Yuma Prison: Country club or hellhole?

A couple of guards stood in the thin shade of a wall at Yuma Territorial Prison, watching convicts mill about the yard. It was summer, the dog days, sometime around the monsoon, and everything was quiet.

Then all hell broke loose. A metal spike flashed and a guard fell. An inmate grabbed the slain guard’s rifle and fired point blank at the other guard. The cons left the yard and ran for the gates.

As they ran, they exchanged fire with guards stationed around the prison and took out the guard behind the prison’s Gatling gun. Other prisoners join them, until a frenzied mob had gathered. A steam whistle signaled that a prison break was under way.

Little stood between the convicts and their freedom.

Someone fired the Gatling gun, cutting off their escape. Behind the big, rapid-fire gun stood Madora Ingalls, the lovely wife of Superintendent Frank Ingalls. The guards regrouped. The escape attempt had been foiled by a mother of three in her late 20s.

The story is one of many surrounding the Yuma prison (referred to variously over time as Arizona Territorial Prison, Arizona Territorial Prison at Yuma and Yuma Territorial Prison). This one likely originated in newspapers, without citation, then appeared in a thin book on the prison called “The Hell Hole,” published in 1962. Later, the story appeared in another newspaper, with a time frame: July 1891.

But records on file at the state archives show that Superintendent Frank Ingalls no longer worked at the prison then. Some inmates did attempt an escape that month, during a work detail, far from the prison yard and its big gun, which was actually a Lowell battery gun. Newspapers of the day do not make any mention of the outbreak and the heroics of Mrs. Ingalls, in July 1891 or any other time.

The story of Madora Ingalls is one of several tales that have been told about the prison over the years. Strip away the myths, however, and there are plenty of stories left. Yuma Territorial Prison held a female stagecoach robber, a Tombstone gunslinger, murderers, rustlers, gamblers, robbers, polygamists from sleepy Mormon settlements.

Although the idea of frontier justice implies hasty trials, hangings and long sentences, nobody was ever executed in the Yuma prison, though one prisoner was executed in Yuma County. Prisoners were frequently pardoned or paroled long before their sentences were up. Lawmakers and newspapers talked about how soft the prison was on criminals, and politicians made get-tough-on-crime speeches that sounded remarkably similar to the ones they make today.

There were escape attempts, of course — lots of them. Some succeeded, some did not. Sometimes men simply vanished from work detail, never to be seen again. Sometimes, they stormed the prison gates.

Built by the prisoners themselves

The first convicts arrived before the prison was even built. They were kept at the Yuma County Jail, where Sheriff William Werninger served as the first prison superintendent. In August 1875, three prisoners pulled off the prison’s first escape attempt and headed for Sonora, Mexico. Werninger got on his horse and captured two of them.

The prison was built by the prisoners themselves, on a hill overlooking the Colorado River. They quarried rock out of the hill and made walls of adobe, mortar and granite. They plastered over the walls and whitewashed them in places, made doors from thick straps of iron shipped up the river.

Werninger moved the inmates, just over half a dozen at first, from the jail to the prison site until July 1876, when there were enough cells to hold them.

The Territorial Legislature had appropriated $25,000 to build the prison. The Arizona Republican reported that it cost about $50,000 to run the prison, which came to nearly $1 for every man, woman and child in the territory.

Time passed and they built more cells. Workers bored a hole in the rock on the south side of the prison until they had a room about 16 feet by 15 feet. A small hole in the roof provided ventilation and gated hallway led into what became known as the dark cell, or the snake den.

The dark cell was reserved for inmates caught fighting, trying to escape, or violating other rules. Superintendent M.M. McInerney, for example, tossed inmates into the dark cell for gambling.

Prisoners sentenced to time in the dark cell were stripped to their underwear, placed inside a cage and chained to a couple of stout rings mounted on the floor. There was no light, except for the light that came in the hole in the roof, no visitors, save for the guards bringing in food. There are stories that a sadistic guard would drop snakes down the ventilation hole, but one historian cautions that those stories have not been verified and are probably not true.

