The Project Gutenberg EBook of Arizona's Yesterday, by
John H. Cady and Basil Dillon Woon
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Title: Arizona's Yesterday
Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer
Author: John H. Cady
Basil Dillon Woon
Release Date: May 3, 2009 [EBook #28670]
Language: English
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[Illustration: JOHN H. CADY, 68 YEARS, SOLDIER OF FORTUNE, ON THE
SONOITA, DECEMBER, 1914]
ARIZONA'S YESTERDAY
BEING
THE NARRATIVE OF
JOHN H. CADY
PIONEER
Rewritten and Revised by
BASIL DILLON WOON
1915
Copyright, 1916,
By John H. Cady.
TO
THE PIONEERS WHO ARE LIVING
AND TO
THE MEMORIES OF
THOSE WHO ARE DEAD
_this book_,
in affectionate tribute to the gallant courage,
rugged independence and wonderful endurance
of those adventurous souls who formed the
vanguard of civilization in the early history of
the Territory of Arizona and the remainder of
the Great West,
_is dedicated_.
JOHN H. CADY
BASIL D. WOON
Patagonia,
Arizona,
Nineteen-Fifteen.
PREFACE
When I first broached the matter of writing his autobiography to John H.
Cady, two things had struck me particularly. One was that of all the
literature about Arizona there was little that attempted to give a
straight, chronological and _intimate_ description of events that
occurred during the early life of the Territory, and, second, that of
all the men I knew, Cady was best fitted, by reason of his extraordinary
experiences, remarkable memory for names and dates, and seniority in
pioneership, to supply the work that I felt lacking.
Some years ago, when I first came West, I happened to be sitting on the
observation platform of a train bound for the orange groves of Southern
California. A lady with whom I had held some slight conversation on the
journey turned to me after we had left Tucson and had started on the
long and somewhat dreary journey across the desert that stretches from
the "Old Pueblo" to "San Berdoo," and said:
"Do you know, I actually used to believe all those stories about the
'wildness of the West.' I see how badly I was mistaken."
She had taken a half-hour stroll about Tucson while the train changed
crews and had been impressed by the--to the casual observer--sleepiness
of the ancient town. She told me that never again would she look on a
"wild West" moving picture without wanting to laugh. She would not
believe that there had ever been a "wild West"--at least, not in
Arizona. And yet it is history that the old Territory of Arizona in days
gone by was the "wildest and woolliest" of all the West, as any old
settler will testify.
There is no doubt that to the tourist the West is now a source of
constant disappointment. The "movies" and certain literature have
educated the Easterner to the belief that even now Indians go on the
war-path occasionally, that even now cowboys sometimes find an outlet
for their exuberant spirits in the hair-raising sport of "shooting up
the town," and that even now battles between the law-abiding cattlemen
and the "rustlers" are more or less frequent. When these people come
west in their comfortable Pullmans and discover nothing more interesting
in the shape of Indians than a few old squaws selling trinkets and
blankets on station platforms, as at Yuma; when they visit one of the
famous old towns where in days gone by white men were wont to sleep with
one eye and an ear open for marauding Indians, and find electric cars,
modern office buildings, paved streets crowded with luxurious motors,
and the inhabitants nonchalantly pursuing the even tenor of their ways
garbed in habiliments strongly suggestive of Forty-fourth street and
Broadway; when they come West and note these signs of an advancing and
all-conquering civilization, I say, they invariably are disappointed.
One lady I met even thought "how delightful" it would be "if the Apaches
would only hold up the train!" It failed altogether to occur to her
that, in the days when wagon-trains _were_ held up by Apaches, few of
those in them escaped to tell the gruesome tale. And yet this estimable
lady, fresh from the drawing-rooms of Upper-Radcliffe-on-the-Hudson and
the ballroom of Rector's, thought how "delightful" this would be! Ah,
fortunate indeed is it that the pluck and persistence of the pioneers
carved a way of peace for the pilgrims of today!
Considering the foregoing, such a book as this, presenting as it does in
readable form the Arizona West as it _really was_, is, in my opinion,
most opportune and fills a real need. The people have had fiction
stories from the capable pens of Stewart Edward White and his companions
in the realm of western literature, and have doubtless enjoyed their
refreshing atmosphere and daring originality, but, despite this, fiction
localized in the West and founded however-much on fact, does _not_
supply all the needs of the Eastern reader, who demands the truth about
those old days, presented in a compact and _intimate_ form. I cannot too
greatly emphasize that word "intimate," for it signifies to me the
quality that has been most lacking in authoritative works on the Western
country.
When I first met Captain Cady I found him the very personification of
what he ought not to have been, considering the fact that he is one of
the oldest pioneers in Arizona. Instead of peacefully awaiting the close
of a long and active career in some old soldiers' home, I found him
energetically superintending the hotel he owns at Patagonia, Santa Cruz
county--and with a badly burned hand, at that. There he was, with a
characteristic chef's top-dress on him (Cady is well known as a
first-class cook), standing behind the wood-fire range himself,
permitting no one else to do the cooking, allowing no one else to
shoulder the responsibilities that he, as a man decidedly in the autumn
of life, should by all the rules of the "game" have long since
relinquished.
Where this grizzled old Indian fighter, near his three-score-and-ten,
should have been white-haired, he was but gray; where he should have
been inflicted with the kindred illnesses of advancing old age he simply
owned up, and sheepishly at that, to a burned hand. Where he should have
been willing to lay down his share of civic responsibility and let the
"young fellows" have a go at the game, he was as ever on the
firing-line, his name in the local paper a half-dozen times each week.
Oh, no, it is wrong to say that John H. Cady _was_ a fighter--wrong in
the spirit of it, for, you see, he is very much of a fighter, now. He
has lost not one whit of that aggressiveness and sterling courage that
he always has owned, the only difference being that, instead of fighting
Indians and bad men, he is now fighting the forces of evil within his
own town and contesting, as well, the grim advances made by the
relentless Reaper.
In travels that have taken me over a good slice of Mother Earth, and
that have brought me into contact with all sorts and conditions of men,
I have never met one whose friendship I would rather have than that of
John H. Cady. If I were asked to sum him up I would say that he is a
_true_ man--a true father, a true and courageous fighter, and a true
American. He is a man anybody would far sooner have with him than
against him in a controversy. If so far as world-standards go he has not
achieved fame--I had rather call it "notoriety"--it is because of the
fact that the present-day standards do not fit the men whom they ignore.
With those other men who were the wet-nurses of the West in its
infantile civilization, this hardy pioneer should be honored by the
present generation and his name handed down to posterity as that of one
who fought the good fight of progress, and fought well, with weapons
which if perhaps crude and clumsy--as the age was crude and clumsy
judged by Twentieth Century standards--were at least most remarkably
effective.
The subject of this autobiography has traveled to many out of the way
places and accomplished many remarkable things, but the most astonishing
thing about him is the casual and unaffected way in which he, in
retrospect, views his extraordinarily active life. He talks to me as
unconcernedly of tramping hundreds of miles across a barren desert
peopled with hostile Indians as though it were merely a street-car trip
up the thoroughfares of one of Arizona's progressive cities. He talks of
desperate rides through a wild and dangerous country, of little scraps,
as he terms them, with bands of murderous Apaches, of meteoric rises
from hired hand to ranch foreman, of adventurous expeditions into the
realm of trade when everything was a risk in a land of uncertainty, of
journeys through a foreign and wild country "dead broke"--of these and
many similar things, as though they were commonplace incidents scarcely
worthy of mention.
Yet the story of Cady's life is, I venture to state, one of the most
gripping and interesting ever told, both from an historical and from a
human point of view. It illustrates vividly the varied fortunes
encountered by an adventurous pioneer of the old days in Arizona and
contains, besides, historical facts not before recorded that cannot help
making the work of unfailing interest to all who know, or wish to know,
the State.
For you, then, reader, who love or wish to know the State of Arizona,
with its painted deserts, its glorious skies, its wonderful mountains,
its magical horizons, its illimitable distances, its romantic past and
its magnificent possibilities, this little book has been written.
BASIL DILLON WOON.
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE BOY SOLDIER 13
FOLLOWING THE ARGONAUTS 17
ROUGH AND TUMBLE ON LAND AND SEA 37
THROUGH MEXICO AND BACK TO ARIZONA 50
STAGE DRIVER'S LUCK 61
A FRONTIER BUSINESS MAN 71
VENTURES AND ADVENTURES 80
INDIAN WARFARE 92
DEPUTY SHERIFF, CATTLEMAN AND FARMER 102
IN AGE THE CRICKET CHIRPS AND BRINGS-- 115
ILLUSTRATIONS
JOHN H. CADY Frontispiece
OLD BARRACKS IN TUCSON 20
RUINS OF FORT BUCHANAN 28
CADY'S HOUSE ON THE SONOITA 44
RUINS OF FORT CRITTENDEN 60
THE OLD WARD HOMESTEAD 76
SHEEP CAMP ON THE SONOITA 92
CADY AND HIS FAMILY 108
ARIZONA'S YESTERDAY
THE BOY SOLDIER
"_For the right that needs assistance,
For the wrong that needs resistance,
For the future in the distance,
And the good that they could do._"
Fourteen years before that broad, bloody line began to be drawn between
the North and the South of the "United States of America," before there
came the terrific clash of steel and muscle in front of which the entire
world retreated to a distance, horrified, amazed, fascinated and
confounded; before there came the dreadful day when families were
estranged and birthrights surrendered, loves sacrificed and the blight
of the bullet placed on hundreds of thousands of sturdy hearts--fourteen
years before this, on the banks of the mighty Ohio at Cincinnati, I was
born, on September 15, 1846. My parents were John N. Cady, of
Cincinnati, and Maria Clingman Cady, who was of German descent, and of
whom I remember little owing to the fact that she died when I reached my
third birthday.
Ah, Cincinnati! To me you shall always be my City of Destiny, for it was
within your boundaries that I, boy and man, met my several fates. One
sent me through the turmoil and suffering of the Civil War; another sent
me westward mounted on the wings of youthful hope and ambition. For that
alone I am ever in the debt of Ohio's fairest city, which I hope to see
again some day before there sounds for me the Taps.... But I do not
know. The tide of life is more than past its ebb for me and I should be
thinking more of a quiet rest on the hillside, my face turned to the
turquoise blue of Arizona's matchless infinity, than to the treading
again of noisy city streets in the country of my birth.
But this is to be a story of Arizona, and I must hasten through the
events that occurred prior to my leaving for the West. When I had
reached three years of age my father married again--a milliner--and
moved to Philadelphia. My grandmother, who had raised me practically
from birth, removed with me to Maysville in Kentucky, where I was sent
to school. Some of my pleasantest memories now are of that period in the
old-fashioned Kentucky river town.
Just after my ninth birthday my father came back to Maysville, claimed
me, took me to Philadelphia with him and afterwards turned me over to
one William Turner, his wife's brother, who was the owner of a farm on
the eastern shore of Maryland. I stayed at the Turner farm until the
outbreak of the Civil War in the fall of '61, when my father, who was
then working for Devlin & Son, clothiers, with headquarters at Broadway
and Warren streets, New York City, enlisted in Duryea's Zouaves as
orderly sergeant in Company K. The Zouaves wintered at Federal Hill,
Baltimore, and I joined my father and the regiment there. In the spring
we moved to Washington, joining there the great Army of the Potomac,
with which we stayed during that army's succession of magnificent
battles, until after the Fredericksburg fight in '63.
In Washington we were quartered at Arlington Heights and I remember that
I used to make pocket money by buying papers at the Washington railway
depot and selling them on the Heights. The papers were, of course, full
of nothing but war news, some of them owing their initial publication to
the war, so great was the public's natural desire for news of the
titanic struggle that was engulfing the continent. Then, as now, there
were many conflicting statements as to the movements of troops, and so
forth, but the war correspondents had full rein to write as they
pleased, and the efforts of some of them stand out in my memory today as
marvels of word-painting and penned rhetoric.
When Grant took command of the Army of the Potomac I left the army,
three or four days before reinforcements for General Sherman, who was
then making preparations for his famous "march to the sea," left for
Kentucky. At Aguire Creek, near Washington, I purchased a cargo of
apples for $900--my first of two exceedingly profitable ventures in the
apple-selling industry--and, after selling them at a handsome profit,
followed Sherman's reinforcements as far as Cincinnati. I did not at
this time stay long in the city of my birth, going in a few days to Camp
Nelson, Ky., where I obtained work driving artillery horses to Atlanta
and bringing back to Chattanooga condemned army stock. Even at that
time--1864--the proud old city of Atlanta felt the shadow of its
impending doom, but few believed Sherman would go to the lengths he did.
After the close of the war in 1865 I enlisted in Cincinnati, on October
12, in the California Rocky Mountain service. Before this, however, I
had shipped in the Ram Vindicator of the Mississippi Squadron and after
being transferred to the gunboat Syren had helped move the navy yard
from Mound City, Ill., to Jefferson Barracks, St. Louis, Mo., where it
still is.
I was drafted in the First United States Cavalry and sent to Carlisle
Barracks in Pennsylvania, from which place I traveled to New Orleans,
where I joined my regiment. I was allotted to Company C and remember my
officers to have been Captain Dean, First Lieutenant Vail and Second
Lieutenant Winters. Soon after my arrival in New Orleans we commenced
our journey to California, then the golden country of every man's dreams
and the Mecca of every man's ambition.
FOLLOWING THE ARGONAUTS
_So it's Westward Ho! for the land of worth,
Where the "is," not "was" is vital;
Where brawn for praise must win the earth,
Nor risk its new-born title.
Where to damn a man is to say he ran,
And heedless seeds are sown,
Where the thrill of strife is the spice of life,
And the creed is "GUARD YOUR OWN!"_
--WOON.
When the fast mail steamer which had carried us from the Isthmus of
Panama (we had journeyed to the Isthmus from New Orleans in the little
transport McClellan), steamed through the Golden Gate and anchored off
the Presidio I looked with great eagerness and curiosity on the
wonderful city known in those days as "the toughest hole on earth," of
which I had read and heard so much and which I had so longed to see. I
saw a city rising on terraces from the smooth waters of a glorious bay
whose wavelets were tempered by a sunshine that was as brilliant as it
was ineffective against the keen sea-breeze of winter. The fog that had
obscured our sight outside the Golden Gate was now gone--vanished like
the mist-wraiths of the long-ago philosophers, and the glorious city of
San Francisco was revealed to view.
I say "glorious," but the term must be understood to apply only to the
city's surroundings, which were in truth magnificent. She looked like
some imperial goddess, her forehead encircled by the faint band of mist
that still lingered caressingly to the mountain tops, her countenance
glistening with the dew on the green hill-slopes, her garments quaintly
fashioned for her by the civilization that had brought her into being,
her slippers the lustrous waters of the Bay itself. Later I came to know
that she, too, was a goddess of moods, and dangerous moods; a coquette
to some, a love to others, and to many a heartless vampire that sucked
from them their hard-wrung dust, scattered their gold to the four winds
of avarice that ever circled enticingly about the vortex of shallow joys
that the City harbored, and, after intoxicating them with her beauty and
her wine, flung them aside to make ready for the next comer. Too well
had San Francisco merited the title I give it in the opening lines of
this chapter. Some say that the earthquake and the fire came like
vitriol cast on the features of a beautiful woman for the prostitution
of her charms; but I, who lost little to her lures, am not one to judge.
My memories of San Francisco are at any rate a trifle hazy now, for it
is many, many years since I last saw the sun set over the Marin hills.
An era has passed since the glamour of the Coast of High Barbaree
claimed my youthful attention. But I remember a city as evil within as
it was lovely without, a city where were gathered the very dregs of
humanity from the four corners of the earth. What Port Said is now, San
Francisco was then, only worse. For every crime that is committed in the
dark alleys of the Suez port or the equally murky callejons of the
pestholes of Mexico, four were committed in the beautiful Californian
town when I first went there. Women as well as men carried "hardware"
strapped outside, and scarcely one who had not at some time found this
precaution useful. The city abounded with footpads and ruffians of every
nationality and description, whose prices for cutting a throat or
"rolling a stiff" depended on the cupidity of the moment or on the
quantity of liquor their capacious stomachs held. Scores of killings
occurred and excited little comment.
Thousands of men were daily passing in and out of the city, drawn by the
lure of the Sierra gold-fields; some of these came back with the joy of
dreams come true and full pokes hung around their necks, some came with
the misery of utter failure in their hearts, and some--alas, they were
many, returned not at all.
