Arizona Ranger’s Widow Is Last Link to Tradition

Rita Beaty still cries when she talks too long about her late husband, Clarence.

Her tears are tears of pride and love for a man who helped write one of the early chapters in Arizona history.

Clarence Beaty was one of only 107 men who served as Arizona Rangers, a group of rugged lawmen organized in 1901 to tame cattle rustlers, thieves, claim jumpers and murderers so the Arizona territory could become a state.

“My husband was true to me and I was true to him for 33 years,” Rita Beaty said in her yellow brick house in this U.S.-Mexico border town, 46 miles south of Tucson. “We used to talk all the time. He always used to say, ‘It was a hard life for me and you, but we made it through thick and thin.’ ”

Today, 87-year-old Rita Beaty is the state’s last direct link to the Arizona Rangers, who were disbanded in 1909. All the Rangers are dead. Rita is the last widow.

She still collects a $12,000-a-year pension for Clarence’s law enforcement work. State lawmakers write an individual line item for that stipend into the budget every two years, along with funding for schools, roads and social programs.

Rita Beaty met her future husband on the Fourth of July, 1931, at a party hosted by a family whose house she tended. Within a year, the couple eloped to the courthouse in Tombstone.

The groom was 58. The bride was three months shy of 19, but lied on the marriage license to appear older.

“I was lucky to get a hold of a man like him,” Rita Beaty said. “I thought the world of him.”

Just after their wedding, Clarence started working as a watchman at a Patagonia mine. Rita had no idea of her husband’s earlier life as a frontier lawman.

“He told me he was an Arizona Ranger. I didn’t know anything about that,” she said. “He told me a Ranger had to be a man.”

Clarence Beaty stood about 5 feet 4 inches tall, which led his friends to call him “Chapo”--”Shorty” in Spanish. Though small, he had a reputation as a brave and tough man who could ride a horse at a slow lope up to 40 miles in a single day.

The couple reared five children. Two sons, Marshall and Gilbert, survive along with a daughter, Margorie Haskill, from Clarence’s first marriage.

Growing up, Marshall Beaty loved to listen to his father’s stories of saloon shootouts, chasing smugglers and bringing in the bad guys. There were long days in the saddle, cold nights sleeping on the ground without any cover, and meals cooked over an open fire in a Dutch oven carried with the supplies on a mule.

Clarence Beaty joined the Rangers in 1902 when he was 27, earning $100 a month. He stayed with the group, which consisted of 14 to 26 Rangers for the entire territory, until its end seven years later, leaving as a first sergeant. In the southern Arizona district he patrolled, Chapo was often the only law available.

“Cowboys and outlaws are what it comes down to,” Marshall Beaty said.

One of Marshall Beaty’s favorite stories begins with his father on patrol near the border. Clarence Beaty and his partner discovered some smugglers who had come into Arizona from Mexico and started chasing them on horseback. The pursuit would last nearly two months, winding north through the White Mountains and into southern Utah before the Rangers captured the men near the Grand Canyon’s North Rim.

During another incident, Marshall Beaty recalls, his father was in Naco when he was called to break up a fight at the telegraph office. The telegraph operator was arguing with a tailor from the shop next door.

“They started shooting at each other,” Marshall Beaty said. “By the time they came riding up, one guy came staggering out shot full of holes. The last words he told my dad were, ‘Did I get him? Did I get him?’ My dad said, ‘Yeah, you did.’ He died right there in his arms. There was no value to it. It was over a suit of clothes.”

Clarence Beaty survived the dangers of wearing a badge, dying in 1964 at the age of 90.

Beaty and the other Rangers’ exploits carved a place in Arizona history for the organization, which made a comeback in 1957 as a volunteer group that continues to assist law enforcement and youth explorer programs throughout the state.

Clarence Beaty’s saddle and some of his papers are now part of the collection at the Hall of Fame Museum in the state Capitol. His shotgun and Colt .45 are in the care of the Arizona Historical Society Museum in Tucson.

Guns and Ammo magazine even published a feature story on the pistol, with its sawed-off barrel. Beaty cut the long gun down so he could get it out of his holster faster--a timesaver that could have meant the difference between making an arrest and going home in a wooden box.

Rita Beaty still gets questions about her husband from people who are fascinated with Arizona’s Wild West past and want to hear the stories.

“They were something,” she said. “They were muy hombres”--very macho.

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Arizona Rangers:

https://www.azrangers.org/index.html