Wild Celebration of St. Johns Day

The San Juan Fiestas have been celebrated annually on or near June 24th since the earliest days of St. Johns. The following story was reported in "The Pioneer Press," a local newspaper.

Harris at age 17, one year after this incident

There was a wild time in St. Johns on the day of the Mexican population's patron saint, San Juan, June 24, 1882, when Nat Greer and a band of Texas cowboys entered the Mexican town. The Greers had been unpopular with the Mexicans since they had marked a Mexican with an ear underslope, as cattle are marked, this after a charge that their victim had been found in the act of stealing a Greer colt. The fight that followed the Greer entry had nothing at its initiation to do with the Mormon settlers. Assaulted by the Mexican police and populace, eight of the band rode away and four were penned into an uncompleted adobe house. Jim Vaughn [one of the Greer cowhands] was killed and Harris Greer was wounded.... It was declared that several thousand shots had been fired, but there was a lull, in which the part of the peacemaker was taken up by "Father" Nathan C. Tenney, a pioneer of Woodruff and father of Ammon Tenney. He walked to the house and induced the Greers to surrender. The Sheriff, E.S. Stover, was summoned and was in the act of taking the men to jail when a shot was fired from a loft of the Barth house, where a number of Mexicans had established themselves. The bullet, possibly intended for a Greer, passed through the patriarch's head and neck, killing him instantly. The Greers were threatened with lynching, but were saved by the sheriff's determination. Their case was taken to Prescott and they escaped with light punishment.

[You can read a more complete version of the story (from the Greer point of view) in Errol G. Brown's book The Greer Family and a Look Into the Past available online through the catalog at FamilySearch.org. This story starts on page 42.]

memorial honoring Nathan Tenney,
who gave his life trying to save the Greer boys