The Barbary Coast was fast gaining for itself an unenviable reputation
throughout the world. Every time one walked on Pacific street with any
money in pocket he took his life in his hand. _"Guard Your Own!"_
was the accepted creed of the time and woe to him who could not do so.
Gold was thrown about like water. The dancing girls made fabulous sums
as commissions on drinks their consorts could be persuaded to buy.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent nightly in the great temples
devoted to gambling, and there men risked on the luck of a moment or the
turn of a painted wheel fortunes wrung from the soil by months and
sometimes years of terrific work in the diggings. The most famous
gamblers of the West at that time made their headquarters in San
Francisco, and they came from all countries. England contributed not a
few of these gentlemen traders in the caprices of fortune, France her
quota, Germany very few and China many; but these last possessed the
dives, the lowest kind of gambling places, where men went only when they
were desperate and did not care.
We were not at this time, however, to be given an opportunity to see as
much of San Francisco as most of us would have liked. After a short stay
at the Presidio we were sent to Wilmington, then a small port in the
southern part of the State but now incorporated in the great city of Los
Angeles. Here we drew our horses for the long trek across the desert to
our future home in the Territory of Arizona. There was no railroad at
that time in California, the line not even having been surveyed as far
as San Jose, which was already a city but, instead of being, as now, the
market-place for a dozen fertile and beautiful valleys, she was then
merely an outfitting point for parties of travelers, prospectors,
cattlemen and the like, and was also a station and terminus for
various stage lines.
[Illustration: OLD BARRACKS (1912) ON NORTH SIDE OF ALAMEDA STREET, NEAR
MAIN, WHERE Co. C, 1st U. S. CAVALRY, CAMPED IN 1866 ON ITS ARRIVAL IN
TUCSON]
Through San Jose, too, came those of the gold-seekers, bound for the
high Sierras on the border of the desert, who had not taken the
Sacramento River route and had decided to brave instead the dangers of
the trail through the fertile San Joaquin, up to the Feather River and
thus into the diggings about Virginia City. Gold had been found by that
time in Nevada and hundreds of intrepid men were facing the awful Mojave
and Nevada deserts, blazing hot in day-time and icy cold at night, to
seek the new Eldorados. Since this is a book about pioneers, and since I
am one of them, it is fitting to stay awhile and consider what
civilization owes to these daring souls who formed the vanguard of her
army. Cecil Rhodes opened an Empire by mobilizing a black race; Jim Hill
opened another when he struck westward with steel rails. But the
pioneers of the early gold rushes created an empire of immense riches
with no other aid than their own gnarled hands and sturdy hearts. They
opened up a country as vast as it was rich, and wrested from the very
bosom of Mother Earth treasures that had been in her jealous keeping for
ages before the era of Man. They braved sudden death, death from thirst
and starvation, death from prowling savages, death from the wild
creatures,--all that the works of man might flourish where they had not
feared to tread. It is the irony of fate that these old pioneers, many
of whom hated civilization and were fleeing from her guiles, should have
been the advance-guard of the very Power they sought to avoid.
The vast empire of Western America is strewn with the bones of these
men. Some of them lie in kindly resting places, the grass over their
graves kept green by loving friends; some lie uncared for in potters'
fields or in the cemeteries of homes for the aged, and some--a vast
horde--still lie bleached and grim, the hot sand drifted over them by
the desert winds.
But, wherever they lie, all honor to the pioneer! There should be a day
set apart on which every American should revere the memory of those men
of long ago who hewed the way for the soft paths that fall to the
generation of today.
What San Bernardino is now to the west-bound traveler, Wilmington was
then--the end of the desert. From Wilmington eastward stretched one
tremendous ocean of sand, interspersed here and there by majestic
mountains in the fastnesses of which little fertile valleys with clear
mountain streams were to be discovered later by the pioneer
homesteaders. Where now are miles upon miles of yellow-fruited orange
and lemon groves, betraying the care and knowledge of a later generation
of scientific farmers, were then only dreary, barren wastes, with only
the mountains and clumps of sagebrush, soapweed, cacti, creosote bushes
and mesquite to break the everlasting monotony of the prospect.
Farming then, indeed, was almost as little thought of as irrigation, for
men's minds were fixed on the star of whitest brilliancy--_Gold_. Men
even made fortunes in the diggings and returned East and bought farms,
never realizing that what might be pushed above the soil of California
was destined to prove of far greater consequence than anything men would
ever find hidden beneath.
The march to Arizona was both difficult and dangerous, and was to be
attempted safely only by large parties. Water was scarce and wells few
and far between, and there were several stretches as, for instance, that
between what are now known as the Imperial Mountains and Yuma, of more
than sixty miles with no water at all. The well at Dos Palmas was not
dug until a later date. Across these stretches the traveler had to
depend on what water he could manage to pack in a canteen strung around
his waist or on his horse or mule. On the march were often to be seen,
as they are still, those wonderful desert mirages of which so much has
been written by explorers and scientists. Sometimes these took the form
of lakes, fringed with palms, which tantalized and ever kept mockingly
at a distance. Many the desert traveler who has been cruelly deceived by
these mirages!
Yuma, of which I have just spoken, is famed for many reasons. For one
thing, the story that United States army officers "raised the
temperature of the place thirty degrees" to be relieved from duty there,
has been laughed at wherever Americans have been wont to congregate. And
that old story told by Sherman, of the soldier who died at Yuma after
living a particularly vicious existence here below, and who soon
afterwards telegraphed from Hades for his blankets, has also done much
to heighten the reputation of the little city, which sometimes still has
applied to it the distinction of being the hottest place in the United
States. This, however, is scarcely correct, as many places in the
Southwest--Needles in California, and the Imperial Valley are
examples--have often demonstrated higher temperatures than have ever
been known at Yuma. A summer at the little Colorado River town is quite
hot enough, however, to please the most tropical savage. It may be
remarked here, in justice to the rest of the State, that the temperature
of Yuma is not typical of Arizona as a whole. In the region I now live
in--the Sonoita Valley in the southeastern part of the State, and in
portions around Prescott, the summer temperatures are markedly cool and
temperate.
Yuma, however, is not famed for its temperature alone; in fact, that
feature of its claim to notice is least to be considered. The real
noteworthy fact about Yuma from a historical point of view is that, as
Arizona City, it was one of the earliest-settled points in the Territory
and was at first easily the most important. The route of the major
portion of the Forty-Niners took them across the Colorado River where
Fort Yuma was situated on the California side; and the trend of
exploration, business and commerce a few years later flowed westward to
Yuma over the picturesque plains of the Gadsden Purchase. The famous
California Column ferried itself across the Colorado at Yuma, and later
on the Overland Mail came through the settlement. It is now a division
point on the Southern Pacific Railway, just across the line from
California, and has a population of three or four thousand.
At the time I first saw the place there was only Fort Yuma, on the
California side of the river, and a small settlement on the Arizona side
called Arizona City. It had formerly been called Colorado City, but the
name was changed when the town was permanently settled. There were two
ferries in operation at Yuma when our company arrived there, one of them
run by the peaceable Yuma Indians and the other by a company headed by
Don Diego Jaeger and Hartshorne. Fort Yuma had been established in 1851
by Major Heintzelman, U.S.A., but owing to scurvy (see De Long's history
of Arizona) and the great difficulty in getting supplies, the Colorado
River being then uncharted for traffic, it was abandoned and not
permanently re-established until a year later, when Major Heintzelman
returned from San Diego. The townsite of Colorado City was laid out in
1854, but floods wiped out the town with the result that a permanent
settlement, called Arizona City, was not established until about 1862,
four years before I reached there.
The first steamboat to reach Yuma with supplies was the Uncle Sam, which
arrived in 1852. Of all this I can tell, of course, only by hearsay, but
there is no doubt that the successful voyage of the Uncle Sam to Yuma
established the importance of that place and gave it pre-eminence over
any other shipping point into the territories for a long time.
Until the coming of the railroad, supplies for Arizona were shipped from
San Francisco to the mouth of the Colorado and ferried from there up the
river to Yuma, being there transferred to long wagon trains which
traveled across the plains to Tucson, which was then the distributing
point for the whole Territory.
Tucson was, of course, the chief city. I say "city" only in courtesy,
for it was such in importance only, its size being smaller than an
ordinary eastern village. Prescott, which was the first Territorial
Capital; Tubac, considered by many the oldest settled town in Arizona,
near which the famous mines worked by Sylvester Mowry were located;
Ehrenberg, an important stage point; Sacaton, in the Pima and Maricopa
Indian country, and other small settlements such as Apache Pass, which
was a fort, were already in existence. The Gadsden Purchase having been
of very recent date, most of the population was Indian, after which came
the Mexicans and Spaniards and then the Americans, who arrogantly
termed themselves the Whites, although the Spaniards possessed fully as
white a complexion as the average pioneer from the eastern states. Until
recently the Indian dominated the white man in Arizona in point of
numbers, but fortunately only one Indian race--the Apache--showed
unrelenting hostility to the white man and his works. Had all the
Arizona Indians been as hostile as were the Apaches, the probabilities
are that the settlement of Arizona by the whites would have been of far
more recent date, for in instance after instance the Americans in
Arizona were obliged to rely on the help of the peaceful Indians to
combat the rapacious Apaches.
Yuma is the place where the infamous "Doc" Glanton and his gang
operated. This was long before my time, and as the province of this book
is merely to tell the story of life in the Territory as I saw it, it has
no place within these pages. It may, however, be mentioned that Glanton
was the leader of a notorious gang of freebooters who established a
ferry across the Colorado at Yuma and used it as a hold-up scheme to
trap unwary emigrants. The Yuma Indians also operated a ferry, for which
they had hired as pilot a white man, whom some asserted to have been a
deserter from the United States army. One day Glanton and his gang,
angered at the successful rivalry of the Indians, fell on them and slew
the pilot. The Glanton gang was subsequently wiped out by the Indians in
retaliation.
When the Gila City gold rush set in Yuma was the point to which the
adventurers came to reach the new city. I have heard that as many as
three thousand gold seekers congregated at this find, but nothing is now
to be seen of the former town but a few old deserted shacks and some
Indian wickiups. Gold is still occasionally found in small quantities
along the Gila River near this point, but the immense placer deposits
have long since disappeared, although experts have been quoted as saying
that the company brave enough to explore the fastnesses of the mountains
back of the Gila at this point will probably be rewarded by finding rich
gold mines.
I will not dwell on the hardships of that desert march from Yuma to
Tucson, for which the rigors of the Civil War had fortunately prepared
most of us, further than to say that it was many long, weary days before
we finally came in sight of the "Old Pueblo." In Tucson I became, soon
after our arrival, twenty years old. I was a fairly hardy youngster,
too. We camped in Tucson on a piece of ground in the center of the town
and soon after our arrival were set to work making a clean, orderly
camp-park out of the wilderness of creosote bushes and mesquite. I
remember that for some offence against the powers of the day I was then
"serving time" for a short while and, among other things, I cut shrub on
the site of Tucson's Military Plaza, with an inelegant piece of iron
chain dangling uncomfortably from my left leg. Oh, I wasn't a saint
in those days any more than I am a particularly bright candidate for
wings and a harp now! I gave my superior officers fully as much trouble
as the rest of 'em!
[Illustration: RUINS OF OLD FORT BUCHANAN, DECEMBER 7, 1914]
Tucson's Military Plaza, it may be mentioned here, was, as stated,
cleared by Company C, First United States Cavalry, and that body of
troops was the only lot of soldiery that ever camped on that spot, which
is now historic. In after years it was known as Camp Lowell, and that
name is still applied to a fort some seven miles east of Tucson.
Captain Dean had not come with us to Arizona, having been taken ill in
California and invalided home. Lieutenant Vail, or, as he was entitled
to be called, Brevet-Major Vail, commanded Company C in his absence, and
he had under him as fearless a set of men as could have been found
anywhere in the country in those days. Vail himself was the highest type
of officer--stern and unbending where discipline was concerned, and
eminently courageous. Second Lieutenant Winters was a man of the same
stamp, and both men became well known in the Territory within a few
months after their arrival because of their numerous and successful
forays against marauding Indians. Vail is alive yet, or was a short time
ago.
After some weeks in Tucson, which was then a typical western town
peopled by miners, assayers, surveyors, tradespeople, a stray banker or
two and, last but not least by any means, gamblers, we were moved to
old Camp Grant, which was situated several hundred yards downstream from
the point where the Aravaipa Creek runs into the San Pedro.
Among others whom I remember as living in Tucson or near neighborhood in
1866 were:
Henry Glassman,
Tom Yerkes,
Lord & Williams,
Pete Kitchen,
---- Tongue,
The Kelsey boys,
Sandy McClatchy,
Green Rusk,
Frank Hodge,
Alex. Levin,
Bob Crandall,
---- Wheat,
Smith Turner,
"Old" Pike.
Glassman lived most of the time at Tubac. Yerkes owned the Settlers
Store in Tubac. Lord and Williams owned the chief store in Tucson and
were agents for the United States Mail. Pete Kitchen was at Potrero
Ranch; but Pete, who was more feared by the Indians than any white man
in the Territory, deserves a whole chapter to himself. Tongue was a
storekeeper. Green Rusk owned a popular dance house. Hodge and Levin had
a saloon. Wheat owned a saloon and afterwards a ranch near Florence. The
remainder were mostly gamblers, good fellows, every one of them. "Old
Pike" especially was a character whose memory is now fondly cherished by
every pioneer who knew him. He could win or lose with the same perpetual
joviality, but he generally won. The principal gambling game in those
days was Mexican monte, played with forty cards. Poker was also played a
great deal. Keno, faro and roulette were not introduced until later,
and the same may be said of pangingi, the Scandinavian game.
There were several tribes of Apaches wintering at Camp Grant the winter
we went there, if I remember correctly, among them being the Tontos and
Aravaipas. All of them, however, were under the authority of one
chief--Old Eskiminzin, one of the most blood-thirsty and vindictive of
all the old Apache leaders. The Government fed these Apaches well during
the winter in return for pledges they made to keep the peace. This was
due to the altruism of some mistaken gentlemen in the councils of
authority in the East, who knew nothing of conditions in the Territory
and who wrongly believed that the word of an Apache Indian would hold
good. We, who knew the Indian, understood differently, but we were
obliged to obey orders, even though these were responsible in part for
the many Indian tragedies that followed.
The Apache was a curious character. By nature a nomad, by temperament a
fighter, and from birth a hater of the white man, he saw nothing good in
the ways of civilization except that which fed him, and he took that
only as a means to an end. Often an Indian chief would solemnly swear to
keep the peace with his "white brethren" for a period of months, and the
next day go forth on a marauding expedition and kill as many of his
beloved "brethren" as he could lay his hands on. Every dead white man
was a feather in some Apache's headdress, for so they regarded it.
One day Chief Eskiminzin appeared with a protest from the tribes against
the quality of the rations they were receiving. It was early spring and
the protest, as we well knew, was merely his way of saying that the
Indians were no longer dependent on what the government offered but
could now hunt their own meat. Our commanding officer endeavored to
placate the old chief, who went back for a conference with his men. Then
he re-appeared, threw down his rations, the others doing the same, and
in a few minutes the entire encampment of Apaches was in the saddle.
Some little time after they had gone Lieutenant Vail, suspecting
trouble, sent a man down the trail to investigate. A few miles away was
a ranch owned by a man named Israels. The scout found the ranch
devastated, with Israels, his wife and family brutally slain and all the
stock driven off. He reported to Vail, who headed an expedition of
retaliation--the first I ever set forth on. We trailed the Indians
several days, finally coming up with them and in a pitched battle
killing many of them.
This was just a sample of the many similar incidents that occurred from
time to time throughout the Territory. Invariably the Military attempted
to find the raiders, and sometimes they were successful. But it seemed
impossible to teach the Apaches their lesson, and even now there are
sometimes simmerings of discontent among the surviving Apaches on their
reservation. They find it difficult to believe that their day and the
day of the remainder of the savage Indian race is gone forever.
It was during this stay at Fort Grant that Company C was ordered to
escort the first Southern Pacific survey from Apache Pass, which was a
government fort, to Sacaton, in the Pima Indian country. The route
abounded with hostile Apaches and was considered extremely dangerous. I
have mentioned this as the "first Southern Pacific survey," but this
does not mean that there were not before that other surveys of a similar
character, looking to the establishment of a transcontinental railroad
route through the Territory. As early as 1851 a survey was made across
Northern Arizona by Captain L. Sitgreaves, approximating nearly the
present route of the Santa Fe Railway. A year or two later Lieutenant A.
