When Solomon Warner and Rodolfo Spense’s freight train reached Tucson from Yuma on the first of March 1856, they found a handful of Mexican dragoons still garrisoned at the presidio, their departure just days away. Rather an adventurer, stone mason Warner had leased fourteen mules from Sonoran freighter Joaquín Quiroga, and hired commissary clerk Spense, to initiate his own business transporting goods between Yuma and Tucson. After trading in the wide Pima-Maricopa Villages crossroads for flour, pinole, and buskskins, Tucson may have seemed little more than a town to Warner and Spense, and a rather ragged town at that — a collection of jacales and a few dozen run-down adobe structures a fraction the size of the Gila Villages. One American visitor complained:
“The general appearance of the place gave one the impression it had originally been a hill, which owing to an unexpected but just visitation of Providence, had been struck with lightning; and the dilapidated mud walls, and dismantled jacals, that served as a shelter . . . were the residuum left in the shape of mud deposits, for not a white wall nor a green tree was to be seen there.”
“The only objects which met the eye were dilapidated bake ovens, old sheds, broken pottery, dead horses, tumble-down corrals, live dogs, drunken Indians, mules, pigs, and naked children. The sight was such an one as I had never before witnessed within the limits of civilization, and completely filled me with disgust.”[i]
Another traveler seconded this view of Tucson as “a city of mud-boxes, dingy and dilapidated, cracked and baked into a composite of dust and filth ; littered about with broken corrals, sheds, bake-ovens, carcasses of dead animals, and broken pottery ; barren of verdure, parched, naked and grimly desolate in the glare of a southern sun.” Still another added, “There is a small creek runs through the town. The water is alkaline and warm. The hogs wallow in the creek, the Mexicans water their asses and cattle and wash themselves and their clothes and drink water out of the same creek. . . It never rains there — only in the rainy season and sometimes not then. There is very little air stirring, and if hell is any hotter than this I don’t want to go there.”[ii]
Those reporting may have been trying to impress with their sophistication. Tucson was a frontier town, a brief stop on the road from ports in Texas to California, with few services. It had its own rough charm: west of the Santa Cruz, ancient cottonwoods and willows gracefully lined acequias watering three hundred acres of peach, apple, pear, fig, quince, and pomegranate orchards, as well as vineyards and fields of wheat, maize, peas, beans, onions, and pumpkins. In the town proper on the east side, chickens and naked children ranged the streets, stray dogs nipped the hooves of unfamiliar horses, and the smell of chile colorado hung in the air.[iii]
If Americans were expecting aristocratic damas and caballeros in the isolated, rough-and-tumble town, they may have been surprised to find that most men and children dressed like the Tohono O’odham and the Apache. Hilario Gallego, who turned six years old a month before Warner’s arrival, recalled that many of the smaller children didn’t wear clothing, but gradually began wearing breechcloths like the men as they grew. Most indigenous women didn’t cover their breasts, but most Mexican women carefully wrapped themselves in long dresses, and even hid their faces behind shawls or rebozos. Most water for consumption was drawn from a spring on the east bank of the Santa Cruz, or a well inside the presidio walls — not from the river itself, as some visitors had claimed. And women pounded laundry, often under an armed guard, on large rocks at an acequia of the Santa Cruz that ran along the west wall, just outside the fort.
The eroded presidio walls had once stood about twelve feet high and two to three feet thick, broken by an entrance on the west large enough to accommodate teams and wagons, and a smaller gate on the east for foot traffic. Covering nearly thirteen acres in its final configuration, the presidio was large enough to provide refuge for hundreds of Tucsonenses in times of duress. At least one cannon defended it, a platform with portholes anchored the northeast corner, and a few one-room cottages, primarily built for soldiers and their families, lined the interior. Doors for the storeroom-like houses were fashioned from saguaro ribs or brush stalks tied together with native twine or, if the owner could afford it, rawhide, and window openings were covered with rawhide strips in lieu of glass. There was a ruined church within the perimeter, north of the east entrance, but also a newer one, recently built by Cirilo León, just inside a southern gate. Masses were infrequent as Tucson was just a visita without an assigned priest. When an itinerant priest did pass through — perhaps every four or five years — he would be kept busy with a backlog of baptisms and marriages to perform. “If young people wanted to get married,” Gallego explained, “they just had to wait.”[iv]
Gallego’s father, Isidoro, farmed his family’s plot in the communal gardens west of the Santa Cruz and kept a few cows. He sometimes hired mansos (peaceful) Apache boys as herders, and several had been murdered by raiders, whose strongholds were thought to be in Aravaipa Canyon and the mountains. Some Tucsonenses, like the Gila River tribes and other native peoples, gathered mesquite beans to make pinole when it was safe to do so, and collected the fruit of the prickly pear, saguaro, and tasejo cactuses — which they dried and ground into meal, then added to the pinole to give it a tart, pickle-like flavor. When they needed food staples beyond what they could grow or forage locally, they would make rag dolls and take them to the Pima Villages to trade for beans, corn, wheat, and peas.
