Irish History - Luke Monihon

Luke Monihon

1841-1879
A Rancher Murdered

Buried in City Loosley Cemetery, Block 2, Lot 6, north half

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

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Luke Monihon was born on November 15, 1841, in Waddington, St. Lawrence County, New York. He was the son of James Monaghan and Ann Martin, immigrants from Ireland who had arrived in the United States between 1833 and 1837. The Monaghans were farmers.
 
James Davidson Monihon, Luke’s older brother, caught ‘gold fever’ in 1854 and went off to California to become a placer miner.
 
In 1860, Luke was working as a hired hand for a Rutherford family, also in St. Lawrence County. No evidence has been found that Luke himself served during the Civil War, although his brother James enlisted in Company F, 1st California Infantry, which brought him to Arizona in 1863. Evidently James saw potential in the Salt River Valley and invited his brothers to join him.
 
Of Luke’s and James’s siblings, Joseph and Christopher also came to Arizona. While their kin back in New York continued to spell their surname as Monaghan, the brothers in Arizona were known as Monahans, Monahons and, finally--Monihons.
 
Luke Monihon was in Arizona by at least August 1875, when he filed on a homestead near his brother James’s, in the new Phoenix township. After “proving up," he received his homestead patent in May 1878.
 
He married Sarah Elizabeth Wilcoxen, daughter of his neighbor Andrew Jackson Willcoxen, although the marriage appears to have been of short duration and there were no children. Sarah had been married previously and had a son by her first husband.
 
On August 19, 1879, Monihon was driving home with a load of wood when he was shot in the back by an assailant who had been lying in wait along the road. The team of horses continued home where a ranch hand, seeing no driver, backtracked and found Monihon’s body.
 
The following morning, deputy sheriffs Blankenship and Garfias picked up the trail of a man on foot near the site of the murder. A Maricopa Indian tracker followed the trail to the ranch of Monihon’s father-in-law, A. J. Willcoxen. The boot track was found to match that of John Keller, one of Willcoxen’s ranch hands who had reportedly been infatuated with Luke’s wife Sarah. The deputies arrested Keller but he was lynched by an angry mob a few days later.
 
Monihon was originally buried in in the first Phoenix cemetery, but his grave was relocated to Loosley Cemetery after it opened in 1884.
 
Monihon’s widow Sarah sold his ranch shortly thereafter, and the entire Willcoxen family moved to Ventura, California, to escape local opprobrium.
 
© 2024 by Donna L. Carr. Last revised 27 February 2024.

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