W. Whipple made a survey along the line of the 35th degree parallel.
Still later Lieutenant J. G. Parke surveyed a line nearly on that of the
Southern Pacific survey. At that time, just before the Gadsden treaty,
the territory surveyed was in the republic of Mexico. These surveys were
all made by order of the then Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, who
aroused a storm of protest in the East against his "misguided attention
to the desolate West." But few statesmen and fewer of the outside public
in that day possessed the prophetic vision to perceive the future
greatness of what were termed the "arid wastes" of Arizona and
California. This was shown by the perfect hail of protest that swept to
the White House when the terms of the Gadsden Treaty, drawn up by a man
who as minister to a great minor republic had had ample opportunities to
study at his leisure the nature of the country and the people with whom
he dealt, became known.
This Southern Pacific survey party was under the superintendence of
Chief Engineer Iego--I believe that is the way he spelled his name--who
was recognized as one of the foremost men in his line in the country.
The size of our party, which included thirty surveyors and surveyors'
helpers in addition to the soldier escort, served to deter the Indians,
and we had no trouble that I remember. It is perhaps worthy of note that
the railroad, as it was afterwards built--it reached Tucson in 1880--did
not exactly follow the line of this survey, not touching at Sacaton. It
passed a few miles south of that point, near the famous Casa Grande,
where now is a considerable town.
Railroad and all other surveying then was an exceedingly hazardous job,
especially in Arizona, where so many Indian massacres had already
occurred and were still to occur. In fact, any kind of a venture that
involved traveling, even for a short distance, whether it was a small
prospecting or emigrant's outfit or whether it was a long "train on
hoofs," laden with goods of the utmost value, had to be escorted by a
squad of soldiers, and often by an entire company. Even thus protected,
frequent and daring raids were made by the cruel and fearless savages,
whose only dread seemed to be starvation and the on-coming of the white
man, and who would go to any lengths to get food.
Looking back in the light of present day reasoning, I am bound to say
that it would be wrong to blame the Apaches for something their savage
and untutored natures could not help. Before the "paleface" came to the
Territory the Indian was lord of all he surveyed, from the peaks of the
mountains down to the distant line of the silvery horizon. He was
monarch of the desert and could roam over his demesne without
interference save from hostile tribes; and into his very being there was
born naturally a spirit of freedom which the white man with all his
weapons could never kill. He knew the best hunting grounds, he knew
where grew excellent fodder for his horses, he knew where water ran the
year around, and in the rainy season he knew where the waterholes were
to be found. In his wild life there was only the religion of living, and
the divinity of Freedom.
When the white man came he, too, found the fertile places, the running
water and the hunting grounds, and he confiscated them in the name of a
higher civilization of which the savage knew nothing and desired to know
less. Could the Indian then be blamed for his overwhelming hatred of the
white man? His was the inferior, the barbaric race, to be sure, but
could he be blamed for not believing so? His was a fight against
civilization, true, and it was a losing fight as all such are bound to
be, but the Indian did not know what civilization was except that it
meant that he was to be robbed of his hunting grounds and stripped of
his heritage of freedom. Therefore he fought tirelessly, savagely,
demoniacally, the inroads of the white man into his territory. All that
he knew, all that he wished to understand, was that he had been free and
happy before the white man had come with his thunder-weapons, his
fire-water and his mad, mad passion for yellow gold. The Indian could
not understand or admit that the White was the superior, all-conquering
race, and, not understanding, he became hostile and a battling demon.
So intense was the hatred of the white man among the Apaches
of the period of which I speak that it was their custom to
cut off the noses of any one of their women caught in illegal
intercourse with a white man. This done, she was driven from
her tribe, declared an outcast from her people, and
frequently starved to death. I can remember many instances of
this exact kind.
ROUGH AND TUMBLE ON LAND AND SEA
"_'Twas youth, my friend, and joyfulness besides,
That made me breast the treachery of Neptune's fickle tides._"
When Spring came around in the year 1867 we were moved to Tubac, where
we were joined by K Company of my regiment and C Company of the
Thirty-Second Infantry. Tubac, considered by some to be the oldest town
in Arizona, before the consummation of the Gadsden Treaty was a military
post at which the republic of Mexico regularly kept a small garrison. It
was situated on the Santa Cruz River, which at this point generally had
considerable water in it. This was probably the reason for the
establishment of the town, for water has always been the controlling
factor in a settlement's progress in Arizona. The river is dry at Tubac
now, however, except in unusually rainy seasons, irrigation and cattle
having robbed the stream of its former volume.
At the time we were quartered there Tubac was a place of no small
importance, and after Tucson and Prescott were discounted it was
probably the largest settlement in the Territory. Patagonia has now
taken the position formerly occupied by the old adobe town as center of
the rich mining zone of Southern Arizona, and the glories of Tubac (if
they can be given that name) are, like the glories of Tombstone, gone.
Unlike those of Tombstone, however, they are probably gone forever.
Tombstone may yet rise from the ashes of her splendid past to a future
as one of the important towns of the Southwest, if the stories of untold
riches near by her are to be believed.
A little to the east of Tubac and separating that town from Patagonia is
Mount Wrightson, one of the highest mountains in Arizona. Nicknamed "Old
Baldy" after its famous namesake in California, this mammoth pile of
rock and copper was in the old days a landmark for travelers, visible
sometimes for days ahead on the wagon trails. It presaged near arrival
in Tucson, for in a direct line Old Baldy is probably not further than
forty miles from the Old Pueblo.
We camped at Tubac during the summer and part of the winter of 1867 and
I remember that while we were there I cooked a reception banquet to
Colonel Richard C. McCormick, who was then and until 1869 Governor of
the Territory of Arizona. I forget his business in Tubac, but it was
either an electioneering trip or one of inspection after his appointment
to the office of Governor in 1866.
In the early part of 1868 we moved to Fort Buchanan, which before the
war had been a military post of considerable importance. It received its
name from the President before Lincoln and was garrisoned by
Confederates during the Civil War. We re-built the fort and re-named it
Fort Crittenden, in honor of General Thomas L. Crittenden, a son of the
Hon. John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, who was then in command of the
military district embracing that portion of the Territory south of the
Gila River. Crittenden was beautifully situated on the Sonoita, about
ten miles from where I now live and in the midst of some of the most
marvelously beautiful scenery to be found on the American continent.
Fort Crittenden is no longer occupied and has not been for some time;
but a short distance toward Benson is Fort Huachuaca, where at present a
garrison of the Ninth Cavalry is quartered.
During part of 1868 I carried mail from where Calabasas is now--it was
then Fort Mason--to Fort Crittenden, a proceeding emphatically not as
simple as it may sound. My way lay over a mountainous part of what is
now Santa Cruz county, a district which at that time, on account of the
excellent fodder and water, abounded with hostile Indians.
On one occasion that I well remember I had reached the waterhole over
which is now the first railroad bridge north of Patagonia, about a half
mile from the present town, and had stopped there to water my horse.
While the animal was drinking I struck a match to light my pipe--and
instantly I ducked. A bullet whistled over my head, near enough to give
me a strong premonition that a couple of inches closer would have meant
my end. I seized the bridle of my horse, leaped on his back, bent low
over the saddle and rode for it. I escaped, but it is positive in my
mind today that if those Apaches had been better accustomed to the use
of the white man's weapons I would not now be alive to tell the story.
I was a great gambler, even in those days. It was the fashion, then, to
gamble. Everybody except the priests and parsons gambled, and there was
a scarcity of priests and parsons in the sixties. Men would gamble their
dust, and when that was gone they would gamble their worldly
possessions, and when those had vanished they would gamble their
clothes, and if they lost their clothes there were instances where some
men even went so far as to gamble their wives! And every one of us, each
day, gambled his life, so you see the whole life in the Territory in the
early days was one continuous gamble. Nobody save gamblers came out
there, because nobody but gamblers would take the chance.
As I have stated, I followed the natural trend. I had a name, even in
those days, of being one of the most spirited gamblers in the regiment,
and that meant the countryside; and I confess it today without shame,
although it is some time now since I raised an ante. I remember one
occasion when my talents for games of chance turned out rather
peculiarly. We had gone to Calabasas to get a load of wheat from a store
owned by a man named Richardson, who had been a Colonel in the volunteer
service. Richardson had as manager of the store a fellow named Long,
who was well known for his passion for gambling. After we had given our
order we sought about for some diversion to make the time pass, and Long
caught sight of the goatskin chaperejos I was wearing. He stared at them
enviously for a minute and then proposed to buy them.
"They're not for sale," said I, "but if you like I'll play you for 'em."
"Done!" said Long, and put up sixteen dollars against the chaps.
Now, Long was a game sport, but that didn't make him lucky. I won his
sixteen dollars and then he bet me some whiskey against the lot, and
again I won. By the time I had beat him five or six times, had won a
good half of the store's contents, and was proposing to play him for his
share in the store itself, he cried quits. We loaded our plunder on the
wagon. Near Bloxton, or where Bloxton now is, four miles west of
Patagonia, we managed to upset the wagon, and half the whiskey and wheat
never was retrieved. We had the wherewithal to "fix things" with the
officers, however, and went unreproved, even making a tidy profit
selling what stuff we had left to the soldiers.
At that time the company maintained gardens on a part of what afterwards
was the Sanford Rancho, and at one time during 1868 I was gardening
there with three others. The gardens were on a ranch owned by William
Morgan, a discharged sergeant of our company. Morgan had one Mexican
working for him and there were four of us from the Fort stationed there
to cultivate the gardens and keep him company--more for the latter
reason than the first, I believe. We took turn and turn about of one
month at the Fort and one month at the gardens, which were about
fourteen miles from the Fort.
One of us was Private White, of Company K. He was a mighty fine young
fellow, and we all liked him. Early one morning the five of us were
eating breakfast in the cabin, an illustration of which is given, and
White went outside for something. Soon afterward we heard several
reports, but, figuring that White had shot at some animal or other, we
did not even get up from our meal. Finally came another shot, and then
another, and Morgan got up and peered from the door. He gave a cry.
"Apaches!" he shouted. "They're all around! Poor White----"
It was nip-and-tuck then. For hours we kept up a steady fire at the
Indians, who circled the house with blood-curdling whoops. We killed a
number of them before they finally took themselves off. Then we went
forth to look for White. We found our comrade lying on his back a short
distance away, his eyes staring unseeingly to the sky. He was dead. We
carried him to the house and discussed the situation.
"They'll come back," said Morgan, with conviction.
"Then it's up to one of us to ride to the Fort," I said.
But Morgan shook his head.
"There isn't a horse anywhere near," he said.
We had an old army mule working on the gardens and I bethought myself of
him.
"There's the mule," I suggested.
My companions were silent. That mule was the slowest creature in
Arizona, I firmly believed. It was as much as he could do to walk, let
alone gallop.
"Somebody's got to go, or we'll all be killed," I said. "Let's draw
lots."
They agreed and we found five straws, one of them shorter than the rest.
These we drew, and the short one fell to me.
I look back on that desperate ride now with feelings akin to horror.
Surrounded with murderous savages, with only a decrepit mule to ride and
fourteen miles to go, it seemed impossible that I could get through
safely. My companions said good-bye to me as though I were a scaffold
victim about to be executed. But get through I did--how I do not
know--and the chillingly weird war-calls of the Indians howling at me
from the hills as I rode return to my ears even now with extraordinary
vividness.
And, as Morgan had prophesied, the Apaches did "come back." It was a
month later, and I had been transferred back to the Fort, when a nephew
of Colonel Dunkelberger and William J. Osborn of Tucson were riding
near Morgan's ranch. Apaches ambushed them, slew the Colonel's nephew,
whose name has slipped my memory, and wounded Osborn. The latter, who
was a person of considerable importance in the Territory, escaped to
Morgan's ranch. An expedition of retaliation was immediately organized
at the Fort and the soldiers pursued the assassins into Mexico, finally
coming up with them and killing a number. I did not accompany the troops
on this occasion, having been detailed to the Santa Rita range to bring
in lumber to be used in building houses.
I returned from the Santa Ritas in July and found an order had been
received at the Fort from the War Department that all men whose times
had expired or were shortly to expire should be congregated in Tucson
and from there marched to California for their discharge. A few weeks
later I went to the Old Pueblo and, together with several hundred others
from all parts of the Territory, was mustered out and started on the
return march to Wilmington where we arrived about October 1. On the
twelfth of October I was discharged.
After working as cook for a short time for a company that was
constructing a railroad from Wilmington to Los Angeles, I moved to the
latter place and obtained employment in the Old Bella Union Hotel as
chef. John King was the proprietor of the Bella Union. Until Christmas
eve I stayed there, and then Sergeant John Curtis, of my company, who
had been working as a saddler for Banning, a capitalist in
Wilmington, came back to the kitchen and said:
[Illustration: CADY'S HOUSE ON THE SONOITA, NEAR BLOXTON, 1914. BUILT IN
1868]
"John, old sport, let's go to 'Frisco."
"I haven't," I told him, "enough change to set 'em up across the street,
let alone go to 'Frisco."
For answer Curtis pulled out a wallet, drew therefrom a roll of bills
that amounted to about $1,000, divided the pile into two halves, laid
them on the table and indicated them with his forefinger.
"John," he offered, "if you'll come with me you can put one of those
piles in your pocket. What do you say?"
Inasmuch as I had had previously little opportunity to really explore
San Francisco, the idea appealed to me and we shook hands on the
bargain. Christmas morning, fine, cloudless and warm, found us seated on
the San Jose stage. San Jose then was nearly as large a place as Tucson
is now--about twenty odd thousand, if I remember rightly. The stage
route carried us through the mission country now so widely exploited by
the railroads. Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo and Monterey were all
towns on the way, Monterey being probably the largest. The country was
very thinly occupied, chiefly by Spanish haciendas that had been in the
country long before gold was discovered. The few and powerful owners of
these estates controlled practically the entire beautiful State of
California prior to '49, and at the time I write of still retained a
goodly portion of it. They grew rich and powerful, for their lands were
either taken by right of conquest or by grants from the original Mexican
government, and they paid no wages to their peons. These Spaniards, with
the priests, however, are to be credited with whatever progress
civilization made in the early days of California. They built the first
passable roads, they completed rough surveys and they first discovered
the wonderful fertility of the California soils. The towns they built
were built solidly, with an eye to the future ravages of earthquakes and
of Time, which is something the modern builder often does not do. There
are in many of their pueblos old houses built by the Spaniards in the
middle part of the eighteenth century which are still used and occupied.
We arrived in San Francisco a few days after our departure from Los
Angeles, and before long the city had done to us what she still does to
so many--had broken us on her fickle wheel of fortune. It wasn't many
days before we found ourselves, our "good time" a thing of the past, "up
against it."
"John," said Curtis, finally, "we're broke. We can't get no work.
What'll we do?"
I thought a minute and then suggested the only alternative I could think
of. "Let's get a blanket," I offered.
"Getting a blanket" was the phrase commonly in use when men meant to say
that they intended to enlist. Curtis met the idea with instant approval,
if not with acclamation, and, suiting the action to the words, we
obtained a hack and drove to the Presidio, where we underwent the
examination for artillerymen. Curtis passed easily and was accepted, but
I, owing to a wound in my ankle received during the war, was refused.
Curtis obtained the customary three days' leave before joining his
company and for that brief space we roamed about the city, finishing our
"good time" with such money as Curtis had been able to raise by pawning
and selling his belongings. After the three days were over we parted,
Curtis to join his regiment; and since then I have neither seen nor
heard of him. If he still chances to be living, my best wishes go out to
him in his old age.
For some time I hung around San Francisco trying to obtain employment,
without any luck. I was not then as skillful a gambler as I became in
after years, and, in any case, I had no money with which to gamble. It
was, I found, one thing to sit down to a monte deck at a table
surrounded with people you knew, where your credit was good, and another
to stake your money on a painted wheel in a great hall where nobody
cared whether you won or lost.
Trying to make my little stake last as long as possible, I roomed in a
cheap hotel--the old What Cheer rooming house, and ate but one "two-bit"
meal a day. I was constantly on the lookout for work of some kind, but
had no luck until one day as I was passing up Kearney street I saw a
sign in one of the store windows calling for volunteers for the
Sloop-o'-War Jamestown. After reading the notice a couple of times I
decided to enlist, did so, was sent to Mare Island Navy Yard and from
there boarded the Jamestown.
