1st in a series in chronological order
COCHISE COUNTY’S FIRST SETTLEMENTS
By Kathy Klump
1. Tres Alamos (Three Cottonwoods): Originally a prehistoric village inhabited by indigenous peoples including the Hohokam, Salado, and Sobaipuris, it was excavated by the Amerind Foundation in 1940. The village had been abandoned in the 1700s. In 1865, John Montgomery and seven other settlers filed claims under the new Homestead Act. They brought their families, built homes, and constructed an irrigation ditch from the San Pedro River to supply water. The first crop of wheat, barley and beans amounted to 350,000 pounds. In a special 1866 U.S. Census, fifty-nine people lived there. Thirty-five were Mexican, 21 were Anglo American, and three were African American. John Montgomery married Maria Ruiz, and seven of their nine children were born in Tres Alamos. The only other people in what would become Cochise County were at Fort Bowie, established in 1862, and Camp Wallen in 1866. There were no Apache attacks the first year, but for several years thereafter, life was very hard with many of the settlers killed by Apaches, and their animals and crops stolen. The very first school was held in one room in the home of Fred Berthold. Mary Bernard Aguirre was hired as the first teacher for the 1875 school year. At that time, local ranchers were Leonardo Apodaca, A. Blair, G. Gibson, and Frank Long. Jesus Dias and A. A. Wilt were merchants. Thomas Dunbar was postmaster and station keeper. Cassius Hooker was operating Col. Henry Clay Hooker’s store and hotel. Dr. Glendy King was the physician, and Levi Pitts was the U.S. Military telegraph operator.
2. San Pedro: An old settlement in existence as early as 1870 a few miles west of the San Pedro river and near an old stage road. Sixty men lived there in 1872. The post office was established March 22, 1872 with Jacob Schaublin as post master and discontinued June 8, 1880.
3. Goodwin : A post office was established on March 5, 1875 with Thomas McWilliams as postmaster. It was discontinued October 18, 1880. It was first known as Cochise Canyon when stage lines ran through Apache Pass. It was called Cochise because he camped here behind the Apache Pass Stage Station with seven hundred of his tribe while another chief, Old Jack camped five hundred men in front of the Apache Pass Stage Station. By 1889 the name of the Spring and Canyon were named after the first Governor of Arizona Territory, John N. Goodwin, who stopped here.
4. Fort Huachuca: This United States Military post was constructed in March of 1877 by Captain Samuel Marmaduke Whitside and two companies of the U. S. Army 6th Cavalry at the base of the Huachuca Mountains to protect the settlers during the Apache Wars. It was originally intended to be a temporary fort until peace was made, but it is the only fort that has survived. Fort Bowie was abandoned in 1894 and Fort Grant in 1905.
5. St. David: The town’s name originally had an “s” at the end, but that was dropped sometime over the years. It was named in memory of David Patten, a leader of the “Saints” before their migration to Utah. It was founded by Philemon Merrill. He and his wife Cyrena, along with four other Mormon families, founded the town on November 29, 1877. Mr. Merrill served as adjutant general of the Mormon Battalion when it traveled through in 1846. He remembered the abundance of ground water and the lush greenery in contrast to the surrounding desert land. During the first year, the colonists built a small adobe fort measuring sixty feet and forming a hollow square. It was located three miles south of the present town. The first site was named MacDonald after a Mormon apostle who was killed by the same mob as Joseph Smith in Missouri. The fort collapsed during the earthquake of 1887, was not rebuilt, and the town was moved to the present site. Mail was received at Tres Alamos until the post office was established on July 24, 1882 with Joseph McRae as postmaster.
HOT OFF THE PRESS!
