Sam Steiger, 1929–2012

No one could say Arizona Rep. Sam Steiger wasn’t a hands-on politician. In 1975, when constituents complained about a rampaging herd of burros, he went to the town of Paulden to investigate. In what he claimed was an act of self-defense, he ended up shooting two of the animals, prompting a criminal investigation and picketing by outraged schoolchildren.

Steiger “lived during a time when being blunt and bristly could be cool,” particularly in Arizona, said the Phoenix Arizona Republic. Born in New York City, Steiger fell in love with the West when he went to a dude ranch as a teenager. After two years at Cornell University, he transferred to Colorado A&M University, earned a Purple Heart as an Army platoon leader in Korea, and then settled on a ranch near Prescott, Ariz. He soon established himself as “a brash, independent politician,” first in the state Senate and then, beginning in 1966, as a five-term U.S. congressman.

Steiger “relished being an outsider in clubby Washington,” said The Washington Post. His voting record was even more conservative than that of fellow Arizona Republican Barry Goldwater. Steiger particularly enjoyed needling environmentalists, informing them, for instance, that his preference for sharkskin cowboy boots stemmed from conviction: “I wear nothing but endangered species,” he said.

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Steiger left the House to run for the Senate in 1976; he lost to Democrat Dennis DeConcini. But though “his political career may have peaked, it was far from over,” said The New York Times. He ran unsuccessfully for governor twice, in 1982 as a libertarian favoring the legalization of marijuana and in 1990 as a Republican opposing it. In the meantime he was acquitted of criminal damage charges for commandeering a striping machine and painting a crosswalk in front of the county courthouse in Prescott. More seriously, he was found guilty of pressuring a state parole board member, a conviction overturned on appeal.

Steiger later became a radio and TV talk-show host and served one term as a surprisingly anti-development mayor of Prescott, but he never outlived his past. “I could find a cure for cancer,” he once said, “and they’d remember me as the guy who shot the burros.”