that brings those elements together and demonstrates that the West was still “wild” well into the deadly 20th Century.
The deadliest gunfight in Arizona did not take place on the streets of Tombstone during its wild territorial days, but rather in a remote canyon of the Galiuro Mountains on a snowy Sunday morning in 1918, three decades after the frontier had closed. The numerous books that have been written about the gunfight are filled with unsubstantiated rumors and conspiracy theories, as authors have tried to make sense of it all. Why did eight men fight to the death on a cold winter’s morning in a remote canyon? Were they fighting over the gold mine? Or was the federal government determined to punish draft evaders with deadly force?
POWER’S WAR is a documentary film directed by Cameron Trejo that delves deep into the circumstances leading up to and following the controversial Power Shootout during the First World War. Featured historians include Heidi Osselaer, Eduardo Pagan, Mark Weitz, Paul Hietter, Marshall Trimble, the Arizona Republic’s Don Dedera, author Thomas Cobb (Crazy Heart), and many descendants of the Power Shootout.
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