Wayne Davis, 1877-1914
Rodeo Champion and Arizona Ranger

Buried in Masons Cemetery, Block 7, Lot 4, Grave 5

(Grave marker photo courtesy of the
​Pioneers’ Cemetery Association, Inc.)

​Wayne Davis was born May 1, 1877, in Arlington, Arizona. He was one of seven children born to James Davis and Harriet. The Davises were cattle ranchers, so Wayne and his brother Charles tended stock along the Agua Fria and New Rivers, becoming proficient at riding and roping. At age 17, Wayne won the world championship for steer roping in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He continued to enter roping contests at state fairs, gaining a reputation as an expert horseman.
 
In January 1900, Davis, his brother Charles, and several others, were out looking for a mine in the Four Peaks Mountains. While stopping to water their horses at a stream, they were ambushed by Indians. As shots were being fired at them, they mounted up and escaped unharmed. There was speculation that the ambush was the work of the Apache Kid, who had escaped from custody in 1889.
 
Wayne Davis was appointed deputy livestock inspector for Maricopa County in December 1900. This appointment led to him becoming a deputy sheriff with Maricopa County. He was tasked with tracking down wanted men or serving legal paperwork for the courts. However, he left the Sheriff’s office in 1906 to become an Arizona Ranger.  Assigned to a post near Roosevelt Lake, Arizona, he resigned within the year due to the desolation of the area. He returned to his old job at the sheriff’s office, where he served under Carl Hayden.
 
In May 1909, Davis took part in the capture of Henry Starr. Starr had been associated with the Dalton gang in the late 1880s and was considered a “skillful and dangerous desperado.”
 
Although Wayne Davis was respected as a rodeo cowboy and lawman, his reputation with women was questionable. He married Ella Gordon March 4, 1904, but she divorced him barely a year later. In 1909, he was accused of having an inappropriate relationship with Dorothy “Dolly” Haynes, who was not yet 17. To save the sheriff’s department the embarrassment of arresting him, Davis resigned his position as deputy on December 10, 1909, insisting that he had done no wrong. He did marry Dolly on March 7, 1910, but that marriage didn’t last, either. By 1913, Dolly was the wife of someone else. Davis went back to cattle ranching for a time before becoming a bartender at the Q T Saloon in Phoenix. 
 
While living at the Dorris Hotel in downtown Phoenix, Davis became infatuated with Alice Huntsman, a divorcee who also stayed there. She did not return his affections and expressed fear that he might hurt her. On April 6, 1914, Davis lurked outside the hotel, waiting for Alice. He shot her, then turned the gun on himself.
 
Wayne Davis was buried near his parents in Masons Cemetery. Alice died two weeks later and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery.
 
© 2021 by Patricia Gault. Last revised 23 February 2026.

​If you would like assistance researching our interred, you can find more information on our website. You can contact us at [email protected] at any time. Thank you for your interest to preserve the history of Arizona's pioneers!

Rose Gregory, circa 1852-1898
Benevolent "Madam"
 
Buried in Rosedale Cemetery, Space 99

(Grave marker photo courtesy of the
Pioneers’ Cemetery Association, Inc.)

Born in England, Rose Gregory and her extended family came to the United States in 1870 aboard the ship Manhattan as part of the Mormon migration to Utah. After the family settled in Salt Lake City, Rose bore a daughter around 1871. Three years later, Rose apparently asked her married sister Mary Ann in California to raise her.
 
Unmarried women had few options for earning a living in the Wild West. Rose chose to enter the "oldest profession" and began calling herself Minnie Powers, possibly to protect her families’ reputation. 
 
In May, 1879, Rose arrived by train to the often rowdy town of Tucson. Soon she was living with two other women who listed their occupation on the 1880 census as "courtesans." Such women typically catered to the desires of wealthier men.
 