It was on that vessel that I performed an action that I have not since
regretted, however reprehensible it may seem in the light of present-day
ethics. Smallpox broke out on board and I, fearful of contracting the
dread disease, planned to desert. This would probably not have been
possible today, when the quarantine regulations are so strict, but in
those days port authorities were seldom on the alert to prevent vessels
with diseases anchoring with other shipping, especially in Mexico, in
the waters of which country we were cruising.
When we reached Mazatlan I went ashore in the ordinary course of my
duties as ward-room steward to do some marketing and take the officers'
laundry to be washed. Instead of bringing the marketing back to the ship
I sent it, together with a note telling where the laundry would be
found, and saying good-bye forever to my shipmates. The note written and
dispatched, I quietly "vamoosed," or, as I believe it is popularly
termed in the navy now, I "went over the hill."
My primary excuse for this action was, of course, the outbreak of
smallpox, which at that time and in fact until very recently, was as
greatly dreaded as bubonic plague is now, and probably more.
Vaccination, whatever may be its value in the prevention of the
disease, had not been discovered in the sense that it is now understood
and was not known at all except in the centers of medical practice in
the East.
Smallpox then was a mysterious disease, and certainly a plague. Whole
populations had been wiped out by it, doctors had announced that there
was practically no cure for it and that its contraction meant almost
certain death, and I may thus be excused for my fear of the sickness. I
venture to state, moreover, that if all the men aboard the Jamestown had
had the same opportunity that I was given to desert, they would have
done so in a body.
My second excuse, reader, if one is necessary, is that in the days of
the Jamestown and her sister ships, navy life was very different from
the navy life of today, when I understand generous paymasters are even
giving the jackies ice-cream with their meals. You may be entirely sure
that we got nothing of the kind. Our food was bad, our quarters were
worse, and the discipline was unbearably severe.
THROUGH MEXICO AND BACK TO ARIZONA
"_Know thou the spell of the desert land,
Where Life and Love are free?
Know thou the lure the sky and sand
Hath for the man in me?_"
When I deserted from the sloop-o'-war Jamestown it was with the no
uncertain knowledge that it was distinctly to my best advantage to clear
out of the city of Mazatlan just as rapidly as I could, for the ships of
the free and (presumably) enlightened Republic had not yet swerved
altogether from the customs of the King's Navee, one of which said
customs was to hang deserters at the yard-arm. Sometimes they shot them,
but I do not remember that the gentlemen most concerned had any choice
in the matter. At any rate, I know that it was with a distinct feeling
of relief that I covered the last few yards that brought me out of the
city of Mazatlan and into the open country. In theory, of course, the
captain of the sloop-o'-war Jamestown could not have sent a squad of men
after me with instructions to bring me back off foreign soil dead or
alive, but in practice that is just what he would have done. Theory and
practice have a habit of differing, especially in the actions of an
irate skipper who sees one of his best ward-room stewards vanishing from
his jurisdiction.
Life now opened before me with such a vista of possibilities that I felt
my breath taken away. Here was I, a youth twenty-two years old, husky
and sound physically, free in a foreign country which I felt an instant
liking for, and no longer beholden to the Stars and Stripes for which I
was quite ready to fight but not to serve in durance vile on a
plague-ship. My spirit bounded at the thought of the liberty that was
mine, and I struck northward out of Mazatlan with a light step and a
lighter heart. At the edge of the city I paused awhile on a bluff to
gaze for the last time on the Bay, on the waters of which rode quietly
at anchor the vessel I had a few hours before quit so unceremoniously.
There was no regret in my heart as I stood there and looked. I had no
particular love for Mexico, but then I had no particular love for the
sea, either, and a good deal less for the ships that sailed the sea. So
I turned my back very definitely on that part of my life and set my face
toward the north, where, had I known it, I was to find my destiny
beneath the cloudless turquoise skies of Arizona.
When I left Mazatlan it was with the intention of walking as far as I
could before stopping, or until the weight of the small bundle
containing my worldly possessions tired my shoulders. But it was not to
be so. Only two miles out of the city I came upon a ranch owned by two
Americans, the sight of whom was very welcome to me just then. I had no
idea that I should find any American ranchers in the near neighborhood,
and considered myself in luck. I found that one of the American's names
was Colonel Elliot and I asked him for work. Elliot sized me up, invited
me in to rest up, and on talking with him I found him to be an
exceedingly congenial soul. He was an old Confederate colonel--was
Elliot, but although we had served on opposite sides of the sad war of a
few years back, the common bond of nationality that is always strongest
beyond the confines of one's own land prevented us from feeling any
aloofness toward each other on this account. To me Colonel Elliot was an
American, and a mighty decent specimen of an American at that--a friend
in need. And to Colonel Elliot also I was an American, and one needing
assistance. We seldom spoke of our political differences, partly because
our lives speedily became too full and intimate to admit of the petty
exchange of divergent views, and partly because I had been a boy during
the Civil War and my youthful brain had not been sufficiently mature to
assimilate the manifold prejudices, likes, dislikes and opposing
theories that were the heritage of nearly all those who lived during
that bloody four years' war.
I have said that Colonel Elliot was a friend in need. There is an apt
saying that a "friend in need is a friend indeed," and such was Colonel
Elliot as I soon found. For I had not been a week at the ranch when I
was struck down with smallpox, and throughout that dangerous sickness,
lasting several weeks, the old Colonel, careless of contagion, nursed
me like a woman, finally bringing me back to a point where I once again
had full possession of all my youthful health and vigor.
I do not just now recall the length of time I worked for Elliot and his
partner, but the stay, if not long, was most decidedly pleasant. I grew
to speak Spanish fluently, haunted the town of Mazatlan (from which the
Jamestown had long since departed), and made as good use generally of my
temporary employment as was possible. I tried hard to master the patois
of the peon as well as the flowery and eloquent language of the
aristocracy, for I knew well that should I at any time seek employment
as overseer at a rancho either in Mexico or Arizona, a knowledge of the
former would be indispensable, while a knowledge of the latter was at
all times useful in Mexico, especially in the cities, where the
possession of the cultured dialect marked one for special favors and
secured better attention at the stores.
The Mexicans I grew to understand and like more and more the longer I
knew them. I found the average Mexican gentleman a model of politeness,
a Beau Brummel in dress and an artist in the use of the flowery terms
with which his splendid language abounds. The peons also I came to know
and understand. I found them a simple-minded, uncomplaining class,
willingly accepting the burdens which were laid on them by their
masters, the rich landlords; and living, loving and playing very much as
children. They were good-hearted--these Mexicans, and hospitable to the
last degree. This, indeed, is a characteristic as truly of the Mexican
of today as of the period of which I speak. They would, if needs be,
share their last crust with you even if you were an utter stranger, and
many the time some lowly peon host of mine would insist on my occupying
his rude bed whilst he and his family slept on the roof! Such
warm-hearted simplicity is very agreeable, and it was a vast change from
the world of the Americans, especially of the West, where the watchword
was: "Every man for himsel', and the de'il tak' the hindmost." It may be
remarked here that the de'il often took the foremost, too!
When I left the hospitable shelter of Colonel Elliot's home I moved to
Rosario, Sinaloa, where was situated the famous Tajo mine which has made
the fortunes of the Bradbury family. It was owned then by Don Luis
Bradbury, senior, the same Bradbury whose son is now such a prominent
figure in the social and commercial life of San Francisco and Los
Angeles. I asked for work at the Bradbury mine, obtained it, and started
in shoveling refuse like any other common laborer at the munificent wage
of ten dollars per week, which was a little less than ten dollars more
than the Mexican peons laboring at the same work obtained. I had not
been working there long, however, when some suggestions I made to the
engineer obtained me recognition and promotion, and at the end of a
year, when I quit, I was earning $150 per month, or nearly four times
what my wage had been when I started.
And then--and then, I believe it was the spell of the Arizona plains
that gripped the strings of my soul again and caused them to play a
different tune.... Or was it the prospect of an exciting and more or
less lawless life on the frontier that beckoned with enticing lure? I do
not know. But I grew to think more and more of Arizona, the Territory in
which I had reached my majority and had found my manhood; and more and
more I discovered myself longing to be back shaking hands with my old
friends and companions, and shaking, too, dice with Life itself. So one
day saw me once more on my way to the wild and free Territory, although
this time my road did not lie wholly across a burning and uninhabited
desert.
It is a hard enough proposition now to get to the United States from
Mazatlan, or any other point in Mexico, when the Sud Pacifico and other
railroads are shattered in a dozen places and their schedules, those
that have them, are dependent on the magnanimity of the various tribes
of bandits that infest the routes; but at the time I write of it was
harder.
To strike north overland was possible, though not to be advised, for
brigands infested the cedar forests of Sinaloa and southern Sonora; and
savage Yaquis, quite as much to be feared as the Apaches of further
north, ravaged the desert and mountain country. I solved the difficulty
finally by going to Mazatlan and shipping from that port as a deck-hand
on a Dutch brigantine, which I remember because of its exceptionally
vile quarters and the particularly dirty weather we ran up against on
our passage up the Gulf. The Gulf of California, especially the mouth of
it, has always had an evil reputation among mariners, and with justness,
but I firmly believe the elements out-did themselves in ferocity on the
trip I refer to.
Guaymas reached, my troubles were not over, for there was still the long
Sonora desert to be crossed before the haven of Hermosillo could be
reached. At last I made arrangements with a freighting outfit and went
along with them. I had had a little money when I started, but both
Mazatlan and Guaymas happened to be chiefly filled with cantinas and
gambling-hells, and as I was not averse to frequenting either of these
places of first resort to the lonely wanderer, my money-bag was
considerably depleted when at last I arrived in the beautiful capital of
Sonora. I was, in fact, if a few odd dollars are excepted, broke, and
work was a prime necessity. Fortunately, jobs were at that time not very
hard to find.
There was at that time in Hermosillo a house named the Casa Marian Para,
kept by one who styled himself William Taft. The Casa Marian Para will
probably be remembered in Hermosillo by old-timers now--in fact, I have
my doubts that it is not still standing. It was the chief stopping-house
in Sonora at that time. I obtained employment from Taft as a cook, but
stayed with it only long enough to procure myself a "grub-stake," after
which I "hit the grit" for Tucson, crossing the border on the Nogales
trail a few days later. I arrived in Tucson in the latter part of the
year 1870, and obtained work cooking for Charlie Brown and his family.
It was while I was employed as chef in the Brown household that I
made--and lost, of course, a fortune. No, it wasn't a very big fortune,
but it was a fortune certainly very curiously and originally made. I
made it by selling ham sandwiches!
Charlie Brown owned a saloon not far from the Old Church Plaza. It was
called Congress Hall, had been completed in 1868 and was one of the most
popular places in town. Charlie was fast becoming a plutocrat. One night
in the saloon I happened to hear a man come in and complain because
there wasn't a restaurant in town that would serve him a light snack at
that time of night except at outrageous prices.
"That's right," said another man near me, "if somebody would only have
the sense to start a lunch-counter here the way they have them in the
East he'd make all kinds of money."
The words suggested a scheme to me. The next day I saw Brown and got his
permission to serve a light lunch of sandwiches and coffee in the saloon
after I had finished my work at the house. Just at that time there was a
big crowd in the town, the first cattle having arrived in charge of a
hungry lot of Texan cowpunchers, and everyone was making money. I set up
my little lunch counter, charged seventy-five cents, or "six-bits" in
the language of the West, for a lunch consisting of a cup of coffee and
a sandwich, and speedily had all the customers I could handle. For forty
consecutive nights I made a clear profit of over fifty dollars each
night. Those sandwiches were a mint. And they were worth what I charged
for them, too, for bacon, ham, coffee and the other things were 'way up,
the three mentioned being fifty or sixty cents a pound for a very
indifferent quality.
Sometimes I had a long line waiting to buy lunches, and all the time I
ran that lunch stand I never had one "kick" at the prices or the grub
offered. Those cowboys were well supplied with money, and they were more
than willing to spend it. Charlie Brown was making his fortune fast.
After I quit Brown's employ, John McGee--the same man who now is
secretary of the Arizona Pioneers' Historical Society and a well-known
resident of Tucson--hired myself and another man to do assessment work
on the old Salero mine, which had been operated before the war. Our
conveyance was an old ambulance owned by Lord & Williams, who, as I have
said, kept the only store and the post office in Tucson. The outfit was
driven by "Old Bill" Sniffen, who will doubtless be remembered by many
Arizona pioneers. We picked up on the way "Old Man" Benedict, another
familiar character, who kept the stage station and ranch at Sahuarita,
where the Twin Buttes Railroad now has a station and branch to some
mines, and where a smelter is located. We were paid ten dollars per day
for our work and returned safely to Tucson.
I spoke of Lord & Williams' store just now. When in the city of Tucson
recently I saw that Mr. Corbett has his tin shop where the old store and
post office was once. I recognized only two other buildings as having
existed in pioneer days, although there may be more. One was the old
church of San Augustine and the other was part of the Orndorff Hotel,
where Levin had his saloon. There were more saloons than anything else
in Tucson in the old days, and the pueblo richly earned its reputation,
spread broadcast all over the world, as being one of the "toughest"
places on the American frontier.
Tucson was on the boom just then. Besides the first shipment of cattle,
and the influx of cowboys from Texas previously mentioned, the
Territorial capital had just been moved to Tucson from Prescott. It was
afterwards moved back again to Prescott, and subsequently to the new
town of Phoenix; but more of that later.
After successfully concluding the assessment work and returning to
Tucson to be paid off by McGee I decided to move again, and this time
chose Wickenburg, a little place between Phoenix and Prescott, and one
of the pioneer towns of the Territory. West of Wickenburg on the
Colorado River was another settlement named Ehrenberg, after a man who
deserves a paragraph to himself.
Herman Ehrenberg was a civil engineer and scientist of exceptional
talents who engaged in mining in the early days of Arizona following the
occupation of the Territory by the Americans. He was of German birth
and, coming at an early age to the United States, made his way to New
Orleans, where he enlisted in the New Orleans Grays when war broke out
between Mexico and Texas. After serving in the battles of Goliad and
Fanning's Defeat he returned to Germany and wrote and lectured for some
time on Texas and its resources. Soon after the publication of his book
on Texas he returned to the United States and at St. Louis, in 1840, he
joined a party crossing to Oregon. From that Territory he went to the
Sandwich Islands and for some years wandered among the islands of the
Polynesian Archipelago, returning to California in time to join General
Fremont in the latter's attempt to free California from Mexican rule.
After the Gadsden Purchase he moved to Arizona, where, after years of
occupation in mining and other industries, he was killed by a Digger
Indian at Dos Palmas in Southern California. The town of Ehrenberg was
named after him.[1]
[Illustration: FORT CRITTENDEN RUINS, 1914. QUARTERS OF COS. K AND
C, 1ST U. S. CAVALRY IN 1868]
FOOTNOTE:
[Footnote 1: This information relative to Ehrenberg is taken largely
from The History of Arizona; De Long, 1905.]
STAGE DRIVER'S LUCK
_God, men call Destiny: Hear thee my prayer!
Grant that life's secret for e'er shall be kept.
Wiser than mine is thy will; I dare
Not dust where thy broom hath swept._
--WOON.
I have said that Wickenburg was a small place half-way between Phoenix
and Prescott, but that is not quite right. Wickenburg was situated
between Prescott and the valley of the Salt River, in the fertile midst
of which the foundation stones of the future capital of Arizona had yet
to be laid. To be sure, there were a few shacks on the site, and a few
ranchers in the valley, but the city of Phoenix had yet to blossom forth
from the wilderness. I shall find occasion later to speak of the birth
of Phoenix, however.
When I arrived in Wickenburg from Tucson--and the journey was no mean
affair, involving, as it did, a ride over desert and mountains, both of
which were crowded with hostile Apaches--I went to work as stage driver
for the company that operated stages out of Wickenburg to Ehrenberg,
Prescott and other places, including Florence which was just then
beginning to be a town.
Stage driving in Arizona in the pioneer days was a dangerous, difficult,
and consequently high-priced job. The Indians were responsible for this
in the main, although white highwaymen became somewhat numerous later
on. Sometimes there would be a raid, the driver would be killed, and the
stage would not depart again for some days, the company being unable to
find a man to take the reins. The stages were large and unwieldy, but
strongly built. They had to be big enough to hold off raiders should
they attack. Every stage usually carried, besides the driver, two
company men who went heavily armed and belted around with numerous
cartridges. One sat beside the driver on the box-seat. In the case of
the longer stage trips two or three men guarded the mail. Very few women
traveled in those days--in fact, there were not many white women in the
Territory and those who did travel usually carried some masculine
protector with them. A man had to be a good driver to drive a stage,
too, for the heavy brakes were not easily manipulated and there were
some very bad stretches of road.