Teodoro Ramírez operated a store within the presidio walls, and Juan Burruel a cantina that served only mescal; Cirilo León, Juan Elías, and Ramón Pacheco each ran his own store outside the walls. About every six months the government would send a shipment of manta, unbleached cotton, from Hermosillo, which the women would fashion into clothing. Wedding celebrations were rare due the scarcity of a priest, but Tusconenses found other reasons to hold dances, which were often accompanied by a harp, violin, banjo, and a drum or whatever instruments were available. The card game monte was quite popular, as were cockfights and horse races. And in recent years, romerías from Sonora, traveling circuses of clowns, acrobats, and tightrope walkers, would pass through town — often with títeres, puppet shows, whose puppeteers would parade through the streets in advance, animating their dolls and shouting their advertisements to promote the shows. Staging of the performances was very much a cooperative affair, with spectators bringing their own chairs, pillows, and blankets for seating, and enterprising local vendors preparing enchiladas, tamales, chile con carne, coffee, and hot chocolate to serve the crowds.[v]
Tucson’s population had been 760 in 1848, but many left for the California gold fields the following year, scores died in a cholera epidemic in 1851, and others had been murdered or taken captive by raiding Apaches.[vi] Fifty-one mansos Apaches and two other Tucsonenses, for example, were killed or seized by hostile Apaches in one assault alone near Calabasas on July 31, 1851.[vii] That same year, between three hundred and four hundred Apaches — armed with weapons acquired from Americans, in trade for stolen Mexican mules — surrounded Tucson and besieged the presidio, killing four Tucsonenses at the future site of Congress Hall, on the outskirts of the village, and seizing all the town’s livestock. Then, of all things, the raiders proposed peace. Corporal Tomás Gastelo, and nine others who had successfully defended the presidio bravely met the raiders outside the presidio’s north wall to exchange embraces and small gifts as tokens of trust. But as they were negotiating a settlement, Tohono O’odham reinforcements — unaware of the turn of events — attacked, killing four Apaches and wounding many others, seized a headman, and sent the rest into flight, unintentionally spoiling a chance for peace.[viii]
Not surprisingly, the following year, on the morning of June 17, 1852, a force nearly as large returned to Tucson to set fire to the wheat fields and claim another thousand sheep, three hundred cattle, a herd of oxen, and some mules and horses. But that time the raiders didn’t propose peace. Captain Agustín Romanos dispatched twenty-five soldiers against the raiders pouring in from the north, Justice of the Peace Ygnacio Saenz, with a militia of civilians and fourteen Tohono O’odham, joined the defenders, and Sergeant Joaquín Morales led ten infantrymen and a handful of civilians in a bold attempt to reclaim the stolen stock. After a battle that lasted most of the day, the Apaches, though far superior in number, again surprised the Tucsonenses by releasing most of the stock and withdrawing north to Cañada del Oro.
By the time Tucson had assembled a force of over a hundred soldiers, mansos Apaches, Tohono O’odham, and civilians, including a dozen newly-arrived French colonists, to ride in pursuit of the raiders, it was four in the afternoon, so late the ad hoc army was unable to either catch them or recover the stock, which scattered on the desert. The Tucsonenses again thought they found American boot prints among the Apaches’ in the pursuit.[ix]
Apache attacks had abated somewhat by the time of Warner and Spense’s arrival in 1856, but herders on the edge of town and farmers within shouting distance of the presidio remained alert to the possibility of assaults. Tucson’s population had been reduced to perhaps less than five hundred, and abandoned adobes were so common that when houses fell into disrepair, families — like plague survivors in Europe centuries earlier — did the most expedient thing, and simply packed up and moved into a vacant building in better condition.[x] With so many empty buildings around, Solomon Warner had little trouble acquiring property where he could set up his store.