Resting Under the Shifting Sands; the stories of those buried in the Historic Cemetery at Willcox, Arizona by Kathy Klump (Sulphur Springs Valley Historical Society Monograph No. 6)
Available at the Chiricahua Regional Museum, or by mail. Send check for $20 plus $5 postage to SSVHS, 127 E. Maley, Willcox, AZ 85643 . Also available at website ssvhs.weebly.com
COCHISE COUNTY’S FIRST SETTLEMENTS
By Kathy Klump
1. Tombstone: Ed Schieffelin began prospecting on a flat mesa known as Goose Flats. In September 1879, he made his first strike. He had his ore assayed by Richard Gird. It was so rich, that Gird left Signal, Arizona and settled with Ed, and Ed’s brother Al at a place they called Gird Camp. Ed Schieffelin had been warned that all he would ever find would be his Tombstone. So that is what he named his mine, and that became the name of the town. The boom was on as miners rushed to the area. A tent community rose up nearby called Tank Hill about three miles west of Tombstone. Near its base was the community of Watervale. It was temporary, for it lacked room for building permanent structures for the hordes of newcomers.
John B. “Pie” Allen built the first permanent home. By the end of 1879,
Tombstone had one hundred permanent residents and a thousand others camped in tents on nearby hills. A community named Richmond was named by Virginians who flocked to the region and was absorbed into Tombstone Town Association with the Tombstone mine and the Toughnut mine. A post office was established December 2, 1878. By 1881, there were about 8,000 people in the town. Tombstone served as the Cochise County seat from 1881 to 1929. The County courthouse was built in 1885.
The town became known as “The Town Too Tough To Die” and is most famous for the Earp brothers and the shootout near the OK corral.
2. Dos Cabezas: (Spanish for Two Heads) The town is named after the nearby mountain with twin peaks. It is located about fourteen miles southeast of Willcox and one-half mile west of Ewell Springs. The springs were used by the Boundary Survey party in 1851, and the Birch Stage route at a station owned by the San Antonio and San Diego stage line (The Jackass Mail) in 1857. In 1859, John Butterfield built Ewell Springs Station about four miles south of the spring. The first mining claims were filed near Dos Cabezas on Aug. 15, 1864 by several soldiers from Fort Bowie. Gold and silver deposits were found nearby in 1878 by the Casey brothers. In 1883, John D. Emersley discovered a rich vein. Other early miners were Theopholus and William T. Cooper.
The very first school house in Cochise County was built in Dos Cabezas in 1878. The post office was established on April 8, 1879.
Mrs. George Cummings arrived in Dos Cabezas on June 2, 1900 as housekeeper for Jack Howard at his mine. Many years later it was learned that she was “Big Nose Kate” the notorious companion of Doc Holliday during the Earp days in Tombstone.
In 1906, T. N. McCauley arrived and purchased twenty-five of the early mining claims covering an area of over 600 acres. This became the Mascot Copper Company. The Mascot and Western Railroad line was built from Willcox to Dos Cabezas in 1915. The mine was later known as Central Copper Company. It provided a living for many families in the Dos Cabezas area, but turned out to be a big scam to sell stock.
3. Lewis Springs: Fritz Hoffman located these springs on June 6, 1878 and named them Fritz Springs. In 1889, the name was changed to Lewis Springs when Robert Alpheus Lewis settled there and named them after his father. A post office was established on November 15, 1904. “Old man” Clanton and his two sons, Ike and Billy (part of the OK Corral shootout) had a ranch here.
4. Swisshelm: The Mountain Queen Mine was located on September 5, 1878 by Henry Henson, J. W. Fleming, and John Swisshelm. The name of the mountains at that time was the Pedrogosa Mountains. The three men renamed this part of the mountain range as the Swisshelm Mountains and named the highest peak as Fleming Peak. The mountain range is about 15 miles long and about half way between Willcox and Douglas. The Swisshelm post office was established December 12, 1907 to serve the one hundred miners who worked at the mine, but was discontinued four months later.
5. Charleston: In March 1879, A. W. Store of Tombstone laid out the town of Charleston on the San Pedro River bank. It was a mill town with reduction works that served the Tombstone Milling and Mining Company as Tombstone had no water to work reduction facilities. A post office was established April 17, 1879. The town was known as a center for rustlers and a place for soldiers from Fort Huachuca to have a heyday. When the mines in Tombstone flooded, Charleston was no longer needed and the post office was discontinued October 24, 1888.