Apropos of what I have just said about stage drivers being slain, and
the difficulty sometimes experienced in getting men to take their
places, I remember that on certain occasions I would take the place of
the mail driver from Tucson to Apache Pass, north of where Douglas now
is--the said mail driver having been killed--get fifty dollars for the
trip and blow it all in before I started for fear I might not otherwise
get a chance to spend it.
The stage I drove for this Wickenburg company was one that ran regular
trips out of Wickenburg. Several trips passed without much occurring
worthy of note; and then on one trip I fell off the box, injuring my
ankle. When I arrived back in Wickenburg I was told by Manager Pierson
of the company that I would be relieved from driving the stage because
my foot was not strong enough to work the heavy brakes, and would be
given instead the buckboard to drive to Florence and back on post-office
business.
The next trip the stage made out of Wickenburg, therefore, I remained
behind. A few miles from town the stage was held up by an overwhelming
force of Apaches, the driver and all save two of the passengers
massacred, and the contents looted. A woman named Moll Shepherd, going
back East with a large sum of money in her possession, and a man named
Kruger, escaped the Indians, hid in the hills and were the only two who
survived to tell the story of what has gone down into history as the
famous "Wickenburg Stage Massacre." I shudder now to think how nearly I
might have been on the box on that fatal trip.
I was not entirely to escape the Apaches, however. On the first return
trip from Florence to Wickenburg with the buckboard, while I was
congratulating myself and thanking my lucky stars for the accident to my
ankle, Apaches "jumped" the buckboard and gave me and my one passenger,
Charlie Block of Wickenburg, a severe tussle for it. We beat them off in
the end, owing to superior marksmanship, and arrived in Wickenburg
unhurt. Block was part owner of the Barnett and Block store in
Wickenburg and was a well-known man in that section.
After this incident I determined to quit driving stages and buckboards
and, casting about for some new line of endeavor, went for the first
time into the restaurant business for myself. The town needed an
establishment of the kind I put up, and as I had always been a good cook
I cleaned up handsomely, especially as it was while I was running the
restaurant that Miner started his notorious stampede, when thousands of
gold-mad men followed a will-o'-the-wisp trail to fabulously rich
diggings which turned out to be entirely mythical.
It was astonishing how little was required in those days to start a
stampede. A stranger might come in town with a "poke" of gold dust. He
would naturally be asked where he had made the strike. As a matter of
fact, he probably had washed a dozen different streams to get the
poke-full, but under the influence of liquor he might reply: "Oh, over
on the San Carlos," or the San Pedro, or some other stream. It did not
require that he should state how rich the streak was, or whether it had
panned out. All that was necessary to start a mad rush in the direction
he had designated was the sight of his gold and the magic word "streak."
Many were the trails that led to death or bitter disappointment, in
Arizona's early days.
Most of the old prospectors did not see the results of their own
"strikes" nor share in the profits from them after their first "poke"
had been obtained. There was old John Waring, for instance, who found
gold on a tributary of the Colorado and blew into Arizona City, got
drunk and told of his find:
"Gold--Gold.... Lots 'v it!" he informed them, drunkenly, incoherently,
and woke up the next morning to find that half the town had disappeared
in the direction of his claim. He rushed to the registry office to
register his claim, which he had foolishly forgotten to do the night
before. He found it already registered. Some unscrupulous rascal had
filched his secret, even to the exact location of his claim, from the
aged miner and had got ahead of him in registering it. No claim is
really legal until it is registered, although in the mining camps of the
old days it was a formality often dispensed with, since claim jumpers
met a prompt and drastic punishment.
In many other instances the big mining men gobbled up the smaller ones,
especially at a later period, when most of the big mines were grouped
under a few large managements, with consequent great advantage over
their smaller competitors.
Indeed, there is comparatively little incentive now for a prospector to
set out in Arizona, because if he chances to stumble on a really rich
prospect, and attempts to work it himself, he is likely to be so
browbeaten that he is finally forced to sell out to some large concern.
There are only a few smelters in or near the State and these are
controlled by large mining companies. Very well; we will suppose a
hypothetical case:
A, being a prospector, finds a copper mine. He says to himself: "Here's
a good property; it ought to make me rich. I won't sell it, I'll hold on
to it and work it myself."
So far, so good.
A starts in to work his mine. He digs therefrom considerable rich ore.
And now a problem presents itself.
He has no concentrator, no smelter of his own. He cannot afford to build
one; therefore it is perfectly obvious that he cannot crush his own ore.
He must, then, send it elsewhere to be smelted, and to do this must sell
his ore to the smelter.
In the meantime a certain big mining company has investigated A's find
and has seen that it is rich. The company desires the property, as it
desires all other rich properties. It offers to buy the mine for a sum
far below its actual value. Naturally, the finder refuses.
But he must smelt his ore. And to smelt it he finds he is compelled to
sell it to a smelter that is controlled by the mining company whose
offer he has refused. He sends his ore to the smelter. Back comes the
quotation for his product, at a price ridiculously low. "That's what
we'll give you," says the company, through its proxy the smelter, "take
it or leave it," or words to that effect.
Now, what can A do? Nothing at all. He must either sell his ore at an
actual loss or sell his mine to the company. Naturally, he does the
latter, and at a figure he finds considerably lower than the first
offer. The large concern has him where it wanted him and it snuffs out
his dreams of wealth and prosperity effectively.
These observations are disinterested. I have never, curiously enough,
heeded the insistent call of the diggings; I have never "washed a pan,"
and my name has never appeared on the share-list of a mine. And this,
too, has been in spite of the fact that often I have been directly in
the paths of the various excitements. I have been always wise enough to
see that the men who made rapid fortunes in gold were not the men who
stampeded head-over-heels to the diggings, but the men who stayed behind
and opened up some kind of business which the gold-seekers would
patronize. These were the reapers of the harvest, and there was little
risk in their game, although the stakes were high.
I have said that I never owned a mining share. Well, I never did; but
once I came close to owning a part share in what is now the richest
copper mine on earth--a mine that, with the Anaconda in Montana, almost
determines the price of raw copper. I will tell you the tale.
Along in the middle seventies--I think it was '74, I was partner with a
man named George Stevens at Eureka Springs, west of Fort Thomas in the
Apache country, a trading station for freighters. We were owners of the
trading station, which was some distance south of where the copper
cities of Globe and Miami are now situated. We made very good money at
the station and Stevens and I decided to have some repairs and additions
built to the store. We looked around for a mason and finally hired one
named George Warren, a competent man whose only fault was a fondness for
the cup that cheers.
Warren was also a prospector of some note and had made several rich
strikes. It was known that, while he had never found a bonanza, wherever
he announced "pay dirt" there "pay dirt" invariably was to be found. In
other words, he had a reputation for reliability that was valuable to
him and of which he was intensely vain. He was a man with "hunches," and
hunches curiously enough, that almost always made good.
These hunches were more or less frequent with Warren. They usually came
when he was broke for, like all prospectors, Warren found it highly
inconvenient ever to be the possessor of a large sum of money for any
length of time. He had been known to say to a friend: "I've got a
hunch!" disappear, and in a week or two, return with a liberal amount of
dust. Between hunches he worked at his trade.
When he had completed his work on the store at Eureka Springs for myself
and Stevens, Warren drew me aside one night and, very confidentially,
informed me that he had a hunch. "You're welcome to it, George," I
said, and, something calling me away at that moment, I did not hear of
him again until I returned from New Fort Grant, whither I had gone with
a load of hay for which we had a valuable contract with the government.
Then Stevens informed me that Warren had told him of his hunch, had
asked for a grub-stake, and, on being given one, had departed in a
southerly direction with the information that he expected to make a find
over in the Dos Cabezas direction.
He was gone several weeks, and then one day Stevens said to me, quietly:
"John, Warren's back."
"Yes?" I answered. "Did he make a strike?"
"He found a copper mine," said Stevens.
"Oh, only copper!" I laughed. "That hunch system of his must have got
tarnished by this time, then!"
You see, copper at that time was worth next to nothing. There was no big
smelter in the Territory and it was almost impossible to sell the ore.
So it was natural enough that neither myself nor Stevens should feel
particularly jubilant over Warren's strike. One day I thought to ask
Warren whether he had christened his mine yet, as was the custom.
"I'm going to call it the 'Copper Queen,'" he said.
I laughed at him for the name, but admitted it a good one. That mine
today, reader, is one of the greatest copper properties in the world. It
is worth about a billion dollars. The syndicate that owns it owns as
well a good slice of Arizona.
"Syndicate?" I hear you ask. "Why, what about Warren, the man who found
the mine, and Stevens, the man who grub-staked him?"
Ah! What about them! George Stevens bet his share of the mine against
$75 at a horse race one day, and lost; and George Warren, the man with
the infallible hunch, died years back in squalid misery, driven there by
drink and the memory of many empty discoveries. The syndicate that
obtained the mine from Warren gave him a pension amply sufficient for
his needs, I believe. It is but fair to state that had the mine been
retained by Warren the probabilities are it would never have been
developed, for Warren, like other old prospectors, was a genius at
finding pay-streaks, but a failure when it came to exploiting them.
That, reader, is the true story of the discovery of the Copper Queen,
the mine that has made a dozen fortunes and two cities--Bisbee and
Douglas. If I had gone in with Stevens in grub-staking poor Warren would
I, too, I wonder, have sold my share for some foolish trifle or
recklessly gambled it away? I wonder!... Probably, I should.
A FRONTIER BUSINESS MAN
"_The chip of chisel, hum of saw,
The stones of progress laid;
The city grew, and, helped by its law,
Men many fortunes made._"
--Song of the City, by T. BURGESS.
A Phoenix man was in Patagonia recently and--I don't say he was a
typical Phoenix man--commented in a superior tone on the size of the
town.
"Why," he said, as if it clinched the argument, "Phoenix would make ten
Patagonias."
"And then some," I assented, "but, sonny, I built the third house in
Phoenix. Did you know that? And I burnt Indian grain fields in the Salt
River Valley long before anyone ever thought of building a city there.
Even a big city has had some time to be a small one."
That settled it; the Phoenix gentleman said no more.
I told him only the exact truth when I said that I built the third house
in Phoenix.
After I had started the Wickenburg restaurant came rumors that a new
city was to be started in the fertile Salt River Valley, between Sacaton
and Prescott, some forty or fifty miles north of the former place.
Stories came that men had tilled the land of the valley and had found
that it would grow almost anything, as, indeed, it has since been found
that any land in Arizona will do, providing the water is obtained to
irrigate it. One of Arizona's most wonderful phenomena is the sudden
greening of the sandy stretches after a heavy rain. One day everything
is a sun-dried brown, as far as the eye can see. Every arroyo is dry,
the very cactus seems shriveled and the deep blue of the sky gives no
promise of any relief. Then, in the night, thunder-clouds roll up from
the painted hills, a tropical deluge resembling a cloud-burst falls, and
in the morning--lo! where was yellow sand parched from months of
drought, is now sprouting green grass! It is a marvelous
transformation--a miracle never to be forgotten by one who has seen it.
However, irrigation is absolutely necessary to till the soil in most
districts of Arizona, though in some sections of the State dry farming
has been successfully resorted to. It has been said that Arizona has
more rivers and less water than any state in the Union, and this is
true. Many of these are rivers only in the rainy season, which in the
desert generally comes about the middle of July and lasts until early
fall. Others are what is known as "sinking rivers," flowing above ground
for parts of their courses, and as frequently sinking below the sand, to
reappear further along. The Sonoita, upon which Patagonia is situated,
is one of these "disappearing rivers," the water coming up out of the
sand about half a mile from the main street. The big rivers, the
Colorado, the Salt, the upper Gila and the San Pedro, run the year
around, and there are several smaller streams in the more fertile
districts that do the same thing.
The larger part of the Arizona "desert" is not barren sand, but fertile
silt and adobe, needing only water to make of it the best possible soil
for farming purposes. Favored by a mild winter climate the Salt River
Valley can be made to produce crops of some kind each month in the
year--fruits in the fall, vegetables in the winter season, grains in
spring and alfalfa, the principal crop, throughout the summer. A
succession of crops may oftentimes be grown during the year on one farm,
so that irrigated lands in Arizona yield several times the produce
obtainable in the Eastern states. Alfalfa may be cut six or seven times
a year with a yield of as much as ten tons to the acre. The finest
Egyptian cotton, free from the boll weevil scourge, may also be grown
successfully and is fast becoming one of the staple products of the
State. Potatoes, strawberries, pears, peaches and melons, from temperate
climates; and citrus fruits, sorghum grains and date palms from
subtropical regions, give some idea of the range of crops possible here.
Many farmers from the Eastern and Southern states and from California,
finding this out, began to take up land, dig irrigating ditches and make
homes in Arizona.
Fifteen or twenty pioneers had gone to the Salt River Valley while I
was at Wickenburg and there had taken up quarter sections on which they
raised, chiefly, barley, wheat, corn and hay. A little fruit was also
experimented in. Some of the men who were on the ground at the beginning
I remember to have been Dennis and Murphy, Tom Gray, Jack Walters,
Johnny George, George Monroe, Joe Fugit, Jack Swilling, Patterson, the
Parkers, the Sorrels, the Fenters and a few others whose names I do not
recall. A townsite had been laid out, streets surveyed, and before long
it became known that the Territory had a new city, the name of which was
Phoenix.
The story of the way in which the name "Phoenix" was given to the city
that in future days was to become the metropolis of the State, is
interesting. When the Miner excitement was over I decided to move to the
new Salt River townsite, and soon after my arrival there attended a
meeting of citizens gathered together to name the new city. Practically
every settler in the Valley was at this meeting, which was destined to
become historic.
Among those present was a Frenchman named Darrel Dupper, or Du Perre, as
his name has sometimes been written, who was a highly educated man and
had lived in Arizona for a number of years. When the question of naming
the townsite came up several suggestions were offered, among them being
"Salt City," "Aricropolis," and others. Dupper rose to his feet and
suggested that the city be called Phoenix, because, he explained, the
Phoenix was a bird of beautiful plumage and exceptional voice, which
lived for five hundred years and then, after chanting its death-song,
prepared a charnel-house for itself and was cremated, after which a new
and glorified bird arose from the ashes to live a magnificent existence
forever. When Dupper finished his suggestion and explanation the meeting
voted on the names and the Frenchman's choice was decided upon.
"Phoenix" it has been ever since.
Before I had been in Phoenix many days I commenced the building of a
restaurant, which I named the Capital Restaurant. The capital was then
at Prescott, having been moved from Tucson, but my name evidently must
have been prophetic, for the capital city of Arizona is now none other
than Phoenix, which at the present day probably has the largest
population in the State--over twenty thousand.
Soon I gained other interests in Phoenix besides the restaurant. The
Capital made me much money, and I invested what I did not spend in
"having a good time," in various other enterprises. I went into the
butcher business with Steel & Coplin. I built the first bakery in
Phoenix. I staked two men to a ranch north of the city, from which I
later on proceeded to flood the Territory with sweet potatoes. I was the
first man, by the way, to grow sweet potatoes in Arizona. I built a
saloon and dance hall, and in this, naturally, was my quickest turnover.
I am not an apologist, least of all for myself, and as this is the true
story of a life I believe to have been exceptionally varied I think that
in it should be related the things I did which might be considered "bad"
nowadays, as well as the things I did which, by the same token,
present-day civilization may consider "good."
I may relate, therefore, that for some years I was known as the largest
liquor dealer in the Territory, as well as one of the shrewdest hands at
cards. Although I employed men to do the work, often players would
insist on my dealing the monte deck or laying down the faro lay-out for
them. I played for big stakes, too--bigger stakes than people play for
nowadays in the West. Many times I have sat down with the equivalent of
thousands of dollars in chips and played them all away, only to regain
them again without thinking it anything particularly unusual. As games
go, I was considered "lucky" for a gambler. Though not superstitious, I
believed in this luck of mine, and this is probably the reason that it
held good for so long. If of late various things, chiefly the mining
depression, have made my fortunes all to the bad, I am no man to whine
at the inevitable. I can take my ipecac along with the next man!
There were few men in the old days in Phoenix, or, indeed, the entire
Territory, who did not drink liquor, and lots of it. In fact, it may be
said that the entire fabric of the Territory was constructed on liquor.