On March 3, he purchased a lot and house from Estaquio Ramírez for Solomon Warner and Company — that company being himself and Yuma sutlers George Hooper and Francis Hinton — and on March 8, he bought another one-room house and lot on the presidio plaza, property which had been granted to the father of Clemente Telles in 1811 in recognition of thirty years of faithful military service. And knowing he couldn’t clear much profit if he continued to lease stock and gear, Warner began searching for draft animals, wagons, and other equipment to assemble his own train.
There were perhaps twenty American civilians living in the Gadsden Purchase in March 1856, and few in Tucson. But Warner may have met some Yankees, and may have talked with the town blacksmith, Ramón Pacheco, in his search. He found only a few old aparejos, Mexican packsaddles, for sale and no draft animals. The few mules Tucsonenses had were used for transportation, as the cost of maintaining draft stock against Apache thefts was simply too great.[xi]
In August 1855, Boundary Commissioner William Emory had written General John Garland, commander of the Department of New Mexico, conveying the apprehension Tucson’s one hundred families had expressed regarding the impending withdrawal of Mexican dragoons. Emory also passed on Pima-Maricopa concerns regarding property rights, and the status of their traditional role in helping defend New Spain and Mexico’s settlements on the frontier, writing that the Gila River tribes were capable of fielding an army of two thousand warriors, and recommending them as worthy of the government’s confidence as “important auxilliaries in the defence of the new frontier.”[xii] In September 1855, seventy Tucsonenses — including John M. Pinkston, John Jones, and German immigrant Frederick Goerlitz — had sent Garland a petition written in Spanish formally requesting that American troops replace the Mexican dragoons.
Pinkston and Goerlitz attached cover letters written in English. Pinkston complained that Apache raids were so common people found it difficult to work, and urged the immediate posting of troops “before the Apaches uses us up.” Sixty-eight of the names on the petition were Spanish. (Pinkston did not sign it.) At the end of October, Garland forwarded the documents to Army Headquarters in New York, adding Emory’s letter of August, and an alarming bureaucratic note: “It is believed ‘Tucson’ is not in this department.” By December, the now four documents crossed the Adjutant General’s desk, and he attached another layer of discouragement to the package with “The transfer to the United States of the Territory writing alluded to not having been completed, it is not seen how our troops can afford the desired protection at present,” before passing it up to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis.[xiii]
While Solomon Warner was searching for stock and equipment for his freight train, and setting up shop on the properties he’d purchased, a dramatic scene was unfolding at the presidio. Most of Tucson’s soldiers and their families had moved a hundred miles south to Imuris in December and January, leaving only a sergeant, an ensign, and a small force of enlisted men to guard equipment and supplies. But in early March, Captain Hilarión García and a few soldiers returned to escort the remaining garrison and their families across the newly-established border with Mexico. As the soldiers and their families filed out of the frontier outpost where they had lived for generations, a small group of American men hoisted the stars and stripes over Edward Miles’s store.
An unusually heavy late winter storm muddied the road, so it took the caravan several weeks to reach the border and the safety of Santa Cruz. Eleven days into their adventure, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis drafted an oblique response to the remaining Tucsonenses’ petition: “When the President, by proclamation shall have extended the jurisdiction of the U.S. over the territory, it will by law be a part of New Mexico, a garrison will no doubt be necessary at or near Tucson.” It didn’t appear to be the timely support the Tucsonenses had hoped for. With the departure of the Mexican dragoons, regardless of official government acknowledgement, the strip of frontier from the Gila River to the new borderline joined the Territory of New Mexico, and Tucsonans — Tohono O’odham, Mexican American, manso Apache, American, and migrant — were watchful.[xiv]
Enter a teamster’s education to continue.
