Real violence was usually due to disagreements over money or women. There wasn't a great deal of money in Graham County and even less in Klondyke than in Safford or Thatcher, but in his experience, the smaller the amount of money at stake, the greater chance of theft or brutality. And men always fought over women. It was in their makeup. All animals fought over prized females. Where the church held sway, that instinct was channeled into manners, piety, and love of family. Men tended to behave themselves, though boys fought over girls eternally until they were ready to accept the teachings of the Prophet.

And all men and women, Gentile and Mormon alike, were capable of missing the mark of good behavior and conduct. But while the church could lessen both the possibility and the extent of that, alcohol increased it. It fogged men's minds and made them forget what they knew and believed, and it led them to trouble. Alcohol was a solvent, and it was a powerful one, capable of dissolving the layers of civility and goodness that church and country coated its citizens in. That was the great danger. Instead of rising up through levels of holiness, the drunken fell down through levels of beastliness.

He, for one, wanted the prohibition of alcohol to be permanent in the county and state and, perhaps one day, in the nation. There were enough members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints who would speak with one voice and join with the other righteous that they should have been able to easily defeat any attempt to lift the ban on strong spirits. But there was another great source of unease among men to consider—money. Alcohol had been made more valuable by the desperation of the imbibers, and many of the very men charged with protecting the peace turned a blind eye to the trafficking of alcohol in the state and even in Graham County. How many of the county's and state's governments were involved in the trafficking of whiskey he couldn't say, but there were a lot.

And whether Sheriff Tom Alger was directly involved in the dirty business or not, he did little if anything to slow the whiskey traffic. McBride didn't know whether money came to Sheriff Alger every time he let a bootlegger go or whether it simply kept him employed. In either case, Sheriff Alger was part of the problem, and that was enough to convince Robert Frank McBride that Alger had to go and that McBride was the man to replace him.

In August 1916 McBride filed paper to run for the office of Graham County sheriff on the Democratic ticket. McBride cared little about party affiliation, but Alger was a Republican, so McBride would need to run as a Democrat. It was difficult to unseat an incumbent in a general election but even more difficult to unseat one in a primary.