The pioneers were most of them whiskey fiends, as were the gamblers.
By this I am not defending the liquor traffic. I have sold more liquor
than any man in Arizona over the bar in my life-time, but I voted dry at
the last election and I adhere to the belief that a whiskey-less Arizona
will be the best for our children and our children's children.
[Illustration: THE OLD WARD HOMESTEAD, WHERE CADY KEPT STORE DURING THE
BUILDING OF THE SANTA FE RAILROAD]
During my residence in Phoenix Darrel Dupper, the man who had christened
the town, became one of my best friends. He kept the post and trading
store at Desert Station, at which place was the only water to be found
between Phoenix and Wickenburg, if I remember correctly. The station
made him wealthy. Dupper was originally Count Du Perre, and came of a
noted aristocratic French family. His forefathers were, I believe,
prominent in the court of Louis XIV. When a young man he committed some
foolhardy act in France and was banished by his people, who sent him a
monthly remittance on condition that he get as far away from his home as
he could, and stay there. To fulfill the terms of this agreement Du
Perre came to Arizona among the early pioneers and soon proved that he
had the stuff of a real man in him. He learned English and Americanized
his name to Dupper. He engaged in various enterprises and finally
started Desert Station, where he made his fortune.
He was a curious character as he became older. Sometimes he would stay
away from Phoenix for several months and then one day he would appear
with a few thousand dollars, more or less, spend every cent of it in
treating the boys in my house and "blow back" home again generally in my
debt. He used to sing La Marseillaise--it was the only song he knew--and
after the first few drinks would solemnly mount a table, sing a few
verses of the magnificent revolutionary song, call on me to do likewise,
and then "treat the house." Often he did this several times each night,
and as "treating the house" invariably cost at least thirty dollars and
he was an inveterate gambler, it will be seen that in one way or another
I managed to secure considerable of old Dupper's fortune. His partiality
to the Marseillaise leads me to the belief that he was banished for
participation in one of the French revolutions; but this I cannot state
positively.
On one occasion I remember that I was visiting with Dupper and we made a
trip together somewhere, Dupper leaving his cook in charge. When we
returned nobody noticed us and I happened to look through a window
before entering the house. Hastily I beckoned to Dupper.
The Frenchman's cook was sitting on his bed with a pile of money--the
day's takings--in front of him. He was dividing the pile into two
halves. Taking one bill off the pile he would lay it to one side and
say:
"This is for Dupper."
Then he'd take the next bill, lay it in another spot, and say:
"And this is for me."
We watched him through the window unnoticed until he came to the last
ten-dollar bill. It was odd. The cook deliberated a few moments and
finally put the bill on top of the pile he had reserved for himself.
Then Dupper, whose face had been a study in emotions, could keep still
no longer.
"Hey, there!" he yelled, "play fair--play fair! Divvy up that ten spot!"
What happened afterwards to that cook I don't remember. But Dupper was a
good sport.
VENTURES AND ADVENTURES
_Hush! What brooding stillness is hanging over all?
What's this talk in whispers, and that placard on the wall?
Aha! I see it now! They're going to hang a man!
Judge Lynch is on the ramparts and the Law's an "Also-Ran!"_
--WOON.
Reader, have you ever seen the look in a man's eyes after he has been
condemned by that Court of Last Appeal--his fellow-men? I have, many
times. It is a look without a shadow of hope left, a look of dread at
the ferocity of the mob, a look of fear at what is to come afterwards;
and seldom a hint of defiance lurks in such a man's expression.
I have seen and figured in many lynchings. In the old days they were the
inseparables, the Frontier and Judge Lynch. If a white man killed a
Mexican or Indian nothing was done, except perhaps to hold a farce of a
trial with the killer in the end turned loose; and if a white man killed
another white man there was seldom much outcry, unless the case was
cold-blooded murder or the killer was already unpopular. But let a
Mexican or an Indian lift one finger against a white man and the whole
strength of the Whites was against him in a moment; he was hounded to
his hole, dragged forth, tried by a committee of citizens over whom
Judge Lynch sat with awful solemnity, and was forthwith hung.
More or less of this was in some degree necessary. The killing of an
Apache was accounted a good day's work, since it probably meant that the
murderer of several white men had gone to his doom. To kill a Mexican
only meant that another "bad hombre" had gone to his just deserts.
And most of the Mexicans in Arizona in the early days were "bad
hombres"--there is no doubt about that. It was they who gave the Mexican
such a bad name on the frontier, and it was they who first earned the
title "greaser." They were a murderous, treacherous lot of rascals.
In the Wickenburg stage massacre, for instance, it was known that
several Mexicans were involved--wood-choppers. One of these Mexicans was
hunted for weeks and was caught soon after I arrived in Phoenix. I was
running my dance hall when a committee of citizens met in a mass-meeting
and decided that the law was too slow in its working and gave the
Mexican too great an opportunity to escape. The meeting then resolved
itself into a hanging committee, broke open the jail, seized the
prisoner from the arms of the sheriff and hung him to the rafters just
inside the jail door. That done, they returned to their homes and
occupations satisfied that at least one "Greaser" had not evaded the
full penalty of his crimes.
Soon after a Mexican arrived in town with a string of cows to sell.
Somebody recognized the cows as ones that had belonged to a rancher
named Patterson. The Mexican was arrested by citizens and a horseman
sent out to investigate. Patterson was found killed. At once, and with
little ceremony, the Mexican with the cattle was "strung up" to the
cross of a gatepost, his body being left to sway in the wind until
somebody came along with sufficient decency to cut it down.
Talking about lynchings, reminds me of an incident that had almost
slipped my mind. Before I went to Wickenburg from Tucson I became
partners with a man named Robert Swope in a bar and gambling lay-out in
a little place named Adamsville, a few miles below where Florence now is
on the Gila River. Swope was tending bar one night when an American shot
him dead and got away. The murderer was soon afterward captured in
Tucson and lynched in company with two Mexicans who were concerned in
the murder of a pawnbroker there.
* * * * *
In Phoenix I married my first wife, whose given name was Ruficia. Soon
afterwards I moved to Tucson, where, after being awarded one child, I
had domestic trouble which ended in the courts. My wife finally returned
to Phoenix and, being free again, married a man named Murphy. After this
experience I determined to take no further chances with matrimony.
However, I needed a helpmate, so I solved the difficulty by marrying
Paola Ortega by contract for five years. Contract marriages were
universally recognized and indulged in in the West of the early days. My
relations with Paola were eminently satisfactory until the expiration of
the contract, when she went her way and I mine.
Before I leave the subject of Phoenix it will be well to mention that
when I left I sold all my property there, consisting of some twenty-two
lots, all in the heart of the city, for practically a song. Six of these
lots were situated where now is a big planing mill. Several lots I sold
to a German for a span of mules. The German is alive today and lives in
Phoenix a wealthy man, simply because he had the foresight and acumen to
do what I did not do--hang on to his real estate. If I had kept those
twenty-two lots until now, without doing more than simply pay my taxes
on them, my fortune today would be comfortably up in the six figures.
However, I sold the lots, and there's no use crying over spilled milk.
Men are doing today all over the world just what I did then.
I had not been in Tucson long before I built there the largest saloon
and dance-hall in the Territory. Excepting for one flyer in Florence,
which I shall speak of later on, this was to be my last venture into the
liquor business. My hall was modeled after those on the Barbary Coast.
It cost "four-bits" and drinks to dance, and the dances lasted only a
few minutes. At one time I had thirteen Mexican girls dancing in the
hall, and this number was increased on special days until the floor was
crowded. I always did good business--so good, in fact, that jealousy
aroused in the minds of my rivals finally forced me out. Since then, as
I have said, with the single Florence exception, I have not been in the
dance-hall business, excepting that I now have at some expense put a
ballroom into my hotel at Patagonia, in which are held at times social
dances which most of the young folk of the county attend, the liquor
element being entirely absent, of course.[2]
Besides paying a heavy license for the privilege of selling liquor in my
Tucson dance hall, I was compelled every morning, in addition, to pay
over $5 as a license for the dance-hall and $1.50 collector's fees,
which, if not paid out every morning as regularly as clockwork, would
have threatened my business. I did not complain of this tax; it was a
fair one considering the volume of trade I did. But my patronage grew
and grew until there came a day when "Cady's Place," as it was known,
was making more money for its owner than any similar establishment in
Arizona. The saloon-keepers in Tucson became inordinately jealous and
determined to put an end to my "luck," as they called it. Accordingly,
nine months after I had opened my place these gentlemen used their
influence quietly with the Legislature and "jobbed" me. The license was
raised for dance halls at one bound to $25 per night. This was a
heavier tax than even my business would stand, so I set about at once
looking for somebody on whom to unload the property. I claim
originality, if not a particular observance of ethics, in doing this.
One day a man came along and, when he saw the crowd in the hall,
suggested that I sell him a share in the enterprise.
"No," I replied, "I'll not sell you a share; but, to tell you the truth,
I'm getting tired of this business, and want to get out of it for good.
I'll sell you the whole shooting-match, if you want to buy. Suppose you
stay tonight with my barkeep and see what kind of business I do."
He agreed and I put two hundred dollars in my pocket and started around
town. I spent that two hundred dollars to such good purpose that that
night the hall was crowded to the doors. The prospective purchaser
looked on with blinking eyes at the thought of the profits that must
accrue to the owner. Would he buy the place? Would he? Well, say--he was
so anxious to buy it that he wanted to pass over the cash when he saw me
counting up my takings in the small hours of the morning. The takings
were, I remember, $417. But I told him not to be in a hurry, to go home
and sleep over the proposition and come back the next day.
After he had gone the collector came around, took his $26.50 and
departed. On his heels came my man.
"Do you still want to buy?" I asked him.
"You bet your sweet life I want to buy," he replied.
"You're sure you've investigated the proposition fully?" I asked him.
The customer thought of that four hundred and seventeen dollars taken in
over the bar the night before and said he had.
"Hand over the money, then," I said, promptly. "The place is yours."
The next morning he came to me with a lugubrious countenance.
"Well," I greeted him, "how much did you make last night?"
"Took in ninety-six dollars," he answered, sadly. "Cady, why didn't you
tell me about that $25 tax?"
"Tell you about it?" I repeated, as if astonished. "Why, didn't I ask
you if you had investigated the thing fully? Did I ask you to go into
the deal blindfold? It wasn't my business to tell you about any tax."
And with that he had to be content.
* * * * *
I was now out of the dance-hall business for good, and I looked about
for some other and more prosaic occupation to indulge in. Thanks to the
deal I had put through with the confiding stranger with the ready cash,
I was pretty well "heeled" so far as money went, and all my debts were
paid. Finally I decided that I would go into business again and bought
a grocery store on Mesilla street.
The handing out of canned tomatoes and salt soda crackers, however,
speedily got on my nerves. I was still a comparatively young man and my
restless spirit longed for expression in some new environment. About
this time Paola, my contract-wife, who was everything that a wife should
be in my opinion, became a little homesick and spoke often of the home
she had left at Sauxal, a small gulf-coast port in Lower California.
Accordingly, one morning, I took it into my head to take her home on a
visit to see her people, and, the thought being always father to the
action with me, I traded my grocery store for a buckboard and team and
some money, and set forth in this conveyance for Yuma. This was a trip
not considered so very dangerous, except for the lack of water, for the
Indians along the route were mostly peaceable and partly civilized. Only
for a short distance out of Tucson did the Apache hold suzerainty, and
this only when sufficient Papagos, whose territory it really was, could
not be mustered together in force to drive them off. The Papago Indians
hated the Apaches quite as much as the white man did, for the Papago
lacked the stamina and fighting qualities of the Apache and in other
characteristics was an entirely different type of Indian. I have reason
to believe that the Apaches were not originally natives of Arizona, but
were an offshoot of one of the more ferocious tribes further north.
This I think because, for one thing, the facial characteristics of the
other Arizona Indians--the Pimas, Papagos, Yumas, Maricopas, and
others--are very similar to each other but totally different from those
of the various Apache tribes, as was the language they spoke. The
Papagos, Pimas, Yumas, Maricopas and other peaceable Indian peoples were
of a settled nature and had lived in their respective territories for
ages before the white man came to the West. The Apache, on the other
hand, was a nomad, with no definite country to call his own and
recognizing no boundary lines of other tribes. It was owing to Apache
depredations on the Papagos and Pimas that the latter were so willingly
enlisted on the side of the White man in the latter's fight for
civilization.
Reaching Yuma without any event to record that I remember, we took one
of the Colorado River boats to the mouth of the Colorado, where
transfers were made to the deep-sea ships plying between the Colorado
Gulf and San Francisco. One of these steamers, which were creditable to
the times, we took to La Paz. At La Paz Paola was fortunate enough to
meet her padrina, or godfather, who furnished us with mules and horses
with which we reached Sauxal, Paola's home. There we stayed with her
family for some time.
While staying at Sauxal I went to a fiesta in the Arroyo San Luis and
there began playing cooncan with an old rancher who was accounted one of
the most wealthy inhabitants of the country. I won from him two
thousand oranges, five gallons of wine, seventeen buckskins and two
hundred heifers. The heifers I presented to Paola and the buckskins I
gave to her brothers to make leggings out of. The wine and oranges I
took to La Paz and sold, netting a neat little sum thereby.
Sixty miles from La Paz was El Triunfo, one of the best producing silver
mines in Lower California, managed by a man named Blake. Obeying an
impulse I one day went out to the mine and secured a job, working at it
for some time, and among other things starting a small store which was
patronized by the company's workmen. Growing tired of this occupation, I
returned to Sauxal, fetched Paola and with her returned to Yuma, or
Arizona City, where I started a small chicken ranch a few miles up the
river. Coyotes and wolves killed my poultry, however, and sores
occasioned by ranch work broke out on my hands, so I sold the chicken
ranch and moved to Arizona City, opening a restaurant on the main
street. In this cafe I made a specialty of pickled feet--not pig's feet,
but bull's feet, for which delicacy I claim the original creation. It
was some dish, too! They sold like hot-cakes.
While I was in Lower California I witnessed a sight that is well worth
speaking of. It was a Mexican funeral, and the queerest one I ever saw
or expect to see, though I have read of Chinese funerals that perhaps
approach it in peculiarity. It was while on my way back to Sauxal from
La Paz that I met the cortege. The corpse was that of a wealthy
rancher's wife, and the coffin was strung on two long poles borne by
four men. Accompanying the coffin alongside of those carrying it were
about two hundred horsemen. The bearers kept up a jog-trot, never once
faltering on the way, each horseman taking his turn on the poles. When
it became a man's turn to act as bearer nobody told him, but he slipped
off his horse, letting it run wherever it pleased, ran to the coffin,
ducked under the pole and started with the others on the jog-trot, while
the man whose place he had taken caught his horse. Never once in a carry
of 150 miles did that coffin stop, and never once did that jog-trot
falter. The cortege followers ate at the various ranches they passed,
nobody thinking of refusing them food. The 150 mile journey to San Luis
was necessary in order to reach a priest who would bury the dead woman.
All the dead were treated in the same manner.
While I was in Yuma the railroad reached Dos Palmas, Southern
California, and one day I went there with a wagon and bought a load of
apples, which, with one man to accompany me, I hauled all the way to
Tucson. That wagon-load of apples was the first fruit to arrive in the
Territory and it was hailed with acclaim. I sold the lot for one
thousand dollars, making a profit well over fifty per cent. Then with
the wagon I returned to Yuma.
On the way, as I was nearing Yuma, I stopped at Canyon Station, which a
man named Ed. Lumley kept. Just as we drove up an old priest came out of
Lumley's house crying something aloud. We hastened up and he motioned
inside. Within we saw poor Lumley dead, with both his hands slashed off
and his body bearing other marks of mutilation. It turned out that two
Mexicans to whom Lumley had given shelter had killed him because he
refused to tell them where he kept his money. The Mexicans were
afterwards caught in California, taken to Maricopa county and there,
after trial by the usual method, received the just penalty for their
crime.
From Yuma I moved to Florence, Arizona, where I built a dance-hall and
saloon, which I sold almost immediately to an Italian named Gendani.
Then I moved back to Tucson, my old stamping-ground.
FOOTNOTE:
[Footnote 2: Since this was written the State has abolished the sale of
liquor from within its boundaries.]