Each convict was assigned a number. The guards noted scars, tattoos and vices of each prisoner, the date they arrived and the length of their sentence.

Their crimes varied: Burglary, assault, mayhem, rioting, forgery, fraud, murder, manslaughter, selling liquor to Indians, robbery, rape, polygamy, seduction, prize fighting.

There was Pearl Hart, sentenced to five years for her part in Arizona’s last stagecoach robbery in 1899. Hart spent some of her prison time giving interviews to the press, posing for photos in men’s clothing, in which she is shown holding revolvers and a lever-action rifle.

There was Joe Boot, Hart’s partner in the robbery, who received 30 years, then fell from the view of history when he escaped in 1901.

There was Frank Leslie, a Tombstone gunman and reportedly a friend of Wyatt Earp. One historian describes Leslie as “a good shot, mean when drunk, fond of women and a born liar.… ” He was convicted and sentenced to life after shooting his girlfriend. Once in prison, he claimed to have a background in medicine and wound up in charge of the medical supply room.

There was Rutherford Nephew, a.k.a. Jim Thomas, a.k.a., the “Kid,” a.k.a Climax Jim, after a brand of chewing tobacco. A prolific cattle rustler and horse thief, he was also known as an escape artist who could pick locks and slip out of shackles. He broke out of one jail using a pocket knife, another with a spoon. He may have thought of escaping from the Yuma prison, but he never did.

And there was Dewitt Whittaker, who appears to be largely unknown to history. When the guards processed Whittaker as he came into the prison, they noted that he had six gunshot wounds.

'A pretty well-run prison'

The heat was oppressive. Prisoners lived in crowded conditions at a time when tuberculosis was widespread. Hospital facilities were primitive. Cockroaches thrived. Bedbugs, too, until the bunks were rebuilt.

As bad as life may have been, there were worse prisons in America. At San Quentin, in California, prisoners were flogged, spread eagle, on an X frame, John Mason Jeffrey writes in The Journal of Arizona History. “One nineteenth-century southern prison,” he writes, “used punishments known today only by such grim names as ‘cowskin,’ and ‘slue paddle,’ and ‘wooden horse.’ ”

“Yuma came on line where there was a movement toward prison reform,” said Mesa Community College History Professor Paul Hietter. “Yuma was, for its time period, actually a pretty well-run prison.”

Prisoners worked on various work details — on maintenance, at the farm or hospital. There was also the rock pile, where armed guards watched as men dug into a hillside on the south side of the prison grounds. But prisoners couldn’t always work, and keeping them occupied was a challenge.

Although Madora Ingalls, the superintendent's wife, did not take up a battery gun and stop a prison break, she has been credited with starting the state’s first library. The library stocked books, newspapers and magazines for the cons to read.

Eventually, prison authorities gave convicts access to tools and materials. With these, the inmates made cribbage boards, picture frames, canes, jewelry, bridles, and inlaid boxes. For years, the items were sold at what one historian called a “bizarre bazaar.”

In spite of efforts to keep them occupied, the inmates considered the territorial prison a “hell hole.”

Yuma residents called it a country club, in part because the prison eventually had electricity, in part because it had a library. Both were seen as luxuries then, and not available to everyone in town. The craft market fueled this perception.

“One can go any day to the prison and see in the yard where they (sic) are confined men laying in the shade of porches, buildings and trees, singing and sky-larking, reading the latest newspapers and periodicals of the day; joking and conversing with each other and all in all having a grand old time and all at the expense of the taxpayers who toil day in and day out to keep these men guarded and from committing depredations on themselves and their loved ones,” a local newspaper reported.

In 1893, a state commission overseeing the prison complained about the guards drinking on the job.

“Prisoners seem to do and act in about any manner they please,” a joint legislative committee reported. “On going in to the prison, we find little stands of trinkets, canes, onyx fixtures, etc., made by the prisoners and for sale to visitors, and it appeared more like entering a fair where articles are kept for sale than a Territorial Prison.”

