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.