[i] Although already forty-five years old, Warner hadn’t exhausted his taste for adventure. Born in Richmondville, Schoharie County, New York on February 8, 1811 to the son of a Revolutionary War veteran, he had migrated out West eighteen years earlier to work barges and riverboats on the Mississippi, witness the California Gold Rush, and ramble as far as Panama and Nicaragua before landing on the edge of New Mexico Territory. His paternal grandfather, Nicholas Warner, had been an ensign in several companies of the New York Militia during the American War of Independence. Solomon Warner, Biographical file W_284-3, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson (hereafter AHS). Herman W. Witthoft, Sr. and Berry Enterprises, The Descendants of Maria Elizabeth Schäffer, Emigrant to America, Fifth Generation, Part Two, http://www.fortklock.com/fifthpt2.htm (accessed August 3, 2008). Arizona Daily Citizen, December 30, 1893. He and Spense had set out from Francis Hinton and George Hooper’s Yuma Crossing warehouse on February 8. Solomon Warner, “Claim of Solomon Warner for Indian Depredations, Property taken and destroyed and Wounds received,” July 21, 1890, 3-4, Solomon Warner Family Papers (1859-1951), MS 844, Box 3, folder 45, AHS. Officer notes that the consensus among Americans living in the area at the time was that the Mexican troops departed on March 10, 1856. Benjamin Sacks acknowledges the consensus, but estimates March 7 might be a more accurate date. James E. Officer, Hispanic Arizona, 1536-1856 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987), 283, 394n67. B. Sacks, “The Origins of Fort Buchanan: Myth and Fact,” Arizona and the West 7, no. 3 (Autumn 1965): 208-10, 217. Atanacia Santa Cruz thought American troops simultaneously replaced the departing Mexican dragoons on that March day, but Ms. Santa Cruz — who was five years old at the time — was mistaken in her recollection: Major Enoch Steen and four companies of the First Dragoons would not arrive until November 14, 1856, and they would pitch camp at San Xavier del Bac, not in Tucson. Frank C. Lockwood, Life in Old Tucson, 1854-1864 (Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1943), 5, 9. John Russell Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations . . . , 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1854), 2:296. J. Ross Browne, Adventures in the Apache Country (New York: Harper and Brothers, Publishers, 1869), 132-34. Samuel Woodworth Cozzens, The Marvellous Country, or, Three Years in Arizona and New Mexico . . . (1873; reprint, Secaucus: Castle, 1988), 153-54 (quote). Before Warner’s arrival in March 1856, generally speaking, Americans traveling the Gila Trail don’t appear to have stopped long in Tucson, or have been troublesome. An exception would be in the spring of 1849, when two Americans were murdered and robbed by their teamsters, and then five teamsters and an accomplice were killed for the initial murders and robbery. William P. Huff in John Hosmer et al., eds., “From the Santa Cruz to the Gila in 1850: An Excerpt from the Overland Journal of William P. Huff,” Journal of Arizona History 32, no. 1 (Spring 1991) 81, 90-94, 101. Another exception was in July 1851, when fifty Americans without passports were noticed camping a league south of San Xavier. (Officer, Hispanic Arizona, 254).
[ii] Browne, 132 (first quote). Phocion R. Way, “Overland via ‘Jackass Mail’ in 1858,” part 2, ed. William A. Duffen, Arizona and the West 2, no. 2 (Summer 1960): 160 (second quote).
[iii] Bartlett, 2:296-97. John C. Reid, Reid’s Tramp . . . (1858; reprint, Austin, Texas: The Steck Co., 1935), 227. John G. Parke, Report for That Portion of a Railroad Route, near the Thirty-Second Parallel of North Latitude . . . , 7. In United States Army Corps of Engineers, Explorations and Surveys for a Railroad Route from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, (Washington: A. O. P. Nicholson, printer, 1855-60). James G. Bell, “A Log of the Texas-California Cattle Trail, 1854,” part 2, ed. J. Evetts Haley, Southwestern Historical Quarterly 35, no. 4 (April 1932): 316. John G. Bourke, On the Border with Crook (1891; facsimile ed., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974), 55-56, 59.
