Violence swirled like dust in a windstorm around Jacob W. Swart’s “Bar Room” in Charleston, Arizona Territory. Located six miles from infamous Tombstone, Arizona, site of the “Gunfight at the OK Corral,” Swart’s watering hole was a favorite hangout of gunslingers and outlaws. His distant relative (see below) believes that the bearded man standing in the doorway of the saloon wearing a white hat is Swart.
The name is Dutch, derived from the word for “black” and the family settled on American soil in New York State during the 1700s. Jacob likely was born in 1823 in Dryden, Tompkins County, the eldest child of Elizabeth (nee Winnie) and John Duffie Swart. Census data variously recorded the father’s occupation as laborer or “shingle weaver,” that is, working in a wood mill making shingles for houses.
When Jacob, the eldest child, was just an infant, the family moved to Albany where a brother and two sisters were born. The 1850 census found him at age 27 still living at home and likely working as a farm laborer. Later in that decade Swart left his family and moved West, recorded living in Arizona by 1867. Along the way he appears to have learned something about guns and perhaps about operating a saloon. In 1879 the Pima County, Arizona, newspaper reported a payment of $11.44 to Swart as a quarterly fee for his services as deputy sheriff. Such jobs often were awarded to those handy with a six-shooter.
Not long after, Swart moved to Charleston, Arizona, about sixty miles east of Pima. Shown above as it looked in the late 1880s, Charleston was founded in 1879 as a milling site for the silver mines around Tombstone. Because water was essential to recovering the silver and Tombstone was desert, the town, located six miles away on the San Pedro River, was chosen for the factories and the ore was hauled there. The mills held heavy pistons that rose and fell, breaking down ore. The operators then combined the pulverized ore with water and chemicals including mercury to release the precious metal.
People seeking work in the mills poured into town. At its zenith in the mid-1880s Charleston boasted four general stores, a meat market, drug store, two restaurants, two laundries, two hotels, several boarding houses and an estimated thirteen to fifteen saloons. One of the earliest drinking establishments was owned by Frank Stillwell, a noted gunslinger, outlaw and businessman who also owned an interest in silver mines, two livery stables, a wholesale liquor business, and a saloon. In 1881 he sold the saloon to Swart. A year later Stillwell, left, was dead, shot at close range by Marshall Wyatt Earp in revenge for the killing of his brother, Morgan.
In the years following Swart’s proprietorship of the saloon, it became known as a handout for a loose group of outlaws known as the “Cowboys.” The photograph shown here is believed to depict a number of those desperadoes, several of whom subsequently would be involved in the notorious 1881 gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, an epic clash that has been dramatized repeatedly in motion pictures and other media.
Jeff Swart, a distant relative of Jacob Swart, has spent years analyzing the photo of the saloon and believes it is a group picture of the Cowboys. He believes that the shot was taken in 1881 by Charles O. Farcoit, an itinerant photographer in the Southwest, not long before the Tombstone shoot-out. Among those gathered at Swart’s place for the photo, says Jeff, were:
*Ike Clanton: Joseph Isaac Clanton was a member of the Clanton-McLaury gang that confronted the three Earps and Doc Holiday in Tombstone. Reputedly unarmed, he fled the gunfight scene in which his younger brother, Billy, was killed. Shown here, Ike later filed murder charges against the quartet, but after an 30-day court inquiry, the judge ruled that the lawmen had acted within their authority. Six years later Ike was killed attempting to flee from a lawman seeking to arrest him for cattle rustling.
*Tom McLaury: McLaury and his brother Frank owned a ranch outside Tombstone and had ongoing conflicts with Marshall Earp and his brothers over the McLaurys’ cattle rustling and other offenses. They frequently had threatened the Earps and both were at the OK Corral on that October day. Both were killed in the virtual seconds of gunfire that ensued.
