In this photograph, a group of lawmen in Cochise County are breaking up barrels and pouring the whiskey down Tombstone’s Allen Street.

During Prohibition, Cochise County Sheriff Harry Wheeler traveled all over his county trying to put an end to bootlegging. He made numerous arrests, confiscating mountains of booze that piled up in the courthouse in Tombstone.

There was so much contraband liquor, the sheriff and his men had trouble disposing of it. In one case, a judge temporarily suspended a trial at the Tombstone courthouse because of the overpowering smell of whiskey coming through the windows. He looked out to see Sheriff Wheeler breaking up bottles of Sunny Brook which had been confiscated from George F. Taylor in Lowell.

Arizona adopted Prohibition on November 4, 1914, and the law took effect on January 1. On New Year’s Eve in 1914, a few Tucsonans attended church services to give thanks for the dry vote, but most went carousing in the bars on Meyer Street enjoying one last orgy of drinking.

Louis Hughes, editor of the Arizona Daily Star and his wife, Josephine, a staunch member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, led the charge for Arizona Prohibition.

As early as 1883, Josephine Hughes and national WCTU leader, Frances E. Willard, traveled throughout the Arizona Territory denouncing demon rum, administering abstinence oaths and pinning white ribbons on their converts.

Louis Hughes, with the help of perennial Prohibition presidential candidate Eugene Chafin, even fought druggists who insisted on their right to sell liquor on a medical prescription.

Finally on January 16, 1920, national Prohibition was adopted with the passage of the 18^th Amendment, ending the manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors and their importation and exportation throughout the United States.

With national Prohibition, moonshiners, who made everything from smooth blended whiskey to poisonous rotgut, moved into Arizona. During the first two years, Cochise County Deputy Sheriff Percy Bowden made 1,366 arrests, most of which resulted in convictions. At that, Bowden estimated he had apprehended only about half of the lawbreakers in his jurisdiction.

Overnight, new liquor brands appeared: Red Eye, Cherry Dynamite, Scat Whiskey, Soda Pop Moon, Jackass Brandy and Yack-Yack Bourbon. Mexico produced a concoction distilled from potatoes, cacti and burnt sugar, known simply as American Whiskey. From Jamaica came Jamaica Ginger or Jake, a vile booze that is said to have paralyzed its victims.

Wine bricks complete with instructions for fermentation and warnings of the illegality of doing so materialized in Arizona grocery stores.

Not all Arizona lawmen welcomed Prohibition. Mohave County Sheriff Henry Lovin put a sign over his mercantile which read, “All Nations Welcome Except Carrie,” a reference to Carrie Nation, the formidable leader of temperance crusades. Former Coconino County Sheriff Sandy Donahue hung black bordered signs outside his saloon that read, “Closed on account of death.”

Many saw the fight for Prohibition as the women’s war. Weary of seeing their husbands spend their nights in taverns, the women organized anti-saloon leagues and WCTU chapters. Denied the vote, they found power in temperance causes.

They were backed up in the pulpit with sermons like this one by Ohio Rev. Sam Small who preached “. . . American people are crucifying that beastly, bloated bastard of Beelzebub, the liquor traffic. . . . Yet a few months more and we will bury the putrid corpse of John Barleycorn.”

The country never did rid itself of John Barleycorn. The noble experiment failed and on December 5, 1933, Congress repealed the 18^th Amendment, and liquor sales once again were legal in the United States.

Photo and caption courtesy Jane Eppinga. ©Arizona Capitol Times.