[iv] Teodoro Ramírez, Ramón Pacheco, and Juan Elías appear to have been among Tucson’s community leaders. For a discussion of Chicano business and social leadership in Tucson after American settlement, see Thomas E. Sheridan, “Peacock in the Parlor: Frontier Tucson’s Mexican Elite,” Journal of Arizona History 25, no. 3 (Autumn, 1984): 245-64; and Los Tucsonenses: The Mexican Community in Tucson, 1854-1941 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986). A palisade of wooden stakes or narrow logs may have been constructed for the presidio by 1781, and the first adobe walls by 1783. The original configuration of the fort was small, but was expanded incrementally over decades. A partial excavation of the presidio in 1954 suggested a structure of no more than six hundred to 750 square feet, perhaps twenty-four by twenty-five feet, or twenty-five by thirty feet. But more extensive research conducted at the turn of the century determined the structure excavated in 1954 had simply been a torreon or guard tower of the presidio, and variation in brick sizes and building techniques suggested a patchwork of construction. Rather than 750 square feet, the final configuration of the presidio was possibly 750 feet square. Gallego remembered the wall as six feet in height, but others recalled that soldiers would fire their muskets from the roofs of the cottages, using the parapet for defense, so it must have been considerably higher. Sheridan, Los Tucsonenses, 11. Cameron Greenleaf and Andrew Wallace, “Tucson: Pueblo, Presidio, and American City: A Synopsis of Its History,” Arizoniana 3, no. 2 (Summer 1962): 22. Henry F. Dobyns, Spanish Colonial Tucson: A Demographic History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1976), 61, 196n48. Officer, Hispanic Arizona, 147. J. Homer Thiel and Jonathan B. Mabry, eds., Rio Nuevo Archeology, 2000-2003: Investigations at the San Agustín Mission . . . , Technical Report No. 2004-11 (Tucson: Desert Archeology, Inc., 2006), 4.143-146, 4.156 (Feature 351). J. Homer Thiel, “In Search of ‘El Presidio de Tucson’,” Archeology in Tucson 12 no. 3 (Summer 1998): 1-2. Hilario Gallego, “Reminiscences of an Arizona Pioneer,” Arizona Historical Review 6, no. 1 (January 1935): 76-78, 78 (quote).
[v] Gallego, “Reminiscences,” 75-77. Decennial U.S. Census (1860), County of Arizona, New Mexico Territory; Tucson Division, 16; enumerated on August 4, 1860. Browne, 133. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 84-86. Rosemary Gipson, “The Mexican Performers: Pioneer Theatre Artists of Tucson,” Journal of Arizona History 13, no. 4 (Winter 1972): 235-41. Juan M. Riesgo and Antonio J. Valdés, Memoria Estadística de Occidente (Guadalajara: Imprenta á cargo del C. E. Alatorre, 1828), 42. For biographical material on Teodoro Ramírez see James E. Officer and Henry F. Dobyns, “Teodoro Ramírez: Early Citizen of Tucson,” Journal of Arizona History 25, no. 3 (Autumn, 1984): 221-244; and Henry F. Dobyns and James E. Officer, “Hispanic Persistence in the Pimería Alta,” in the Officer Papers, AHS MS 1155. The manuscript contains material supplementing that in the journal essay.
[vi] In their petition requesting military protection, Tucsonenses complained their population had been reduced by “el Colera como tambien por emigraciones a California y otros puntos.” A “fever and ague” was reported in the Sonoran town of Santa Cruz by 1849, and arrived in Tucson by 1850. Tucson Justice of the Peace Miguel Pacheco reported 122 deaths in 1851 — nearly a quarter of the town’s population — compared to nineteen births; many of those deaths may have been due to cholera in June and July. Sonora’s assistant inspector general, José María Flores, noted that nine soldiers from Tucson’s presidio had died by July 9. Citizens of Tucson, petition to General John Garland, Tucson, September 10, 1855. United States Army, Adjutant General’s office letters Received, NA Record Group 94, Entry 12, file # P-400-1855. James E. Officer, “Yanqui Forty-Niners in Hispanic Arizona: Interethnic Relations on the Sonoran Frontier,” Journal of Arizona History 28, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 122. Huff in Hosmer et al., 82, 85-86, 92, 103. Officer, Hispanic Arizona, 24, 244, 246, 254-55. Officer and Dobyns, “Teodoro Ramírez,” 231, 232. Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of Arizona and New Mexico, 1530-1888 (San Francisco: The History Co., Publishers, 1889), 475, 475n2. Two years earlier, a Tucsonense had told James Bell that Apache raids had forced the abandonment of fifteen ranches surrounding Tucson in the previous fifteen years. James G. Bell, 316. Contaminated water is regarded as the primary source of the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, and open, hand-dug wells and irrigation canals can collect animal feces, small carcasses, and other ground pollutants in runoff from the vigorous rainstorms that typify Tucson’s monsoon season. (Thanks to Aravaipa rancher Don Lackner for the latter information.) Crop irrigation with contaminated water can spread the bacterium, and raw shellfish and uncooked fruits, vegetables, and other foods can also be sources. With the degree of commerce between Tucson and Sonora, the disease was easily introduced by travelers from Sonora, and men returning from the California gold fields. A nationwide cholera epidemic arrived in Sacramento in October 1850, and soon spread to San Francisco, a major port for departures. Miners arriving in Guaymas from California introduced cholera to Sonora, and it is known to have quickly spread to Santa Cruz and other settlements — killing 1,116 in Altar Valley alone by the end of July. While some of the American descriptions of Tucson sound alarming, conventional public health practices on the frontier at the time generally facilitated the spread of the disease. G. F. Pyle, “The Diffusion of Cholera in the United States in the Nineteenth Century,” Geographical Analysis 1, no. 1 (January 1969): 116-17. Michael Heilen, ed., Uncovering Identity in Mortuary Analysis: Community-Sensitive Methods for Identifying Group Affiliation in Historical Cemeteries (Walnut Creek, California: Left Coast Press, Inc./Tucson: S.R.I. Press, 2012), 116-17. Mayo Clinic Staff, Cholera-sources, http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/cholera/DS00579/DSECTION=causes (accessed January 11, 2012). One researcher estimates than as many as a third of the emigrants crossing the Colorado River into California at Yuma Crossing in 1849 were from Mexico. David P. Robrock, “Argonauts and Indians: Yuma Crossing, 1849,” Journal of Arizona History 32, no. 1 (Spring 1991), 32.
[vii] Officer, Hispanic Arizona, 255. As we don’t know if Justice of the Peace Miguel Pacheco included the Tucsonenses killed at Calabasas in his 122 total deaths for Tucson in 1851, there still would have been fifty more deaths than births, and we might estimate that approximately that many Tucsonenses died in the cholera epidemic. But if Pacheco did not include the men killed at Calabasas in his Tucson total, then approximately one hundred Tucsonenses died from cholera in 1851. In either event, the mansos Apaches exacted a retribution — with Captain Hilarión García and other Mexican soldiers in a collective force of seventy — when they thwarted an attack on the Gándara hacienda, and its prize of four thousand sheep, near Calabasas in April 1854. They emerged from that encounter with a string of forty Apache ears and the head of the leader of the assault, a captive of the raiders named Romero. Peter R. Brady, “Reminiscences of Peter R. Brady of the A. B. Gray Railroad Survey, 1853-1854,” in A. B. Gray, The A. B. Gray Report: Survey of a Route on the 32nd Parallel for the Texas Western Railroad, 1854, ed. L. R. Bailey (1856; edited republication, Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1963), 209-13. Juan Elías, probably mistaken, placed this incident in March 1853, and said that a dozen Americans accompanied the Apache raiders. Juan Elías (interview), “Apache Raids. Recollections of Dark Deeds of the Indians. Juan Elias Tells of their Bloody Work in the Vicinity of Tucson,” Arizona Daily Citizen, August 3, 1893.
[viii] Officer, Hispanic Arizona, 249-51. Juan Elías (interview), Arizona Daily Citizen, August 3, 1893. Juan Elías stated that the Justice of the Peace was also killed near Elías’s father’s house, but does not name him.
[ix] Officer, Hispanic Arizona, 264-66. Juan Elías placed this second great assault on Tucson in 1851. Juan Elías (interview), Arizona Daily Citizen, August 3, 1893. General Blanco told John Bartlett about the American boot prints when he was in Tucson a month later, but allowed they could have come from emigrant victims. Bartlett, 2:292. James E. Officer argues that Americans trading arms to Indians in New Mexico “certainly contributed” to Apache depredations against frontier settlements. (Officer, “Yanqui Forty-Niners,” 118.) Two months earlier, the Sonoran government in Ures had granted land in the abandoned town of Cocóspera — some fifty-five miles south southeast of Tubac, and twenty-seven miles south of the border — to forty-eight French colonists under the leadership of Carlos de Pindray. Decades of Apache raiding had driven all Mexican settlers from the mission town, and the Sonorans hoped the French, with the help of the land grant, some seed livestock, and farming implements, would reestablish it despite the likelihood of further attacks. But the French would abandon the grant within two years. It is unclear whether it was these French colonists or others who helped pursue the Apache raiders in June 1852. Joaquín V. Elías, Land grant award, April 14, 1852. MS 0805, AHS. U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, “Nuestra Señora del Pilar y Santiago de Cocóspera,” http://www.nps.gov/tuma/historyculture/santiago-de-cocospera.htm. Officer, Hispanic Arizona, 214-15, 234-35.
