Doing Time: How Two Arabian Horses in Arizona Came to Be Owned by Convicts, Part One: JEREMAH 144

 Tobi Lopez Taylor

An Arizona Horse History Project essay

Photo by Sean Foster, 2012, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

The Spur Cross Conservation Area, in Cave Creek, Arizona, today consists of more than 2,000 acres of desert wilderness that contain a rare year-round spring-fed stream, stands of majestic saguaros, and dozens of prehistoric archaeological sites. However, few visitors realize that, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, this land—known then as the Spur Cross Ranch—was also home to two of the earliest Arabian horses to live in Arizona—Jeremah 144 and Amar 767.

            In April 1928, the University of Arizona, in Tucson, held a horse show. University president Byron Cummings was on hand to present medals and trophies. Captain R. C. Woodruff—whom I have written about elsewhere—gave a demonstration ride on his Quarter Horse mare, Sprite. In addition, a young man named Jacob Franz Fishter exhibited a grey Arabian stallion named Jeremah, on behalf of the horse’s lessee, Captain Edward M. Joyce. The latter had quite an unusual excuse for not attending the show: he was in prison in Florence, Arizona. 

             Joyce—a World War I veteran, horseman, and proprietor of some Southern Arizona guest ranches, including the Carlink Ranch—had made headlines four years earlier, when he shot and killed a ranch hand who was paying too much attention to Joyce’s wife. Although Joyce was initially charged with murder, his attorneys successfully advocated for the lesser charge of manslaughter.  

I also happened to learn, while doing research for this essay, that my great-great-uncle, William “Billy” Rhodes, worked for Joyce and was a witness to the shooting. Billy Rhodes was no stranger to violence, as he grew up during the era of Arizona’s Pleasant Valley War (c. 1882–1892), a deadly feud between the Tewksbury and Graham families in which Billy’s father, John Rhodes, was a participant who was nearly killed in a Tempe courtroom. (For more about the Rhodes-Lopez family and the Pleasant Valley War, see here.)

Joyce and two fellow inmates in Arizona’s Florence State Prison used their jail time productively: they met often and, after their release, planned to open a guest ranch north of Phoenix, in Cave Creek. Joyce would provide the ranching experience, Phillip Lewis had some financial expertise (he was a former bank president serving time for tax evasion and embezzlement), and the third, unnamed, convict helped to underwrite the enterprise.

Jeremah Comes to Arizona

Joyce was still in prison when he leased Jeremah. The stallion had already traveled by train from the East Coast to the West Coast and had changed hands at least twice (see below) before arriving in Arizona. Jeremah was born in 1913 at Peter Bradley’s Hingham Stock Farm in Massachusetts.

Breed historian Carol Woodbridge Mulder noted that Jeremah was “a very nice, typy horse with an outstanding pedigree, which included Kars, the founding stallion of Crabbet Stud in England.” Jeremah’s sire, the influential breeding stallion *Hamrah, had been imported from Syria by political cartoonist Homer Davenport, and his dam, Nanshan, was a valuable daughter of *Nedjme, the first horse registered in the Arabian Horse Club of America’s studbook. About Jeremah, Mulder observed that this “very handsome horse is said by the 1927 studbook to have been marked with a blaze that covered his left nostril, left front fetlock, right front pastern, left hind stocking and right hind fetlock. As has often been mentioned in previous articles, *Hamrah 28’s habit at stud was often to sire animals that were quite beautiful, and better than he was himself. Jeremah was one of these.”

Jeremah and Carl Raswan

Jeremah was in a group of Arabians sold by Bradley in 1924 to Carl Schmidt (later known as Carl Raswan), who acted as the buyer’s agent for industrialist Chauncey D. Clarke, then living in California. Clarke had made a fortune from his family’s Illinois distillery business and from his mining interests in Arizona. Unfortunately, his health began to fail, and in March 1925 Clarke sold his horses to cereal magnate W. K. Kellogg, who was establishing his own ranch in Pomona, California. Clarke passed away the following year. (His widow, Marie Rankin Clarke, a philanthropist and a founder of the Hollywood Bowl, outlived him by more than two decades.)

