Author: discoverseaz

John C. Cremony met Pima and Maricopa Indians for the first time in 1850 when he was traveling in the Gila Bend area with the Bartlett / Conde Boundary Commission. Cremony was very favorably impressed with their friendliness and good nature, as can be seen from the following excerpt about them taken from his book, Life…

“The mountains and the sun…were made his allies, the eyes of his command, and the carriers of swift messages. By a system of heliograph signals, communications were sent with almost incredible swiftness; in one instance a message traveled seven hundred miles in four hours. The messages, flashed by mirrors from peak to peak of the mountains,…

The illustration above shows Geronimo and his band returning from Mexico through Skeleton Canyon with a herd of horses stolen from ranchers in Mexico. Frederic Remington, published in Harper’s Weekly, August 18, 1888 In Pursuit of Geronimo Following his surrender in 1883, Geronimo and his band had agreed to live on the San Carlos Reservation. In…

In 1858 John Butterfield of Utica, N.Y. won a government contract of $600,000 a year for six years to carry mail from St Louis to San Francisco twice a week. Butterfield spent more than a million dollars getting the company started. He ran between 100 and 250 coaches, 1000 horses, 500 mules and had about…

Soon after the Gadsden Purchase the territorial legislature had begun petitioning the U.S. Congress to divide the huge expanse along an east-west line. The Congress in Washington, deeply involved in the sectional controversies that preceded the Civil War, refused to do this. Insofar as people in the territory were concerned about the Civil War, sympathies…

1885-86 written by Lieutenant Marion P. Maus, First Infantry Preface by General Nelson Miles In 1883 General George Crook made an expedition into Mexico which resulted in the return of the Chiricahua and Warm Springs Indians under Geronimo and Natchez to the Apache reservation. For nearly two years they remained quiet, when tiring of peaceful…

The Bascom Incident In her book, Chains of Command: Arizona and the Army, 1856-1875, Constance Altshuler published a detailed study of the activities of the U.S. Army in Arizona, using military records from the National Archives and other primary source material. Her study of the Bascom Incident of 1861, “the most famous incident of the pre-Territorial period,…

Father Kino’s bones can be viewed by visitors to the memorial at Magdalena de Kino By the time Father Kino reached New Spain, Jesuit and Franciscan priests had established at least the outward form of Christianity from Durango to Chihuahua and from Culiacan to the present-day Arizona border. The passage into the northeast was blocked…