D  e  s  e  r  t     E  x  p  o  s  u  r  e     September 2005

Mogollons Murder Mystery

Somebody killed young Charley Wood. Then his father killed Willie Grudgings. Then a jury acquitted the vengeful father. A century later, an award-winning research paper tries to sort it out.

By David A. Fryxell

Maybe at last this old Upper Gila grudge, which involved three murders more than 100 years ago, can be considered settled. At least all the facts have been finally set down about the controversial killings of Charley Wood and Francisco Diaz, on the trail above Gila Hot Springs on Oct. 11, 1892, and of Willie Grudgings--by Tom Wood, young Charley's father--almost exactly a year later. It all happened more than a century ago, in an era when shooting and killing and taking the law into your own hands was more common, but some folks in these parts still remember the story. And Tom Wood's grandson, Bill Wood, still lives in Silver City, though the other side of this Old West Hatfield-McCoy saga, the Grudgings, have since returned to Iowa.

Terry Humble and Jan Devereaux at the Grudgings' grave site.

The "settling" of this long-ago local grudge came in the form of a research article published earlier this year in the National Association for Outlaw and Lawman History's Quarterly. This summer, the journal article--titled "Settlin' a Grudge!"--won its author, Jan Devereaux, the association's "Best Article" award at its annual convention in Taos.

Devereaux, who lives in Maypearl, Texas, hadn't initially intended to write the authoritative account of these Southwest New Mexico killings. She was actually researching something else when a footnote about the Wood-Grudgings murders caught her eye. Curious, she tried tracking down living family members, and interviewed folks on the Grudgings side as well as Bill Wood in Silver City, not far from the scene of the crimes. Bill Wood, she learned, still owns his grandfather's Colt .45 six-shooter. She also got to see a photo of William "Willie" Grudgings' headstone, which can still be glimpsed off a rugged trail in the Upper Gila, 150 feet from where the family's two-room cabin once stood, until consumed by time and forest fire. The weathered inscription reads:

If you're an Old West history buff, that kind of thing would prove well-nigh irresistible. So the next time Devereaux came to Silver City--in the company of Bob Alexander, author of the new book on this area's Wild West past, Six-Guns and Single-Jacks--they trekked with Gary Bush and Terry Humble, a Silver City history buff, across the west fork of the Gila River and through the backcountry to find Grudgings' grave.

"I like to take these puzzle pieces and put them together," Devereaux says. "I find a little bit of information and I know there's more to it. History is like a patchwork quilt or a puzzle."

The history of the Wood-Grudgings feud, as Devereaux tells it in her article, began with Tom Wood's arrival in Pinos Altos in 1869. There he fell in love with Tomasita Louisa "Lou" Cisneros, a performer in a visiting circus troupe. "When the circus left town," Devereaux writes, "Lou stayed behind with Tom." The couple moved together deep into the Mogollon Mountains country, establishing a ranch on Iron Creek. By 1880 they had four children; belatedly, they returned to Pinos Altos in 1883 to get married. "Hunter Tom Wood," as he became known, battled Apaches and developed a reputation as man not to be trifled with: "Never inclined to diplomacy, Tom Wood saw life in black-and-white terms. He had many friends and not just a few enemies."

The Grudgings brothers--Henry ("Hank"), Willie and Charley--arrived in the Upper Gila by 1885, building a cabin of Ponderosa pine upstream from what's now the Gila Cliff Dwellings. One of the many sources Devereaux uncovered in her research called the brothers "skilled frontiersmen, and excellent hunters and shots." But, she notes, "Tom Wood thought them rustlers, too." (Wood also had trouble, according to the article, with Tom Lyons, one of Southwest New Mexico's most renowned and controversial cattle barons, co-founder of the "LC" ranch.) For their part, the Grudgings suspected that Wood's son, Charley, was occasionally killing their young steers and "fraudulently passing the meat off as deer jerky when he sold it at Silver City."

In September 1892, weaver Francisco Diaz had shown up at Wood's ranch, lost and hungry, and found hospitality. Diaz wanted to thank the family with some blankets, so he and Charley Wood, age 15, set off for Silver City with five burros to buy "dye stuffs" along with regular supplies. After making their purchases and starting for home, the pair stopped overnight on the trail above Gila Hot Springs, well past the Grudgings' cabin. That's where Edward S. Mulliken found them on the morning of Oct. 11, both shot to death through the head.

A coroner's jury concluded the killings were by "the hands of parties unknown." Rumors continued to fly about both the killer and the reason for the deaths, even about who was really the intended target. "They could have thought Diaz was Tom Wood," Devereaux notes. "No one knew Diaz was staying with the family."

Nearly a year later, however, somehow Tom Wood got evidence--conclusive enough for him, at least--that the Grudgings were behind his son's murder.

According to one account of what happened next that Devereaux uncovered, "Tom Wood, wearing some type of Indian headdress as a partial but ineffective disguise, killed Willie Grudgings with a well-placed rifle shot." She cites several other accounts, but the upshot was straightforward: Claiming that Grudgings had killed young Charley, Wood voluntarily surrendered to Socorro County authorities.

After having second thoughts, though, Wood soon took the advice of a sympathetic jail guard who "told him to skip." Devereaux dismisses the legend of what Wood supposedly did during the next three years on the lam--tracking Henry Grudgings and "finally killing him on a Louisiana bayou as he climbed from a flat-bottomed pirogue." She scoffs, "He was not in the Louisiana swamps. I don't know who made up that story."

What is true, however, is that Wood eventually decided to get it over with and take his chances with a jury--which acquitted him in May 1886. "Society saw this horrendous thing that had happened to his son," Devereaux says. "Tom Wood didn't run amok the next day--he waited patiently until he found the man he thought killed his son and took his revenge. Then he stood up and said, 'This is what I did. He killed mine and I killed him.' The horror of what had happened to his son caused him to be acquitted. Two rights don't make a wrong, but society says, 'We can understand.'"

The Grudgings family members she interviewed, like those before them, to this day don't think a Grudgings killed Charley Wood. But the feud ended with Willie Grudgings' death--"they didn't retaliate."

Tom Wood lived to be 78, dying in Silver City in 1925. He was buried in Silver City's Memory Lane Cemetery next to prominent early citizen Jim Bullard, with whom Wood had done some Indian fighting way back when.

Devereaux concludes, "Whether or not Tom Wood assassinated the right man is still an emotionally debatable issue among family members. . . . Clearly, Tom Wood saw the litany of life's rights and wrongs through his own prism. He was a man of action."

Finding the truth--or at least the various versions of it--about killings more than a century ago took a combination of interviewing family members and digging into documents, Devereaux says. "It was a lot of bits and pieces. I had to talk to both sides and I had to explain I wasn't taking sides. You can't stand 100 percent by what either family says."

Assembling that "puzzle" is what makes historical research so fascinating, she adds. "We all make history every day. It's a puzzle for later researchers to understand. History is to be shared--we all have it."

And if that history happens to include a few killings? Devereaux smiles. "We've all got a skeleton or two in the closet."

David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure.

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