Curiously, a short article in the August 29, 1927 issue of the Pomona Progress Bulletin noted that Kellogg was leasing Jeremah to Chester A. Wortley of Onyx, California, “for breeding purposes.” Presumably the lease agreement fell through, as Jeremah was in Arizona, leased to Joyce, by the time the breeding season would have begun in 1928. (Wortley, a cameraman and wilderness guide for film producer Jesse Lasky and author Zane Grey, died in March 1931.)

It is unclear what, or who, motivated Joyce to lease Jeremah. Presumably he heard about him, or Arabians in general, through Fishter, who owned two Arabians from the Kellogg Ranch, *Razam and Wardi. Homer Smith, a neighbor of Joyce’s in Cave Creek, wrote a colorful, not always accurate, memoir titled From Desert to Tundra that mentioned Joyce and Jeremah. Smith claimed that Kellogg had been a guest at the Spur Cross, that Joyce had borrowed money from Kellogg, and that Kellogg had “given” Jeremah to Joyce.  I have found no evidence for any of these assertions. If Kellogg had visited Spur Cross Ranch, his visit would most certainly have been covered by the Phoenix newspapers.

            Interestingly, the one time that Kellogg is known to have visited Arizona during this period was in November 1924, just weeks before Joyce was arrested for killing his employee. Kellogg stayed in Tucson’s Santa Rita Hotel, where Joyce’s friend Jacob Fishter would later take a job as a clerk. Kellogg was much impressed by the area’s abundant sunshine, telling a reporter, “I have just returned from a trip to Europe and prefer your climate to anything I found there.” (Arizona Daily Star, 11/18/1924) The Santa Rita Hotel, constructed in Mission Revival Style by well-known Southwest architect Henry Trost, was considered the finest hotel in southern Arizona. It was owned by a partnership whose members included former Tucson mayor Levi Manning—the first breeder of purebred registered Arabians in the state of Arizona—and businessman Federico Ronstadt, grandfather of singer Linda Ronstadt, who was herself an Arabian horse owner.

In early 1928, when interviewed about Jeremah, Fishter (or the interviewer) got some basic facts wrong. He claimed that Joyce owned (rather than leased) Jeremah and that “Kellogg paid $12,000 for the stallion, which he purchased from [Bradley’s] Hingham stock farm.” In truth, Kellogg paid Clarke, not Bradley, $18,000 for a package deal of 11 horses, one of which was Jeremah. 

Jeremah 144

Arabian horses were still extremely rare in Arizona in the 1920s; there were only about a dozen in the entire state, and most were in the Tucson area. In addition to Jeremah, these included five Arabians owned by the previously mentioned Levi Manning (El Jafil, Jarad, Kalub, Saraband, and Shiloh); Fishter’s colt and filly *Razam and Wardi; the colts Hasan  and Desert Song, owned by Pearl Gray Clyde of Phoenix;  Faris, a stallion belonging to the U.S. Remount Service, who stood at Arizona congressman Bert Colter’s ranch in Springerville in 1927, and then went to Lewis A. Bailey, at the Grand Canyon, from 1928 to 1931; and Barzin, also a Remount stallion, who stood at various locations throughout Arizona from 1929 to 1938.

Spur Cross Ranch

After their release from prison, in 1928 Joyce and his partners established the Spur Cross Ranch north of Phoenix, on the west side of Cave Creek near the defunct Phoenix Mine. They reportedly reused materials from the mine in the construction of the ranch and worked so quickly that the Spur Cross was able to welcome visitors by at least July 1928, as noted by a columnist for the  Arizona Republic, who wrote: “Mrs. Vernon Martin and her daughter Verna and Miss Ida Smith spent several days at the Spur Cross ranch last week.” These visitors would not have met Joyce, however, as he remained at the Florence prison until October of that year.