INDIAN WARFARE
_When strong men fought and loved and lost,
And might was right throughout the land;
When life was wine and wine was life,
And God looked down on endless strife;
Where murder, lust and hate were rife,
What footprints Time left in the sand!_
--WOON.
In the seventies and early eighties the hostility of the various Apache
Indian tribes was at its height, and there was scarcely a man in the
Territory who had not at some time felt the dread of these implacable
enemies.
By frequent raids on emigrants' wagons and on freighting outfits, the
Indians had succeeded in arming themselves fairly successfully with the
rifle of the white man; and they kept themselves in ammunition by raids
on lonely ranches and by "jumping" or ambushing prospectors and lone
travelers. If a man was outnumbered by Apaches he often shot himself,
for he knew that if captured he would probably be tortured by one of the
fiendish methods made use of by these Indians. If he had a woman with
him it was an act of kindness to shoot her, too, for to her, also, even
if the element of torture were absent, captivity with the Indians would
invariably be an even sadder fate.
[Illustration: CADY'S SHEEP CAMP ON THE SONOITA, DECEMBER 8, 1914. BUILT
IN 1884]
Sometimes bands of whites would take the place of the soldiers and
revenge themselves on Apache raiders. There was the raid on the Wooster
ranch, for instance. This ranch was near Tubac. Wooster lived alone on
the ranch with his wife and one hired man. One morning Apaches swooped
down on the place, killed Wooster and carried off his wife. As she has
never been heard of since it has always been supposed that she was
killed. This outrage resulted in the famous "Camp Grant Massacre," the
tale of which echoed all over the world, together with indignant
protests from centers of culture in the East that the whites of Arizona
were "more savage" than the savages themselves. I leave it to the reader
to judge whether this was a fact.
The Wooster raid and slaughter was merely the culminating tragedy of a
series of murders, robberies and depredations carried on by the Apaches
for years. Soldiers would follow the raiders, kill a few of them in
retaliation, and a few days later another outrage would be perpetrated.
The Apaches were absolutely fearless in the warfare they carried on for
possession of what they, rightly or wrongly, considered their invaded
territory. The Apache with the greatest number of murders to his name
was most highly thought of by his tribe.
When the Wooster raid occurred I was in Tucson. Everybody in Tucson knew
Wooster and liked him. There was general mourning and a cry for instant
revenge when his murder was heard of. For a long time it had been
believed that the Indians wintering on the government reservation at
Camp Grant, at the expense of Uncle Sam, were the authors of the
numerous raids in the vicinity of Tucson, though until that time it had
been hard to convince the authorities that such was the case. This time,
however, it became obvious that something had to be done.
The white men of Tucson held a meeting, at which I was present. Sidney
R. De Long, first Mayor of Tucson, was also there. After the meeting had
been called to order De Long rose and said:
"Boys, this thing has got to be stopped. The military won't believe us
when we tell them that their charity to the Indians is our undoing--that
the government's wards are a pack of murderers and cattle thieves. What
shall we do?"
"Let the military go hang, and the government, too!" growled one man,
"Old Bill" Oury, a considerable figure in the life of early Tucson, and
an ex-Confederate soldier.
The meeting applauded.
"We can do what the soldiers won't," I said.
"Right!" said Oury, savagely. "Let's give these devils a taste of their
own medicine. Maybe after a few dozen of 'em are killed they'll learn
some respect for the white man."
Nobody vetoed the suggestion.
The following day six white men--myself, De Long and fierce old Bill
Oury among them, rode out of Tucson bound for Tubac. With us we had
three Papago Indian trailers. Arrived at the Wooster ranch the Papagos
were set to work and followed a trail that led plain as daylight to the
Indian camp at Fort Grant. A cry escaped all of us at this justification
of our suspicions.
"That settles it!" ground out Oury, between his set teeth. "It's them
Injuns or us. And--it won't be us."
We returned to Tucson, rounded up a party consisting of about fifty
Papagos, forty-five Mexicans and ourselves, and set out for Camp Grant.
We reached the fort at break of day, or just before, and before the
startled Apaches could fully awaken to what was happening, or the
near-by soldiers gather their wits together, eighty-seven Aravaipa
Apaches had been slain as they lay. The Papagos accounted for most of
the dead, but we six white men and our Mexican friends did our part. It
was bloody work; but it was justice, and on the frontier then the whites
made their own justice.
All of us were arrested, as a matter of course, and when word reached
General Sherman at Washington from the commander of the military forces
at Fort Grant, an order was issued that all of us were to be tried for
murder. We suffered no qualms, for we knew that according to frontier
standards what we had done was right, and would inevitably have been
done some time or another by somebody. We were tried in Judge Titus'
Territorial Court, but, to the dismay of the military and General
Sherman, who of course knew nothing of the events that had preceded the
massacre, not a man in the jury could be found who would hang us. The
Territory was searched for citizens impartial enough to adjudge the
slaying of a hostile Apache as murder, but none could be found. The
trial turned out a farce and we were all acquitted, to receive the
greatest demonstration outside the courtroom that men on trial for their
lives ever received in Arizona, I think. One thing that made our
acquittal more than certain was the fact, brought out at the trial, that
the dress of Mrs. Wooster and a pair of moccasins belonging to her
husband were found on the bodies of Indians whom we killed. Lieutenant
Whitman, who was in command at Fort Grant, and on whom the
responsibility for the conduct of the Indians wintering there chiefly
rested, was soon after relieved from duty and transferred to another
post. General George Crook arrived to take his place late in 1871. The
massacre had occurred on the last day of April of that year.
Other raids occurred. Al Peck, an old and valued friend of mine, had
several experiences with the Apaches, which culminated in the Peck raid
of April 27, 1886, when Apaches jumped his ranch, killed his wife and a
man named Charles Owens and carried off Peck's niece. Apparently
satisfied with this, they turned Peck loose, after burning the ranch
house. The unfortunate man's step-niece was found some six weeks later
by Mexican cowpunchers in the Cocoapi Mountains in Old Mexico.
The famous massacre of the Samaniego freight teams and the destruction
of his outfit at Cedar Springs, between Fort Thomas and Wilcox, was
witnessed by Charles Beck, another friend of mine. Beck had come in with
a quantity of fruit and was unloading it when he heard a fusilade of
shots around a bend in the road. A moment later a boy came by
helter-skelter on a horse.
"Apaches!" gasped the boy, and rode on.
Beck waited to hear no more. He knew that to attack one of Samaniego's
outfits there must be at least a hundred Indians in the neighborhood.
Unhitching his horse, he jumped on its back and rode for dear life in
the direction of Eureka Springs. Indians sighted him as he swept into
the open and followed, firing as they rode. By luck, however, and the
fact that his horse was fresher than those of his pursuers, Beck got
safely away.
Thirteen men were killed at this Cedar Springs massacre and thousands of
dollars' worth of freight was carried off or destroyed. The raid was
unexpected owing to the fact that the Samaniego brothers had contracts
with the government and the stuff in their outfit was intended for the
very Indians concerned in the ambuscade. One of the Samaniegos was slain
at this massacre.
Then there was the Tumacacori raid, at Barnett's ranch in the Tumacacori
Mountains, when Charlie Murray and Tom Shaw were killed. Old Man
Frenchy, as he was called, suffered the severe loss of his freight and
teams when the Indians burned them up across the Cienega. Many other
raids occurred, particulars of which are not to hand, but those I have
related will serve as samples of the work of the Indians and will show
just how it was the Apaches gained the name they did of being veritable
fiends in human form.
* * * * *
After the expiration of my contract with Paola Ortega I remained in a
state of single blessedness for some time, and then married Gregoria
Sosa, in the summer of 1879. Gregoria rewarded me with one child, a boy,
who is now living in Nogales. On December 23, 1889, Gregoria died and in
October, 1890, I married my present wife, whose maiden name was Donna
Paz Paderes, and who belongs to an old line of Spanish aristocracy in
Mexico. We are now living together in the peace and contentment of old
age, well occupied in bringing up and providing for our family of two
children, Mary, who will be twenty years old on February 25, 1915, and
Charlie, who will be sixteen on the same date. Both our children, by the
grace of God, have been spared us after severe illnesses.
* * * * *
To make hundreds of implacable enemies at one stroke is something any
man would very naturally hesitate to do, but I did just that about a
year after I commenced working for D. A. Sanford, one of the biggest
ranchers between the railroad and the border. The explanation of this
lies in one word--sheep.
If there was one man whom cattlemen hated with a fierce, unreasoning
hatred, it was the man who ran sheep over the open range--a proceeding
perfectly legal, but one which threatened the grazing of the cattle
inasmuch as where sheep had grazed it was impossible for cattle to feed
for some weeks, or until the grass had had time to grow again. Sheep
crop almost to the ground and feed in great herds, close together, and
the range after a herd of sheep has passed over it looks as if somebody
had gone over it with a lawnmower.
In 1881 I closed out the old Sanford ranch stock and was informed by my
employer that he had foreclosed a mortgage on 13,000 head of sheep owned
by Tully, Ochoa and De Long of Tucson. This firm was the biggest at that
time in the Territory and the De Long of the company was one of the six
men who led the Papagos in the Camp Grant Massacre. He died in Tucson
recently and I am now the only white survivor of that occurrence. Tully,
Ochoa and De Long were forced out of business by the coming of the
railroad in 1880, which cheapened things so much that the large stock
held by the company was sold at prices below what it had cost,
necessitating bankruptcy.
I was not surprised to hear that Sanford intended to run sheep, though I
will admit that the information was scarcely welcome. Sheep, however, at
that time were much scarcer than cattle and fetched, consequently, much
higher prices. My employer, D. A. Sanford, who now lives in Washington,
D. C., was one of the shrewdest business men in the Territory, and was,
as well, one of the best-natured of men. His business acumen is
testified to by the fact that he is now sufficiently wealthy to count
his pile in the seven figures.
Mr. Sanford's wishes being my own in the matter, of course, I did as I
was told, closed out the cattle stock and set the sheep grazing on the
range. The cattlemen were angry and sent me an ultimatum to the effect
that if the sheep were not at once taken off the grass there would be
"trouble." I told them that Sanford was my boss, not them; that I would
take his orders and nobody else's, and that until he told me to take the
sheep off the range they'd stay precisely where they were.
My reply angered the cattlemen more and before long I became subject to
many annoyances. Sheep were found dead, stock was driven off, my ranch
hands were shot at, and several times I myself narrowly escaped death at
the hands of the enraged cattlemen. I determined not to give in until I
received orders to that effect from Mr. Sanford, but I will admit that
it was with a feeling of distinct relief that I hailed those orders when
they came three years later. For one thing, before the sheep business
came up, most of the cattlemen who were now my enemies had been my close
friends, and it hurt me to lose their esteem. I am glad to say, however,
that most of these cattlemen and cowboys, who, when I ran sheep, would
cheerfully have been responsible for my funeral, are my very good
friends at the present time; and I trust they will always remain so.
Most of them are good fellows and I have always admitted that their side
had the best argument.
In spite of the opposition of the cattlemen I made the sheep business a
paying one for Mr. Sanford, clearing about $17,000 at the end of three
years. When that period had elapsed I had brought shearers to Sanford
Station to shear the sheep, but was stopped in my intention with the
news that Sanford had sold the lot to Pusch and Zellweger of Tucson. I
paid off the men I had hired, satisfied them, and thus closed my last
deal in the sheep business. One of the men, Jesus Mabot, I hired to go
to the Rodeo with me, while the Chinese gardener hired another named
Fernando.
Then occurred that curious succession of fatalities among the Chinamen
in the neighborhood that puzzled us all for years and ended by its being
impossible to obtain a Chinaman to fill the last man's place.
DEPUTY SHERIFF, CATTLEMAN AND FARMER
_You kin have yore Turner sunsets,--he never painted one
Like th' Santa Rita Mountains at th' settin' o' th' sun!
You kin have yore Eastern cornfields, with th' crops that never change,
Me--I've all Arizona, and, best o' all, the Range!_
--WOON.
About this time Sheriff Bob Paul reigned in Tucson and made me one of
his deputies. I had numerous adventures in that capacity, but remember
only one as being worth recording here.
One of the toughest characters in the West at that time, a man feared
throughout the Territory, was Pat Cannon. He had a score of killings to
his credit, and, finally, when Paul became sheriff a warrant was issued
for his arrest on a charge of murder. After he had the warrant Paul came
to me.
"Cady," he said, "you know Pat Cannon, don't you?"
"I worked with him once," I answered.
"Well," returned Paul, "here's a warrant for his arrest on a murder
charge. Go get him."
I obtained a carryall and an Italian boy as driver, in Tucson, and
started for Camp Grant. Arrived there I was informed that it was
believed Cannon was at Smithy's wood camp, several miles away. We went
on to Smithy's wood camp. Sure enough, Pat was there--very much so. He
was the first man I spotted as I drove into the camp. Cannon was sitting
at the door of his shack, two revolvers belted on him and his rifle
standing up by the door at his side, within easy reach. I knew that Pat
didn't know that I was a deputy, so I drove right up.
"Hello," I called. "How's the chance for a game of poker?"
"Pretty good," he returned, amiably. "Smithy'll be in in a few moments,
John. Stick around--we have a game every night."
"Sure," I responded, and descended. As I did so I drew my six-shooter
and whirled around, aiming the weapon at him point blank.
"Hands up, Pat, you son-of-a-gun," I said, and I guess I grinned.
"You're my prisoner."
I had told the Italian boy what to do, beforehand, and he now gave me
the steel bracelets, which I snapped on Cannon, whose face bore an
expression seemingly a mixture of intense astonishment and disgust.
Finally, when I had him safely in the carryall, he spat out a huge chew
of tobacco and swore.
He said nothing to me for awhile, and then he remarked, in an injured
way:
"Wa-al, Johnny, I sure would never have thought it of you!"
He said nothing more, except to ask me to twist him a cigarette or two,
and when we reached Tucson I turned him over safely to Sheriff Paul.
* * * * *
You who read this in your stuffy city room, or crowded subway seat,
imagine, if you can, the following scene:
Above, the perfect, all-embracing blue of the Arizona sky; set flaming
in the middle of it the sun, a glorious blazing orb whose beauty one may
dare to gaze upon only through smoked glasses; beneath, the Range,
which, far from being a desert, is covered with a growth of grass which
grows thicker and greener as the rivers' banks are reached.
All around, Arizona--the painted hills, looking as though someone had
carefully swept them early in the morning with a broom; the valleys
studded with mesquite trees and greasewood and dotted here and there
with brown specks which even the uninitiated will know are cattle, and
the river, one of Arizona's minor streams, a few yards across and only a
couple of feet deep, but swift-rushing, pebble-strew'd and clear as
crystal.
Last, but not least, a heterogeneous mob of cowboys and vaqueros, with
their horses champing at the bit and eager to be off on their work. In
the foreground a rough, unpainted corral, where are more
ponies--wicked-looking, intelligent little beggars, but quick turning as
though they owned but two legs instead of four, and hence priceless for
the work of the roundup. In the distance, some of them quietly and
impudently grazing quite close at hand, are the cattle, the object of
the day's gathering.
Cowboys from perhaps a dozen or more ranches are gathered here, for this
is the commencement of the Rodeo--the roundup of cattle that takes place
semi-annually. Even ranches whose cattle are not grazed on this
particular range have representatives here, for often there are strays
with brands that show them to have traveled many scores of miles. The
business of the cowboys[3] is to round up and corral the cattle and pick
out their own brands from the herd. They then see that the unbranded
calves belonging to cows of their brand are properly marked with the hot
iron and with the ear-slit, check up the number of yearlings for the
benefit of their employers, and take charge of such of the cattle it is
considered advisable to drive back to the home ranch.
So much sentimental nonsense has been talked of the cruelty of branding
and slitting calves that it is worth while here, perhaps, to state
positively that the branding irons do not penetrate the skin and serve
simply to burn the roots of the hair so that the bald marks will show
to which ranch the calf belongs. There is little pain to the calf
attached to the operation, and one rarely if ever even sees a calf
licking its brand after it has been applied; and, as is well known, the
cow's remedy for an injury, like that of a dog, is always to lick it. As
to the ear-slitting, used by most ranches as a check on their brands, it
may be said that if the human ear is somewhat callous to pain--as it
is--the cow's ear is even more so. One may slice a cow's ear in half in
a certain way and she will feel only slight pain, not sufficient to make
her give voice. The slitting of a cow's ear draws very little blood.