Rose moved to Phoenix in 1886, whereupon she opened a "ladies’ boarding house" called The Powers on the southwest corner of Van Buren and Montezuma Streets (1st Street today). Contemporaries described Rose as a beautiful and kindhearted woman who occasionally grubstaked miners and cowboys who were down on their luck. Some of the women she took in undoubtedly plied their trade at her establishment. It soon became apparent that Rose was operating a brothel.
 
Her more respectable neighbors were not pleased. One of her creditors foreclosed on her original property, forcing Rose to move to a site on Adams Street, which she owned with some of her "girls." Now and then, their activities drew the attention of the police, as in 1893 when one of Rose’s girls, Letitia Rice (a.k.a. Tessie Murray), died of burns received when a kerosene lamp ignited her clothing.
 
By 1896, community pressure had forced Rose to move even further south to 720 Railroad Avenue (7th Street and Jackson), where she opened the Villa Road House Saloon. She was 42 by then, and much reduced in circumstances. 
 
Her fate was sealed when she began a relationship with her barkeep, William Belcher. Belcher was violently jealous of Rose’s men "friends" and given to drunken outbursts which sometimes landed him in jail. On the morning of September 17, 1898, Belcher obtained a .44-caliber pistol and went to the Villa Road House Saloon, where he found Rose in bed, asleep. He shot her twice, then turned the gun on himself, falling across Rose on the bed. Their bodies were discovered later that day.
 
Rose was buried in the southwest corner of Rosedale Cemetery in a casket lined with copper and adorned with silver plated handles and a plaque that read “At Rest." Though her grave went unmarked for many years, a wrought-iron cross now adorns it.
 
© 2017 by Patricia Gault. Last revised 1 March 2017.

​If you would like assistance researching our interred, you can find more information on our website. You can contact us at [email protected] at any time. Thank you for your interest to preserve the history of Arizona's pioneers!

Wong Fong, about 1891-1914
Barber
 
Buried in City/Loosley Cemetery, exact location unknown

(Photo of Cenotaph courtesy of Donna L. Carr)

Late on the night of February 12, 1914, a shadowy figure loitered behind the house at 220 East Madison in Phoenix’s Chinatown. While he waited for the people in the house to retire, he smoked a cigarette, emptied several spent cartridges from his revolver and reloaded.
 
Around midnight, he pried open the door to the screened porch and crept inside. A man was sleeping there, bedclothes drawn up to his chin against the nighttime chill. From only a few feet away, the gunman shot the unarmed man in the head, then fled into the darkness.
 
Awakened by the sound of the gunshot, neighbors summoned law officers. They identified the victim as Wong Fong, a 23-year-old barber. The house on Madison was the home of a prosperous Chinaman named Wong Fie, who may have been a relative of the deceased man. At the time of the murder, Wong Fie was not at home. The third occupant of the house was Wong Fie’s twenty-year-old wife, Quock Young. So who had killed Wong Fong, and why?
 
Born in China, Wong Fong had been in the United States for at least six years. While living in Globe, Arizona, he had converted to Christianity and had attended a Lutheran mission school there. His facility with both English and Cantonese was such that he had even been considered for a post at a Lutheran mission school in Shanghai. For the past eleven months, however, he had been living in Wong Fie’s household in Phoenix--long enough for him to have fallen in love with his kinsman’s much younger wife.
 
Presumably, Quock Young returned his affections, for she claimed that she had asked Wong Fie for a divorce. She recounted that Wong Fie, furious at his possible "loss of face," had withdrawn a large sum of cash from the bank and gone to Morenci, ostensibly to consult the marriage broker who had arranged his match with Quock Young. 
 
When the coroner’s jury was empaneled the next day, Reverend Frey, a local Lutheran minister, presented a letter which he said he had received from Wong Fong on the very day of his death. It read, “When I am killed, arrest Wong Fie.” But Wong Fie had an alibi; he was visiting a friend at the time that Wong Fong was murdered.
 