            A March 1929 promotional article by Philip W. Jones in Progressive Arizona and the Great Southwest noted, “One could seek all over the southwest without finding a more ideal location than that selected for the Spur Cross Ranch. A splendid highway leading out of Phoenix through fragrant orange groves and beautiful dwelling houses winds gently upward across a great stretch of desert to a mountain pass which is the gateway to the Cave Creek district.” Three horses were singled out: “The herd is headed by Jeremiah (sic), a purebred Arabian stallion sent to ‘Cap’ [Joyce] by W. H. (sic) Kellogg, the breakfast food manufacturer, from his Arabian horse ranch in California…‘Patches,’ probably the best educated horse in Arizona, is another member of the Spur Cross equine family and frequently entertains the guests with his numerous tricks, as does ‘Pancho,’ a beautiful black gelding, who delights in doing funny things for the amusement of his onlookers.”

The main source for information on Jeremah during his years at Spur Cross is the previously mentioned unreliable narrator Homer Smith, who first saw Jeremah in about 1930, when the stallion was 17: “Even at his advanced age he was a magnificent animal.” (Smith, p. 127.) He was much less impressed by Captain Joyce’s abilities as a stockman. Smith penned a harrowing story of several Spur Cross broodmares, either in foal to Jeremah or having just produced foals by him, who died of water founder thanks to gross mismanagement. As Smith trenchantly noted, “That ended the horse breeding ‘division’ of the Spur Cross spread.” (p. 134).

Snooper, a part-bred son of Jeremah

            Smith himself raised a part-bred colt by Jeremah, named Snooper, who was out of a mare called Nugget: “[Snooper] was a superb animal, inheriting the color and conformation of his dam, and the grace, style and endurance of his sire. He was the most tractable animal I ever saw, and imparted this characteristic to all his offspring: we never had to ‘break’ them, we just started riding and training them.” (p. 134).

Smith went on to note that “some months later, in fact it was the following spring [in 1932], that I was riding over on Cave Creek, and stopped in to pay a casual visit to the Spur Cross….It was apparent that things were not going too well. Jeremiah [sic] had died during the winter.” (p. 137.) Jeremah’s death—on December 2, 1931—is confirmed in the records of the W. K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Library.

            Unfortunately, the handsome, well-bred Jeremah sired only two purebred Arabians: a colt out of Killah that died soon after his birth in September 1925, and the 1927 grey filly Zoba, out of the excellent producer Hasiker. Zoba—who was sold to Oklahoma in 1929—was a half-sister to some other Arabians in Arizona, including Kalub (by Ziki), a stallion owned by Levi Manning, and Hasan (by Antez), owned by Pearl Gray Clyde. Amazingly, although Zoba produced only two foals (the fillies Daud and Feisal), she still has many well-known descendants. These include El Jahez WH, 2023 U.S. National Champion Senior Stallion and 2024 Scottsdale Senior Champion Stallion; Katalena Bey, dam of multiple National winners, including Alada Lena, a mare with more than 20 National titles in dressage and sport horse classes, and Royal Atheena, stakes winner and Darley Horse of the Year. As a matter of fact, when Royal Atheena came to Arizona in 2006 for her induction into the Racing Hall of Fame, she spent the night in Cave Creek, at Brusally Arabians—less than three miles from Spur Cross Ranch.

 

After Jeremah died, Joyce leased another stallion from Kellogg in 1932. This was Amar (*Nasik x *Rasima), a 1930 bay colt, bred by Kellogg, of all Crabbet bloodlines. He was also a half-brother to Jacob Fishter’s *Razam (by Hassam). Mulder described Amar as “beautifully marked with a strip and four three-quarter stockings.” As was the case with Jeremah, Amar sired no registered purebred get for Joyce.

In early 1930, Captain Joyce made the papers again—this time in Phoenix. He was arrested at the ranch and spent time in jail on a “statutory charge” involving the underage daughter of a local businessman. He also got crosswise with his business partner Phil Lewis, who foreclosed on him around 1932. Joyce gave up the dude-ranching business and by 1950 he was employed as a letter carrier, living in a New York tenement with his second wife, two children, and his mother-in-law. He died in 1956. The Spur Cross changed hands a few more times over the next several years, and it ceased to be used as a dude ranch in 1953.

1951 advertisement

At some point, perhaps around 1940, Amar came into the hands of Yvette Ward—wife of Charles Ward, the other convict in this saga. Amar’s story will be explored in Part Two.