6. Millville: Located northeast across the San Pedro River from Charleston was another site for the reduction of ores from Tombstone. The post office there was established May 26, 1879 with John B. “Pie” Allen as postmaster, but discontinued only one year later on May 3, 1880. Pie Allen came to Arizona in 1857. He got his nickname based on his pies made with dried apples that he sold in Tucson. He was a prospector, businessman, politician, and Territorial Treasurer from 1867 to 1872.
By Frank Whitehead
The Patagonia Railroad: Transforming Rural Arizona
In the summer of 1881, surveyors employed by the Santa Fe Railway trekked through the lush grass of the Sonoita valley, roughly following the curves of the Babocomari River. Behind them followed teams of men and mules, grading and scraping earth to make way for what would quickly become the Patagonia Branch of the New Mexico & Arizona Railroad. Just over a year later, freight and passenger trains were transporting people and goods through a remote section of Arizona that had previously only been accessible via horseback or wagon. By 1962, however, the Patagonia Branch was abandoned, and the steel tracks were pulled up and salvaged. Although it lasted only a brief eighty years, the Patagonia Branch thoroughly transformed the towns of Elgin, Sonoita, and Patagonia.
Shortly after the Southern Pacific Railroad completed its first line across Arizona and connected with the Santa Fe Railway in New Mexico to create the nation’s second continental railroad in 1880, the two companies began negotiations over an additional line to Mexico. The recent discovery of coal in Sonora and a potential direct line to the Gulf of California via Guaymas made the profitability of such a line obvious. The two railways eventually agreed to joint use of the tracks between Deming and Benson, at which point the Santa Fe would construct a railroad south to the border. On June 17, 1881, the Santa Fe incorporated the New Mexico and Arizona Railroad Company for construction of the line, and soon a route was finalized which would wind south from Benson to the confluence of the Babocomari River and the San Pedro, then follow the Babocomari to Sonoita Creek, from where it would head through Patagonia to Calabasas and eventually to Nogales.
From the moment the first rails were laid in September 1881, construction was not without frequent, perilous incidents. Just two months after work began, two men were thrown from the top of the construction train when the engineer attempted to reconnect with an uncoupled car. One was sent to St. Mary’s hospital in Tucson, while the other underwent an emergency amputation of both legs on site. Amazingly, both survived. Railroad workers continued to face deadly hazards even after the tracks were completed. In 1914, a laborer named Albert Hall was repairing a damaged trestle when a gust of wind blew him off the tall structure, breaking his neck and killing him. He was buried near the worker’s camp in Sonoita, where his grave can still be visited today.
Aside from the dangers of the work itself, law and order were tenuous and life seemed constantly precarious for railroad workers. At a time when the Earps feuded with the Clantons and McLaurys in nearby Tombstone and the Army pursued Geronimo’s band of Apache across the region, laborers were frequent victims and perpetrators of frontier violence. Beatings, shootings, and robberies were so prevalent in the small communities that sprung up along the worksites that one newspaper correspondent from Tombstone reported that “the amount of lawlessness in this vicinity is scarcely credible and is something fearful to contemplate.”
After over a year of construction, a silver spike was tapped into place as the Patagonia Branch finally connected to the Sonora Railway in Nogales on October 25, 1882. The residents of Elgin, Sonoita, Patagonia, and others along the route suddenly had access to goods that previously would have been unattainable, and easier access to markets for the region’s cattle ranches and mines.
In terms of passenger service, the journey from Tucson to Mexico and vice versa was expedited significantly with the addition of a small, daily passenger train affectionately referred to as “the burro.” After the Patagonia station opened in June 1900, the burro would stop there for meals every day on its trek to and from Tucson.
By the 1950s, the Patagonia branch served as the backdrop for numerous westerns such as Red River, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and 3:10 to Yuma. The Elgin station specifically played a prominent role in Oklahoma!, serving as Claremore, Oklahoma, with hundreds of locals serving as extras or crew for the film.