Evidence at the crime scene suggested that someone had lain in wait for Wong Fong for at least an hour. On the strength of his alibi, Wong Fie was released from custody. While the newspapers made much of the ill-fated romance, Coroner C. Johnstone had no choice but to rule that Wong Fong had met his death at the hands of an unknown assailant.   
 
On March 10th, Wong Fong was buried in the Chinese section of City/Loosley Cemetery. His murderer was never apprehended. Quock Young seems to have reconciled with her husband, for she was seen in Phoenix months later, wearing several gold rings and necklaces. Evidently Wong Fie still held her—and her silence?—in high esteem.
 
© 2017 by Donna Carr. Last revised 25 January 2017. Published on the 112th anniversary of Wong Fong's death.

​If you would like assistance researching our interred, you can find more information on our website. You can contact us at [email protected] at any time. Thank you for your interest to preserve the history of Arizona's pioneers!

Edward Ohmer Rouzer, 1879-1906
Mary E. Smith Rouzer, 1883-1906
Honeymoon Ends in Tragedy
 
Originally buried in Rosedale Cemetery;
moved to Greenwood 1914

 
(Grave marker photo courtesy of Donna L. Carr)

Edward Ohmer Rouzer was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1879. He was the son of Charles Conover Rouzer and Jennie Ellen Morton. Charles was in the hotel business and was for many years the manager of Indianapolis’s exclusive Columbia Club.
 
In 1901, the Rouzers moved to Bisbee, Arizona, where Charles became the manager of the Copper Queen Hotel. The 44-room hotel boasted Italianate architecture and opulent furnishings suitable for the mining magnates and businessmen that made up its clientele. As the front desk clerk, Rouzer’s son Edward earned an enviable reputation for amiability, courtesy and efficiency. By 1904, Charles Rouzer had returned to Indianapolis, leaving Edward in charge of the Copper Queen.
 
Edward probably met Mary Elizabeth Smith while she was visiting her married sister, Winifred Smith Buxton, in Bisbee. Mary had been born in Phoenix on July 9, 1883. She was the daughter of John Y.T. Smith and his wife Ellen “Nellie” Shaver. Smith owned a flour mill in Phoenix. Mary herself had graduated from Pomona College in California in 1905. The engagement of Mary Smith to Edward Rouzer was announced in January, 1906.
 
Friends and relatives traveled to Los Angeles to see the happy couple united in marriage by Rev. John Fry on April 11, 1906. The Rouzers planned to honeymoon in San Francisco before returning to Bisbee in May. They checked into an upstairs room with a view of the ocean at the Del Monte Hotel in Monterey, California, on April 17th.
 
In the predawn hours of April 18th, an earthquake of 7.9 magnitude struck the west coast of California. A chimney on the Del Monte Hotel toppled onto the room where the Rouzers were sleeping; they were crushed instantly under tons of bricks. No one else in the hotel was injured. 
 
Owing to the general confusion following the earthquake, it was a day or so before the Rouzers’ families were notified of their demise. The bodies were returned to Phoenix by train and held at the Easterling & Whitney funeral home until the Rouzers could arrive from Indianapolis and Mary’s mother and brother-in-law from Los Angeles, where they had gone to attend the wedding only a week earlier. Rev. John Fry, the same minister who had officiated at the nuptials, conducted the funeral service on April 25th, and Edward and Mary were buried together in Rosedale Cemetery. Friends of Edward Rouzer, who had pooled their funds to buy the Rouzers a wedding present, used the money for flowers instead.
 
In 1914, the Rouzers’ remains were moved to Greenwood, where Mary’s mother, Mrs. Nellie Smith, had purchased a family plot.
 
© 2026 by Donna L. Carr. Last revised 6 February 2026.

If you would like assistance researching our interred, you can find more information on our website. You can contact us at [email protected] at any time. Thank you for your interest to preserve the history of Arizona's pioneers!