[x] Passing through Tucson in 1852, Bartlett (2:295) estimated the population to be just 333; in January 1854, Parke (7) estimated 600; in 1857, Reid (227) found 500. Bartlett, 2:296. Cozzens, 154.
[xi] Pima County Book of Deeds no. 1, 24-25, free translation from the Spanish, Solomon Warner, Hayden biographical file, AHS. Deeds of Real Estate, RG 110, SG 5, roll no. 85.3.51, item 4, 24-25, Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records (hereafter, ASLAPR). Warner, “Claim,” 4. Officer lists the Americans living in the Gadsden Purchase by March 1856 as John Warner Davis, Henry Alfing, and John C. Clarke at the Gándara ranch near Calabasas; Peter Kitchen at Canoa; and James W. Douglass and Christopher C. Dodson at Sopori. William H. Kirkland, Nelson Van Alstine, and V. S. Shelby — Officer notes — arrived in Tucson in January 1856; and Mark Aldrich, Fritz and Julius Contzen, H. H. (Paddy) Burke, and Edward Miles may have been present by the fall of 1855. Lockwood — perhaps referencing a reminiscence of William H. Kirkland — adds a few names to this list. But Kirkland’s date for the departure of the Mexican troops and their families was off by more than a year. The three or four American families Michler mentioned living along the Colorado the previous year may have technically been in California: neither Goerlitz, Lockwood, nor Officer appears to include them in his totals. Officer, Hispanic Arizona, 281-82, 393nn62-63. Frank C. Lockwood and Donald W. Page, “Tucson — the Old Pueblo, Part I,” Arizona Historical Review 3, no. 1 (April 1930): 47. For information on Douglass and Dodson at Sopori, see Phocion R. Way, “Overland by ‘Jackass mail’ in 1858,” part 3, ed. William A. Duffen, Arizona and the West 2, no. 3 (Autumn 1960), 285-86&nn20-23. N. Michler, From the 11th Meridian of Longitude to the Pacific Ocean, 116. In United States Congress. Senate. 1857. Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, Volume I, Part I, 34th Congress 1st Session, Senate Exec. Doc. No. 108 Serial 861 (Washington, D. C.: A. O. P. Nicholson, printer, 1857). Ramón Jesús Pacheco, Hayden biographical file, AHS. James G. Bell, 315.
[xii] William H. Emory to General John Garland, Fort Bliss, August 11, 1855. Manual transcription by Benjamin Sacks, Sacks Collection of the American West (hereafter SCAW), Document 5100, Arizona Historical Foundation (hereafter AHF), 8-9 (quote p.9). Found in Appendix A4.
[xiii] Citizens of Tucson, petition to General John Garland, Tucson, September 10, 1855. John M. Pinkston to General John Garland, Tucson, September 20, 1855 (quotes). Frederick Goerlitz to General John Garland, Tucson, September 21, 1855. United States Army, Adjutant General’s Office Letters Received, NA Record Group 94, Entry 12, file # P-400-1855 [both Pinkston and Goerlitz].
[xiv] Officer, Hispanic Arizona, 282-83, 287-88. Sacks, “Origins,” 208-10. Edward Miles leased the store over which the American flag was raised from Ramón Pacheco. Vance Wampler, Arizona: Years of Courage, 1832-1910 (Phoenix: Quail Run Publications, Inc., 1984), 35-37. William H. Kirkland (interview), “The Flag in Arizona,” Arizona Republican, June 23, 1890. William H. Kirkland, Hayden biographical file, AHS. John M. Pinkston to General John Garland, Tucson, September 20, 1855 (quote). According to Article Eight of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexican citizens living within ceded territories had the right to declare and retain their Mexican citizenship if they chose to do so, but they were required to make the declaration within a year of the treaty’s ratification. Those who did not declare their intention to retain Mexican citizenship by March 16, 1849 became American citizens by default. Article Five of the Gadsden Purchase Treaty confirmed this provision of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and extended it to new territories ceded under the Gadsden Purchase Treaty. Mexican residents of the Gadsden Purchase territories had until December 30, 1854 to declare their intention to remain Mexican citizens, or they became American citizens by default. Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; February 2, 1848, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/guadhida.asp#art8 (accessed January 23, 2014). Gadsden Purchase Treaty: December 30, 1853, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/mx1853.asp.