
The Forgotten Gunfighters: The Pleasant Valley War
In the 1880s, a range war between the Tewksbury and Graham families tore through Arizona's Pleasant Valley, a conflict that killed more than fifty men and, by some counts, ran bloodier than the Hatfield-McCoy feud it gets compared to. This film traces that history through one of its final, most public acts: the shootout in Holbrook, Arizona, where lawman Commodore Perry Owens confronted the Blevins family and left several of them dead in a single burst of gunfire. Sheepmen against cattlemen, old grudges against new land claims, the film lays out how a local dispute escalated into years of ambushes and assassinations with almost no trials and few survivors left to explain what started it. Unlike the famous Kentucky-West Virginia feud, Pleasant Valley never got the songs or the folklore, and the film treats that erasure as part of the story: a war large enough to empty a valley of its men, remembered mostly by the people who study it.