Later Career and Death
The departure of Powers was just one step on the tenuous return of law and order in Santa Barbara and the surrounding region, which had been lawless since the takeover from Mexico. After leaving Santa Barbara, Powers went first to Los Angeles, where he became overlord of a gambling operation, but in 1858 his role in the activities of Pio Linares and his gang in San Luis Obispo County came to light. Finally there were enough warrants for his arrest that he left the country, going to Mexico.
Details of the last years of his life are sparse. He left Los Angeles in 1859, probably to escape a lynch mob, going to the Mexican state of Sonora where he ran a ranching operation in the mountains northeast of Hermosillo. In November 1860, he fought with one of his own men over a woman. She and her lover murdered him and hurled his body into a mesquite-fenced enclosure filled with starving hogs.
The uneaten portion of his corpse was buried in the Arizona Territory south of Tubac, near the town of Nogales, Sonora.
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