Nearly as soon as it was completed, the Patagonia branch faced frustrating financial challenges. The operational cost regularly exceeded revenue from traffic. Flood damage alone – caused by monsoon storms that swelled the multiple waterways the branch traversed – required nearly half a million dollars of repairs within its first fifty years of operation. Over fierce objections from residents, especially ranchers, the Patagonia Branch was abandoned in 1962. Today, the remnants of the former railroad – from the Patagonia station and the Elgin section house to the still-standing trestles and empty railbed – are sources of pride to locals in this special section of Santa Cruz County.
The Patagonia Railroad Depot, opened in 1900.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE BOWMAN STRADLING HISTORY CENTER
THE STORIES OF FORT GRANT
1. John C. Breckinridge, the youngest Vice President in history.
2. Stagecoach of the late 1800's
3. The Apache Kid Reward Poster
4. Tom Horn, a legendary figure of the Old West
5. Apache May
By KAthy klump
THE STORIES OF FORT GRANT
1. Fort Grant has a history under five different names. It was the second military fort to be built in Arizona after the Gadsden Purchase. It was first called Fort Aravaipa, when it was established May 8, 1860 at the confluence of the Aravaipa and San Pedro Rivers. It was named Fort Breckinridge a few months later on August 6, 1860 after Vice President John C. Breckinridge, the youngest Vice President in history. The name was changed to Fort Stanford on May 24, 1862 after California Governor Leland Stanford. It was reestablished after the Civil War as Camp Grant in October 1865 named after Ulysses S. Grant. After the horrific Camp Grant massacre of April 30, 1871, the military reserve was moved to a new location and designated as Fort Grant on April 5, 1879.
2. According to his memoir, Edgar Rice Burroughs arrived in Willcox on May 22, 1896. With only one dollar in his possession, he was able to get a room at the Willcox Hotel, supper, and a bath. The next day he boarded a stagecoach heading to Fort Grant with the other passenger being a lady of the evening from the Hog Ranch near the Fort. The stage coaches, like the one pictured that went from Willcox to Bonita, were not very fancy. Life was pretty boring at the fort, except for Edgar’s time helping to hunt down the Apache Kid.
3. By the 1890s, the Apache wars were over, but the renegade known as the Apache Kid was still causing trouble. He had been a scout for the U. S. Army hunting Geronimo’s band in the 1880s. A breakout and melee at San Carlos Reservation resulted in the Kid’s imprisonment at Alcatraz for a time. A $15,000 bounty was advertised for his capture. There were many stories of his being killed at several different places, but no one ever collected the bounty.
4. Tom Horn, a legendary figure of the Old West, was personally hired by the commander of the 7th U. S. Cavalry Regiment at Fort Grant as a civilian chief of scouts to guide troops in the field during the Army’s 1896 campaign to hunt down the Apache Kid. He was employed in this capacity from June through September 1896. He was paid $75 per month. Tom Horn was a cowboy, government packer, interpreter, participant in the Geronimo campaigns, lawman/vigilante in Arizona’s Pleasant Valley War, Pinkerton operative, range detective, man hunter, and hired assassin for cattle barons in Wyoming. He was hanged, one day before his 43rdbirthday, in Cheyenne, Wyoming on November 20, 1903, for the murder of fourteen-year-old Willie Nickell.
5. John Slaughter of the San Bernardino ranch and some of his cowboys teamed up with a military patrol from Fort Grant along with Army Indian Scouts. They took the trail after a band of renegade Apaches who had been stealing cattle among other depredations. On May 8, 1896, they surprised an Apache rancheria in the Guadalupe Mountains. One renegade was killed and a two-year-old Apache girl was captured. John Slaughter took her home to his wife, Viola. With no children of their own, they adopted her and named her Apache May after the month she was found abandoned. They fell in love with the little girl, and she came to adore them. They took her into Tombstone several times where people would line up to see her. During one of these visits, her picture was taken by C. S. Fly, the famous Tombstone photographer. Sadly, little Apache May died in 1900, when her dress caught fire while playing near the big iron kettle in the ranch house yard where water was boiling to wash the clothes.
1. Vice President John C. Breckinridge, the youngest Vice President in history.