In March 2012 the Arizona Rangers held a grave-marking ceremony for three original Rangers at rest in Globe Cemetery, affixing memorial plaques and Ranger emblems to their headstones. Pollard Pearson was one of those honored (the other two were Cy Byrne and Eugene Shute), but his Ranger service was just part of the story of this lawman, rancher, miner and train engineer.

Making another run

In October 1903 Pearson, then a Gila County deputy sheriff, went to Phoenix to collect one Prospero Encinas, wanted for an attempted shooting in Globe. Encinas had taken a shot at a man on horseback, who the Phoenix Gazette reported “was just grazed across his back by the bullet.” The paper added that “according to the story of Pearson had it not been for the quick movements to the party shot at, the charge against Encinas would be murder.” Later that year, promoted to undersheriff, Pearson would escort the convicted Encinas to prison in Yuma.

His loss to Ed Shanley in the 1904 election didn’t deter Pearson from a second try at the sheriff’s office. Two years later, he sought the Republican nomination again. This time, though, he fell short; the party convention chose William “Timberline Bill” Sparks, until recently an Arizona Ranger. Twenty years passed, and Pearson decided to give it another try. The third time was no charm. Pearson, once more the Republican nominee, lost the 1926 election to incumbent sheriff J. Alf Edwards.

In late January 1907 Pearson was appointed a Globe deputy city marshal. It seems he was on the job less than a year. In mid-September 1907, the Silver Belt reported that he had resigned “to enter the cattle business” in Mexico. Pearson did give up his position for other ventures south of the border, but it’s unclear when he actually left. He was apparently still serving that November, and played a part in the mystery of Richard Vecklund.

The Silver Belt reported that two “officers,” including Pearson, found Vecklund unconscious in Globe’s red light district. When he came to, they asked where he lived. Vecklund named a room in the International boarding house, where he was taken; there, he soon passed away. The mystery was not in his death – the investigation determined he was drugged and robbed, and died from the drug’s effects. It also revealed that he was not staying at the International. Why, then, did Vecklund give that room number? As it happened, the room was the scene of a bloody, still unsolved, murder the year before. Could it be, as the Silver Belt asked, that Vecklund was somehow connected to the crime? It’s a question that remains unanswered.

Despite his resignation as deputy city marshal, Pearson was not quite done with law enforcement. In 1918, he rode out on one more manhunt; in the 1930s, he was a guard at the Florence state prison; and, reporting his death in August 1939, the Arizona Republic included this bit: “. . . at one time [Pearson] was a member of the United States secret service.” So far, that line is the only mention of such service we have found; if confirmed, it would add an intriguing chapter to Pearson’s story.

At the time of the 1918 Power cabin shootout in Graham County, Pearson was a guard at the Inspiration Copper Company in Miami. According to the Feb. 11, 1918 Silver Belt, he spoke by telephone with the shootout’s lone surviving lawman, Deputy U.S. Marshal Frank  Haynes. “According to the story told Pearson . . . Haynes returned to the scene of the shooting after the [Power] boys had left, as he informed Pearson that when he went back to the cabin the three sheriff officials were dead and the elder Powers [sic] is dying,” the paper reported. Pearson saddled up with a posse to seek the fugitives, but their hunt came up empty.

Mines and railroads

In addition to his ranching interests – at various times, he ran cattle around Socorro, New Mexico and in the Mescal Mountains south of Globe – Pearson took an interest in mining.

“A party of mining experts representing the interests of [Montana “copper king”] Augustus Heinze and associates are in the field to examine various of the properties in this vicinity,” the Silver Belt noted on Nov. 30, 1905. “They visited the Pinto creek section, guests of Sam Gibson, who with Pollard Pearson and Henry Thompson accompanied them on a tour of the Pinto creek properties.”

The man those experts represented, F. Augustus Heinze, made his fortune in copper around Butte, Montana. He rose in the industry partially through low-cost smelting, instituting an eight-hour workday and exploiting mining law to dig beneath competing mines. In 1902 he founded United Copper Company, which was valued at $80 million and could produce 40 million pounds a year. Reaching a settlement with a competitor in 1906, Heinze sold his Montana interests for $12 million and moved east, where he would be implicated in the financial panic of 1907.

In June 1907 Pearson and two partners started their own firm, calling it Globe-Amalgamated Copper Company. According to its articles of incorporation, this “general mining, milling and smelting business” had $1 million in stock, divided into 200,000 $5 shares. Other than its founding, though, information on Globe-Amalgamated is sparse. A 1909 edition of the Mines Register listed it as a “dead” operation.

Still, Pearson kept his hand in through the years. In the fall of 1916, with copper demand high due to World War I, he located three claims in the Black Hills Mining District, whose deposits made Jerome a boomtown. About 11 years later, Pearson and his wife staked a 16-lode mining claim on the San Carlos Apache Reservation. It’s unclear whether any of these claims paid.

By June 1911, it seems, Pearson had added train engineer to his occupations. Crossing into Canada by rail that month, bound from Globe to Calgary, he listed his profession as “railroader.” In 1913 he filled in for a sick engineer at Hayden Junction on the Arizona Eastern Railway; in the early summer of 1917, according to payroll records, he was an engineer with the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Stockton Division. It may have been a trade he acquired in his time south of the border.

This story will conclude in next week’s Silver Belt.