The committee wondered why the prison medical supply was under the supervision of a “prisoner under life sentence, as seems to be the case at present.”

The prisoner was probably Leslie, the Tombstone gunslinger who, by all accounts, was a model prisoner.

Certainly, there were problems with contraband, then, as now. In 1897, the Arizona Sentinel reported that a prison guard discovered a cache of “six two ounce sacks of mariguana (sic) … to be smuggled into the prison. … Mariguana is a kind of a loco-weed which is more powerful than opium.”

In 1907, a local resident was caught passing opium to inmates, the local paper reported.

In 1889, the Legislature made national headlines by making train robbery a capital crime. The law was quickly put to the test: Less than a month after its passage, a group of masked men robbed a train at Diablo Canyon. They were later captured, tried, found guilty, and sent to Yuma Prison. None received the death penalty.

Prisoners were frequently released before they had served their full sentence.

Whittaker, the con with six gunshot wounds, sentenced to seven years for manslaughter in 1893, was pardoned in 1894.

Juan Enriquez, sentenced to 30 years for murder, was pardoned after serving about nine and a half years.

Leslie, sentenced to life for murder in 1890, was pardoned in 1896.

Elena Estrada, sentenced to seven years for manslaughter in 1900, was paroled in 1904.

A violent escape unravels

Legend has it that nobody ever escaped from the prison, but one historian puts the number of successful attempts at 20 or more. The Department of Corrections puts the number at 26. Countless others tried to escape and failed.

In 1879, a prisoner named Theodore Brown, who had behaved so well he was made an assistant cook, went outside the prison walls to a water storage container to fetch a cup of water, the Sentinel reported. He went back outside to return the cup, and never came back.

In 1893, the superintendent reported that M.L. Wilcox, prisoner number 870, managed to get beyond the prison walls and tried to swim across the Colorado River. He was captured within 30 minutes and was placed in solitary for 52 days.

One of the most famous escape attempts took place in 1887, when prison Superintendent Thomas Gates went to the prison shop area. As he left, a prisoner followed him and started to talk. Three other inmates joined them as they approached the sally port, a narrow entrance to the main prison. They pulled out knives and took Gates as a hostage. Others joined in as the cons exited the sally port.

An inmate assaulted the yard master and they tumbled over an embankment. Another went after a bag of provisions and still another headed for the river, but they were both pinned down by gunfire or captured. The others took Gates to his office, where they found a pistol with five rounds.

As guards and inmates exchanged fire, the escape attempt unraveled, and an inmate drove a butcher knife into the back of Gates. Lifer Barney Riggs rushed to the aid of the superintendent. He grabbed the pistol from one of the inmates and shot the knife-wielding con, put pressure on the superintendent’s wound and got him to safety. Riggs received a pardon the following year. Gates never fully recovered from his wounds. He committed suicide in March 1896.

On to Florence

In 1908, work began on a new prison in Florence.

Like the Yuma prison, it was built by inmates, who slept in tents and earned credit against their sentence as the work progressed. Some had nearly served their terms and were released during construction of the new facility. Others were released shortly after the work was completed.

In September of 1909, the Holbrook News reported that the remaining inmates were ready to be transferred, and by most accounts, the transfer was complete by the end of the month.

It is difficult to know who was the last prisoner to escape from the Yuma prison, or the first to escape from Florence. The newspapers make no mention of it and surviving superintendents' reports are brief quarterly statements.

In those days, it was not unheard of to pay for the use of horses, or teams of horses. About 34 years after Werninger searched for the first escapees on horseback, the Arizona Republican published a list of county expenses, with the following notation:

Pete Evente, Horse hire, search of escape, September 30. Territorial Prison, Florence.

The state park

What is left of Yuma Territorial Prison is now a state park, where visitors can walk through the sally port, see exhibits and look inside the dark cell. Details: azstateparks.com/Parks/YUTE, 928-783-4771.

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