A paper-mache severed head? Arizonans go to Mexico to celebrate Crabb Massacre
At the annual April 6 parade in Caborca, Mexico, a Prescott Sister Cities float features a paper-mache model of an American's severed head in a jar.
Will Fisher, president of the Prescott group, often rides in the float, tossing candy to children in the historic Mexican city that's about a two-hour drive southeast of Lukeville.
The American presence at the parade is a gesture "to show we don't have any hard feelings about what they did," Fisher said. "We get a lot of support. The people alongside the road are all cheering for us."
The annual festivities celebrate what Caborcans call the Heroic Deed: the 1857 defeat, surrender and execution of ex-California state Sen. Henry Crabb and about 100 American invaders who came to settle, by force if necessary, in the Mexican state of Sonora.
American newspapers of the time called it the Crabb Massacre. After the firing squad finished its work, victorious Mexican troops reportedly removed Crabb's head and shipped it to Mexico City in a jar of mescal.
'Freebooters' had Manifest Destiny mindset
The death toll in the "massacre" was higher than in many battles of the U.S.-Mexico War, which took place years earlier, from 1846 to 1848. It involved prominent men of their day, including one of Arizona's forefathers, Granville Oury. Yet the incident is mostly forgotten, except in Caborca.
The ill-fated expedition began after Crabb lost his bid in 1856 for U.S. senator in California as part of the Know Nothing Party, an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, pro-slavery movement. Married to Filomena Ainsa, who was from a wealthy Sonoran family, Crabbe traveled to Mexico frequently and likely met Ignacio Pesquiera, a Europe-educated rebel with ambitions to become Sonora's governor.
Political chaos in Mexico followed dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna's signing of the Gadsden Purchase, which created Arizona's current border with Mexico. Anger at Santa Anna boiled over into the Ayluta Revolution of the late 1850s and the Reform War, in which liberal-party members like Pesquiera rose to power. According to accounts of the massacre in newspaper archives, Pesquiera may have invited Crabb to bring a group of settlers to Sonora in exchange for helping him overthrow members of a faction that had seized control of the Mexican state's government.
Crabb was no stranger to the American settlement movement called freebooting or filibustering, in which amateur imperialists launched expeditions in Mexico and Central America in hopes of spreading their ideals of Christian civilization. They also wanted to continue the legal enslavement of Black people and expand the political power of Southern states in the pre-Civil War era. Crabb had already accompanied his friend William Walker on a fruitless trip in 1854 to appropriate Baja California. Walker would go on to rule as Nicaragua's president for a year but was ousted in 1857 and executed in Honduras.
Crabb set out the same year with a group of white men, including unsuccessful gold miners and several other former California lawmakers, loading up on weapons after arriving by boat in Los Angeles. They called themselves the Arizona Colonization Society and claimed they would soon be reinforced by another 900 followers. According to the 2004 book "Whitewashed Adobe" by William Deverell, the group chose to "march" to Arizona rather than ride horses to look more like a military unit.
Crabb also tried to sell the idea to Sonoran officials his group would help defend the Mexican state from raiding by Apaches, said Chris Bradley, an associate editor for the Arizona Historical Society who's working on his Ph.D. in history at Arizona State University, focusing on the state's borderlands.
"There's no evidence that Crabb had an agreement with Pesqueira, but he later acted as if he did," Bradley said.
As for Pesqueira, if he believed a deal existed at some point, he evidently changed his mind.
After crossing the border near what is now Lukeville, Bradley said, "Crabb got a pretty ferocious response from the Sonorans."
Surrendering troops shot
Before arriving in Caborca, Crabb wrote to a Mexican official that he knew forces were gathering to "exterminate" his band, but he was going anyway. Sources from the period reported him as overconfident in his team's ability to whip any Mexican fighting units, and had even left some of their weapons and ammunition behind in a wagon outside of town.
Hundreds of Mexican troops and Tohono O'odham fighters took up positions in and around the town's famous church, which was founded in the late 17th century by Father Eusebio Kino. For as many eight days, Crabb's group of about 80 fought from nearby buildings until they were starving and nearly out of ammunition.
"When Crabb surrendered, he and his followers were immediately tried and shot the next morning," Bradley said.
Mexican troops spared only a 16-year-old boy who was with Crabb's group. But from the beginning of the battle, incensed soldiers had fanned out across the land, looking for anyone who'd been working with Crabb.
No escape for some filibusters
On the way to Mexico, men from Crabb's party had gone to Tucson to recruit others for the settlement mission. The Arizona recruits were apparently told they each would get 160 acres of land in Sonora but that the deal was approved by Mexican officials and would involve no fighting. About 30 men from this Arizona contingent, plus other stragglers from Crabb's original party, left for Caborca a few days after Crabb.
While still about 15 miles from the fighting that by then was raging in the town, the self-described "Tucson Valley Company" found themselves surrounded by 200 Mexican troops in a dense patch of mesquite trees. Under Oury's leadership, the men rebuffed an offer to surrender and fought their way out of the trap after nightfall while under heavy fire, according to an article published soon after the incident by the San Diego Herald, as preserved on SanDiegoHistory.org. They were harassed for the next few days by Mexican cavalry as they ran north through the desert to safety, losing four of their group.
Oury would go on to become a representative for the Confederate Congress during the Civil War and an Arizona territorial lawmaker and congressman after the war.
Another group of 16 Crabb followers didn't fare as well. They were found by Mexican troops with a cache of ammunition and "executed" a few days after the Carborca battle, the San Diego Herald reported.
About a week later, roughly two dozen Mexican soldiers crossed into the United States and located four of Crabb's men staying at a ranch, possibly the historic Sopori Ranch in Amado. The Americans, who had come down with an illness preventing them from participating in the raid into Sonora, were taken outside and shot. A man identified as a brother of Crabb's wife was arrested and taken back to Mexico to stand trial.
Prescott group gears up for return to Caborca
Caborca began capitalizing on its history as a filibuster-busting town in 1948, when it changed its name to Heroica Caborca.
But the modern city, which has a population of about 90,000, has received negative media coverage in the past few years due to an ongoing territorial war by rival drug gangs.
Fisher and the Sister Cities group from Prescott decided not to travel to Carboca for the week-long festival this year because of an uptick in cartel violence in and around the city.
Last year's atrocities included the shooting death of American biologist Gabriel Trujillo, who was in Sonora conducting field research. In February of this year, 10 people in a truck transporting farm laborers were shot — four fatally — by cartel gunmen in what may have been a case of mistaken identity.
But Fisher said the Mexican government recently placed a military post with 200 soldiers just outside Caborca. It reminded him of how Father Kino's churches were often protected by nearby presidios, he said.
The group will be back to its sister city soon, possibly for Cinco de Mayo, Fisher said, adding that Caborca doesn't typically see many Arizona tourists and has remained an "authentic Mexican town."
"It's pretty impressive to go to the cathedral and see the gunshot holes in the walls," Fisher said. "It really brings the whole experience to life."
Reach the reporter at rstern@arizonarepublic.com or 480-276-3237. Follow him on X @raystern.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: A paper-mache severed head? Prescott group celebrates Crabb Massacre