While I am on the subject,--it was amusing to note the unbounded
astonishment of the cattlemen of Arizona a few years ago when some
altruistic society of Boston came forward with a brilliant idea that was
to abolish the cruelty of branding cows entirely. What was the idea? Oh,
they were going to hang a collar around the cow's neck, with a brass tag
on it to tell the name of the owner. Or, if that wasn't feasible, they
thought that a simple ring and tag put through the cow's ear-lobe would
prove eminently satisfactory! The feelings of the cowboys, when told
that they would be required to dismount from their horses, walk up to
each cow in turn and politely examine her tag, perhaps with the aid of
spectacles, may be better imagined than described. It is sufficient to
say that the New England society's idea never got further than
Massachusetts, if it was, indeed, used there, which is doubtful.
The brand is absolutely necessary as long as there is an open range, and
the abolishment of the open range will mean the abandonment of the
cow-ranch. At the time I am speaking of the whole of the Territory of
Arizona was one vast open range, over the grassy portions of which
cattle belonging to hundreds of different ranches roamed at will. Most
of the big ranches employed a few cowboys the year around to keep the
fences in repair and to prevent cows from straying too far from the home
range. The home range was generally anywhere within a twenty-mile radius
of the ranch house.
The ear-slit was first found necessary because of the activities of the
rustlers. There were two kinds of these gentry--the kind that owned
ranches and passed themselves off as honest ranchers, and the open
outlaws, who drove off cattle by first stampeding them in the Indian
manner, rushed them across the international line and then sold them to
none too scrupulous Mexican ranchers. Of the two it is difficult to say
which was the most dangerous or the most reviled by the honest
cattlemen. The ranches within twenty or thirty miles of the border,
perhaps, suffered more from the stampeders than from the small ranchers,
but those on the northern ranges had constantly to cope with the
activities of dishonest cattlemen who owned considerably more calves
than they had cows, as a rule. The difficulty was to prove that these
calves had been stolen.
It was no difficult thing to steal cattle successfully, providing the
rustler exercised ordinary caution. The method most in favor among the
rustlers was as follows: For some weeks the rustler would ride the
range, noting where cows with unbranded calves were grazing. Then, when
he had ascertained that no cowboys from neighboring ranches were riding
that way, he would drive these cows and their calves into one of the
secluded and natural corrals with which the range abounds, rope the
calves, brand them with his own brand, hobble and sometimes kill the
mother cows to prevent them following their offspring, and drive the
latter to his home corral, where in the course of a few weeks they would
forget their mothers and be successfully weaned. They would then be
turned out to graze on the Range. Sometimes when the rustler did not
kill the mother cow the calf proved not to have been successfully
weaned, and went back to its mother--the worst possible advertisement of
the rustler's dirty work. Generally, therefore, the mother cow was
killed, and little trace left of the crime, for the coyotes speedily
cleaned flesh, brand and all from the bones of the slain animal. The
motto of most of these rustlers was: "A dead cow tells no tales!"
[Illustration: CADY AND HIS THIRD FAMILY, 1915]
Another method of the rustlers was to adopt a brand much like that of a
big ranch near by, and to over-brand the cattle. For instance, a big
ranch with thousands of cattle owns the brand Cross-Bar (X--). The
rustler adopts the brand Cross L (XL) and by the addition of a vertical
mark to the bar in the first brand completely changes the brand. It was
always a puzzle for the ranchers to find brands that would not be easily
changed. Rustlers engaged in this work invariably took grave chances,
for a good puncher could tell a changed brand in an instant, and often
knew every cow belonging to his ranch by sight, without looking at the
brand. When one of these expert cowboys found a suspicious brand he lost
no time hunting up proof, and if he found that there had actually been
dirty work, the rustler responsible, if wise, would skip the country
without leaving note of his destination, for in the days of which I
speak the penalty for cow-stealing was almost always death, except when
the sheriff happened to be on the spot. Since the sheriff was invariably
heart and soul a cattleman himself, he generally took care that he
wasn't anywhere in the neighborhood when a cattle thief met his just
deserts. Even now this rule holds effect in the cattle lands. Only two
years ago a prominent rancher in this country--the Sonoita Range--shot
and killed a Mexican who with a partner had been caught red-handed in
the act of stealing cattle.
With the gradual disappearance of the open range, cattle stealing has
practically stopped, although one still hears at times of cases of the
kind, isolated, but bearing traces of the same old methods. Stampeding
is, of course, now done away with.
During the years I worked for D. A. Sanford I had more or less trouble
all the time with cattle thieves, but succeeded fairly well in either
detecting the guilty ones or in getting back the stolen cattle. I meted
out swift and sure justice to rustlers, and before long it became
rumored around that it was wise to let cattle with the D.S. brand alone.
The Sanford brand was changed three times. The D.S. brand I sold to the
Vail interests for Sanford, and the Sanford brand was changed to the
Dipper, which, afterwards, following the closing out of the Sanford
stock, was again altered to the Ninety-Seven (97) brand. Cattle with the
97 brand on them still roam the range about the Sonoita.
* * * * *
It was to a rodeo similar to the one which I have attempted to describe
that Jesus Mabot and I departed following the incident of the selling of
the sheep. We were gone a week. When we returned I put up my horse and
was seeing that he had some feed when a shout from Jesus, whom I had
sent to find the Chinese gardener to tell him we needed something to
eat, came to my ears.
"Oyez, Senor Cady!" Jesus was crying, "El Chino muerte."
I hurried down to the field where Mabot stood and found him gazing at
the Chinaman, who was lying face downward near the fence, quite dead.
By the smell and the general lay-out, I reckoned he had been dead some
three days.
I told Mabot to stay with him and, jumping on my horse, rode to
Crittenden, where I obtained a coroner and a jury that would sit on the
Chinaman's death. The next morning the jury found that he had been
killed by some person or persons unknown, and let it go at that.
Two weeks later I had occasion to go to Tucson, and on tying my horse
outside the Italian Brothers' saloon, noticed a man I thought looked
familiar sitting on the bench outside. As I came up he pulled his hat
over his face so that I could not see it. I went inside, ordered a
drink, and looked in the mirror. It gave a perfect reflection of the man
outside, and I saw that he was the Mexican Fernando, whom the Chinese
gardener had hired when I had engaged Mabot. I had my suspicions right
then as to who had killed the Chinaman, but, having nothing by which to
prove them, I was forced to let the matter drop.
Two or three years after this I hired as vaquero a Mexican named
Neclecto, who after a year quit work and went for a visit to Nogales.
Neclecto bought his provisions from the Chinaman who kept the store I
had built on the ranch, and so, as we were responsible for the debt,
when Bob Bloxton, son-in-law of Sanford, came to pay the Mexican off, he
did so in the Chinaman's store.
The next morning Neclecto accompanied Bloxton to the train, and, looking
back, Bob saw, the Mexican and another man ride off in the direction of
the ranch. After it happened Neclecto owned up that he had been in the
Chinaman's that night drinking, but insisted that he had left without
any trouble with the yellow-skinned storekeeper. But from that day
onward the Chinaman was never seen again.
Bloxton persuaded me to return to the ranch from Nogales and we visited
the Chinaman's house, where we found the floor dug up as though somebody
had been hunting treasure. My wife found a $10 gold piece hidden in a
crack between the 'dobe bricks and later my son, John, unearthed twelve
Mexican dollars beneath some manure in the hen-coop. Whether this had
belonged to the Chinaman, Louey, who had disappeared, or to another
Chinaman who had been staying with him, we could not determine. At any
rate, we found no trace of Louey or his body.
Even this was not to be the end of the strange series of fatalities to
Chinamen on the Sanford ranch. In 1897 I quit the Sanford foremanship
after working for my employer seventeen years, and turned the ranch over
to Amos Bloxton, another son-in-law of Sanford. I rented agricultural
land from Sanford and fell to farming. Near my place Crazy John, a
Chinaman, had his gardens, where he made 'dobe bricks besides growing
produce.
We were living then in the old store building and the Chinaman was
making bricks about a quarter of a mile away with a Mexican whom he
employed. One day we found him dead and the Mexican gone. After that, as
was natural, we could never persuade a Chinaman to live anywhere near
the place. I later built a house of the bricks the Chinaman was making
when he met his death. The Mexican escaped to Sonora, came back when he
thought the affair had blown over and went to work for the railroad at
Sonoita. There he had a fracas with the section foreman, stabbed him and
made off into the hills. Sheriff Wakefield from Tucson came down to get
the man and shot him dead near Greaterville, which ended the incident.
In the preceding I have mentioned the railroad. This was the
Benson-Hermosillo road, built by the Santa Fe and later sold to the
Southern Pacific, which extended the line to San Blas in Coahuila, and
which is now in process of extending it further to the city of Tepic. I
was one of those who helped survey the original line from Benson to
Nogales--I think the date was 1883.
In future times I venture to state that this road will be one of the
best-paying properties of the Southern Pacific Company, which has had
the courage and foresight to open up the immensely rich empire of
Western Mexico. The west coast of Mexico is yet in the baby stage of its
development. The revolutions have hindered progress there considerably,
but when peace comes at last and those now shouldering arms for this
and that faction in the Republic return to the peaceful vocations they
owned before the war began, there is no doubt that the world will stand
astonished at the riches of this, at present, undeveloped country. There
are portions of the West Coast that have never been surveyed, that are
inhabited to this day with peaceful Indians who have seldom seen a white
face. The country is scattered with the ruins of wonderful temples and
cathedrals and, doubtless, much of the old Aztec treasure still lies
buried for some enterprising fortune-seeker to unearth. There are also
immense forests of cedar and mahogany and other hard woods to be cut;
and extensive areas of land suitable for sugar planting and other
farming to be brought under cultivation. When all this is opened up the
West Coast cannot help taking its place as a wonderfully rich and
productive region.
FOOTNOTE:
[Footnote 3: The term "cowpuncher" is not common in Arizona as in
Montana, but the Arizona cowboys are sometimes called "vaqueros."]
IN AGE THE CRICKET CHIRPS AND BRINGS--
_A faltering step on life's highway,
A grip on the bottom rung;
A few good deeds done here and there,
And my life's song is sung.
It's not what you get in pelf that counts,
It's not your time in the race,
For most of us draw the slower mounts,
And our deeds can't keep the pace.
It's for each what he's done of kindness,
And for each what he's done of cheer,
That goes on the Maker's scorebook
With each succeeding year._
--WOON.
While I was farming on the Sanford ranch a brother-in-law of D. A.
Sanford, Frank Lawrence by name, came to live with me. Frank was a
splendid fellow and we were fast friends.
One day during the Rodeo we were out where the vaqueros were working and
on our return found our home, a 'dobe house, burned down, and all our
belongings with it, including considerable provisions. My loss was
slight, for in those days I owned a prejudice against acquiring any more
worldly goods than I could with comfort pack on my back; but Frank lost
a trunk containing several perfectly good suits of clothes and various
other more or less valuable articles which he set great store by,
besides over a hundred dollars in greenbacks. We hunted among the ruins,
of course, but not a vestige of anything savable did we find.
Three days later, however, Sanford himself arrived and took one look at
the ruins. Then, without a word, he started poking about with his stick.
From underneath where his bed had been he dug up a little box containing
several hundred dollars in greenbacks, and from the earth beneath the
charred ruins of the chest of drawers he did likewise. Then he stood up
and laughed at us. I will admit that he had a perfect right to laugh.
He, the one man of the three of us who could best afford to lose
anything, was the only man whose money had been saved. Which only goes
to prove the proverbial luck of the rich man.
Not long after this experience I moved to Crittenden, where I farmed
awhile, running buggy trips to the mines in the neighborhood as a side
line.
One day a man named Wheeler, of Wheeler & Perry, a Tucson merchandise
establishment, came to Crittenden and I drove him out to Duquesne. On
the way Wheeler caught sight of a large fir-pine tree growing on the
slope of a hill. He pointed to it and said:
"Say, John, I'd give something to have that tree in my house at
Christmas."
It was then a week or so to the twenty-fifth of December.
I glanced at the tree and asked him:
"You would, eh? Now, about how much would you give?"
"I'd give five dollars," he said.
"Done!" I said. "You give me five dollars and count that tree yours for
Christmas!" And we shook hands on it.
A few days later I rigged up a wagon, took along three Mexicans with
axes, and cut a load of Christmas trees--I think there were some three
hundred in the load. Then I drove the wagon to Tucson and after
delivering Wheeler his especial tree and receiving the stipulated five
dollars for it, commenced peddling the rest on the streets.
And, say! Those Christmas trees sold like wildfire. Everybody wanted
one. I sold them for as low as six-bits and as high as five dollars, and
before I left pretty nearly everybody in Tucson owned one of my trees.
When I counted up I found that my trip had netted me, over and above
expenses, just one thousand dollars.
This, you will have to admit, was some profit for a load of Christmas
trees. Sad to relate, however, a year later when I tried to repeat the
performance, I found about forty other fellows ahead of me loaded to the
guards with Christmas trees of all kinds and sizes. For a time Christmas
trees were cheaper than mesquite brush as the overstocked crowd
endeavored to unload on an oversupplied town. I escaped with my outfit
and my life but no profits--that time.
* * * * *
On December 15, 1900, I moved to Patagonia, which had just been born on
the wave of the copper boom. I rented a house, which I ran successfully
for one year, and then started the building of the first wing of the
Patagonia Hotel, which I still own and run; together with a dance-hall,
skating rink and restaurant. Since that first wing was built the hotel
has changed considerably in appearance, for whenever I got far enough
ahead to justify it, I built additions. I think I may say that now the
hotel is one of the best structures of its kind in the county. I am
considering the advisability of more additions, including a large
skating rink and dance-hall, but the copper situation does not justify
me in the outlay at present.
I am entirely satisfied with my location, however. Patagonia is not a
large place, but it is full of congenial friends and will one day, when
the copper industry again finds its feet, be a large town. It is in the
very heart of the richest mining zone in the world, if the assayers are
to be believed. Some of the mining properties, now nearly all
temporarily closed down, are world-famous--I quote for example the Three
R., the World's Fair, the Flux, the Santa Cruz, the Hardshell, the
Harshaw, the Hermosa, the Montezuma, the Mansfield and the Mowry.
This last, nine miles from Patagonia, was a producer long before the
Civil War. Lead and silver mined at the Mowry were transported to
Galveston to be made into bullets for the war--imagine being hit with a
silver bullet! In 1857 Sylvester Mowry, owner of the Mowry mine and one
of the earliest pioneers of Arizona, was chosen delegate to Congress by
petition of the people, but was not admitted to his seat. Mowry was
subsequently banished from Arizona by Commander Carleton and his mine
confiscated for reasons which were never quite clear.
* * * * *
My purpose in writing these memoirs is two-fold: First, I desired that
my children should have a record which could be referred to by them
after I am gone; and, secondly, that the State of Arizona, my adopted
home, should be the richer for the possession of the facts I have at my
disposal.
I want the reader to understand that even though the process of
evolution has taken a life-time, I cannot cease wondering at the
marvelous development of the Territory and, later, State of Arizona.
When I glance back over the vista of years and see the old, and then
open my eyes to survey the new, it is almost as though a Verne or a
Haggard sketch had come to life.
Who, in an uneventful stop-over at Geronimo, Graham county, would
believe that these same old Indians who sit so peacefully mouthing their
cigarros at the trading store were the terrible Apaches of former
days--the same avenging demons who murdered emigrants, fought the
modernly-equipped soldier with bow and arrow, robbed and looted right
and left and finally were forced to give in to their greatest enemy,
Civilization. And who shall begin to conjecture the thoughts that now
and again pass through the brains of these old Apache relics, living now
so quietly on the bounty of a none-too-generous government? What dreams
of settlement massacres, of stage robberies, of desperate fights, they
may conjure up until the wheezy arrival of the Arizona Eastern
locomotive disperses their visions with the blast of sordid actuality!
For the Arizona that I knew back in the Frontier days was the embodiment
of the Old West--the West of sudden fortune and still more sudden death;
the West of romance and of gold; of bad whiskey and doubtful women; of
the hardy prospector and the old cattleman, who must gaze a little sadly
back along the trail as they near the end of it, at thought of the days
that may never come again.
And now I myself am reaching the end of my long and eventful journey,
and I can say, bringing to mind my youth and all that followed it, that
I have _lived_, really _lived_, and I am content.
THE END.
+-----------------------------------------------+
| Transcriber's Note: |
| |
| Typographical errors corrected in the text: |
| |
| Page 80 recklesssly changed to recklessly |
| Page 82 Wickenberg changed to Wickenburg |
+-----------------------------------------------+
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