*William Brocius: Better known as “Curly Bill,” Brocius was a gunman, rustler and known murderer. One observer called him “Arizona’s most famous outlaw.” Brocius had numerous run-ins with the Earps and was linked to the killing of Morgan Earp. An Earp-led posse unexpectedly encountered him with other Cowboys at present day Mescal Springs, Arizona, in March 1882. During the ensuing shootout Wyatt Earp killed Curly Bill.
*Pete Spence.” Born Elliot Larkin Ferguson, Spence was a hanger-on of the Clantons and McLaurys. Suspected of stealing mules and robbing a stagecoach, he nonetheless was hired by an Arizona town as deputy sheriff. On the job he pistol-whipped and killed a man, resulting in a sentence of 18 months in jail. Despite his fierce demeanor here, Spence retired from crime to raising goats and running supplies to Arizona towns by mule train. He died in bed in 1914.
The sign that hung above the door to J.D. Swart’s Bar Room, pricing drinks at 12 and 1/2 cents deserves some explanation. His customers would know that the reference was to a “bit.” The “bit” was a unit of common currency derived from the early tradition of cutting a Spanish milled dollar into eight pie-shaped pieces or bits, each worth 12 and 1/2 cents. “Two bits” made a quarter as that coin sometimes is called today.
In addition to running his drinking establishment, Jacob engaged in family life. During the early 1870s he had married an Hispanic woman named Sacramento who had been born in the Mexican state of Sonora. Fourteen years his junior, she apparently had been married before. The 1880 census indicated that her son was living with the Swarts in Charleston, along with her brother and a niece. The couple had three children of their own: John, 7, likely named after his grandfather; Charles, 5; and Peter, a baby of 10 months. Jacob, age 52, was listed in the census as “keeping saloon.”
The violence that marked this part of Arizona did not leave Swart untouched. During the mid-1880s, the saloonkeeper had an altercation with a man named Chambers, a manager at one of the Charleston mills. Swart shot and killed him. In the West of those days if the dead man was armed and shot in the front, the verdict almost inevitably was “not guilty” and the shooter was not jailed. In this case Swart found himself facing Justice of the Peace James Burnett, a man known for assessing large fines for infractions and pocketing the money. Likely reckoning Swart a rich man, Burnett fined him $1,000, equivalent to $22,000 today. Rather than pay up, Swart hustled out of Charleston just ahead of a posse sent to arrest him.
Jacob, presumably with his family following, moved 300 miles west to Yuma, Arizona, on the Colorado River near the California border. Yuma was a far different place from Charleston and Tombstone. City Historian Tina Clark has called Yuma a “precious river town.” It was the first stop in Arizona for trains and steamboats coming from urban centers like Los Angeles and San Francisco. Tastes in Yuma were more refined and life was calmer.
There Swart opened a new watering hole he called “The Identical Saloon” at the corner of Main and Second Streets. In a 1891 advertisement, one that misspelled his name, he boasted of always having on hand “First-class Whiskies, Wines and Brandies” as well as “Choice Key West Cigars.” Jacob clearly had taken his drinking establishment up a notch on the elegance scale. Noting his “Cosy Club-rooms” suggests that he was entertaining gambling or perhaps something more intimate. At that point the trail goes cold on Swart. I have been unable to track his final years or his place of burial.
The fate of Charleston, however, is well known. When the silver mines in Tombstone flooded in 1886, the mills were forced to shut down and the town declined sharply in population. That blow was followed by a major earthquake that struck in May 1887. It left the town’s adobe structures in ruins and sealed its fate. By 1889 Charleston had become a ghost town, as it remains today.
Although the population of Tombstone also declined sharply, it remained the seat of Cochise County and beginning in the 20th Century began to flourish economically on tourism and the sale of Western clothing and memorabilia. Annually some 450,000 visitors are drawn to the town by its history of violence, particularly the gunfight at the OK Corral.
Note: Although this post was gathered from many sources, key was a post by Jeff Swart on his blog on February 2, 2014. He has done some excellent genealogical work on his family and apparently ferreting out the identities of the men in the photo of Swart’s Charleston Bar Room. My efforts to reach Jeff online have proved unsuccessful. Photos of the four outlaws are from Wikipedia.
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