Zack Horton, 43, male, left home in Ouachita County on the evening of January 25, 1927, as a deputy sheriff headed for a dangerous assignment on the outskirts of Camden. Prohibition had turned backwoods stills into flashpoints, and a tip sent the sheriff’s posse to the Miller’s Bluff area, where a moonshiner operated out of a rough tent encampment.
As the officers approached to raid the site, the night exploded—gunfire from a shotgun met the lawmen in the dark, and in the exchange Horton fell, mortally wounded, his end of watch recorded that same night.
Newspapers later described the scene as a pitched battle. The target of the raid was identified as Paul Stanley, the suspected bootlegger whose tent served as both home and still. By the time the smoke cleared, both Stanley and Deputy Horton were dead. Sheriff Arthur Ellis was hit, and two others—Jack Lewis, a man whose exact role in the party was uncertain, and F. D. Deering of nearby Louann—were wounded amid the chaos. The confrontation underscored how quickly a routine enforcement stop could become lethal in dry-country Arkansas, where liquor traffickers were heavily armed and ready to stand off the law.
Authorities did not announce arrests in the aftermath; the suspected moonshiner was killed at the scene, and accounts summarized the “suspect info” simply as “shot and killed.” Horton’s death was logged as gunfire, the weapon a shotgun, and his name joined the small roll of Ouachita County officers who never returned from duty. Over time, memorial listings would keep his date and place—January 25, 1927, Camden—fixed in the public record, a stark reminder of the violent edge of Prohibition-era law enforcement in rural Arkansas.
