USA > Arizona > History of Arizona, Vol. V > Part 21
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"At that time there wasn't a white man be- tween Albuquerque and Prescott. We didn't come through Fort Wingate, but came through the Zuni Villages, through Navajo Springs, and struck the old Beale trail, struck this at Navajo Springs, and about the first white man we struck on our trip was old man Banghart, Ed Wells' father-in-law. We finally landed in Prescott; had quite a storm on the road coming out; where
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Flagstaff is now, about twelve inches of snow fell; it was the latter part of November when we got into Prescott. I never kept much track of the dates. Old Hance, who has been a guide about the Canyon, says we landed there on the 2nd day of December, 1868, so that is my history of the trip to Arizona in the early days.
"When we organized to come to Arizona there were only four of us had enough to buy riding animals, so we bought ponies for the rest of the fellows as we had to have a large party for pro- tection. We had a character called 'Dublin'; he was an Irishman and claimed to be a first cousin of the great pugilist, Tom Sayers, an English prizefighter, and this fellow was somewhat on the pugilistic order himself. We christened him 'Dublin Tricks' on the road. He afterwards started a saloon. After I got into Prescott pro- visions were scarce and high. For instance, I had bought a batch of flour in Albuquerque. I traded for it myself, and it was in 100 lb. sacks. When I got into Prescott I sold all my stock ex- cepting a couple of ponies. A pair of mules sold for $500; they cost me $40 apiece in Albu- querque. I had four big cavalry horses, and I sold one team for $400, and the other for $450; horses and mules were very scarce on account of the Indians raiding the outfits, and getting away with most of their stock, and draft stock was very high. I had a peculiar experience just a few days before I left Fort Union-this reminds me of a deal I got into while we were organizing. One day at our camp outside the post, we heard an auctioneer hollering out, calling for bidders for the extra stuff at the commissary yard. I
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stopped in to see what was going on, and they had three great stacks of old rusty bacon, sow belly, and it was in piles of fifty, fifty-five and sixty thousand pounds. It was claimed that in 1864 they had used this bacon for breastworks at Fort Craig. It had been knocked around from one post to another, and was now being sold as condemned army stores. Some of it looked like pretty good bacon, and I thought I knew where I could handle it, trade it off for stuff along the road, and I thought I might load up with a couple of thousand pounds, and trade it off. The first pile offered was the fifty-five thousand pound pile. I bid on it twenty-five dollars for the pile; others bid and I ran it up to fifty-five dollars, and it was knocked down to me for that figure. The other two piles went considerably higher. A couple of days after I got to thinking I had a white elephant on my hands, and a fellow by the name of Collier, who had a station, a Gov- ernment station to look after the teams, asked me what I would take for that bacon. I said to him that I wanted to take about fifteen or eighteen hundred pounds of it. He looked it over, and said he would make me a bid on it; that he would let me take whatever I wanted of it, fifteen hundred pounds at least, and that he would give me $125 for the balance. I told him the bacon was his; that I might be able to get more for it, but didn't want to bother with it. The next day I sorted out my bacon and got a pretty good class of bacon. When I got out on the road I used to trade the bacon for fresh mut- ton, vegetables, and so forth, and I traded some of it at Albuquerque for about six hundred
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pounds of flour, flour in 100 1b. sacks, and when we got into Prescott and split up, we disbanded there, Branneman and the Hance boys were with us, I thought of going through to California, expected to clean up and go through; didn't ex- pect to stop here in Arizona, and a fellow by the name of Silverthorn, who was keeping a restau- rant where the St. Michaels Hotel now is, came over and asked if we had any flour, and I told him that we had about two sacks, but that I ex- pected to go through to California by way of Ehrenberg, and he said that he would give me sixty dollars a hundred for it; there was no flour in Prescott, only a little cornmeal. They got a little from the soldiers at Whipple, who used to steal it and sell it at sixty cents a pound. Old John G. Campbell ran a store at that time, and he came over to my camp and wanted to know if I had any bacon left. I told him I had about two hundred and fifty pounds, but that I wanted to keep a little of it, twenty to twenty-five pounds, and he went and looked it over and said: 'Take ninety cents a pound for it-for what you can spare ?' I had to ask him the second time what he said ; it kind of took my breath away. I said ves, so he told me to bring it down to the store, and I did, and sold my rotten bacon at ninety cents a pound; so I cleaned up and sold every- thing I had except a little saddle pony ; I figured on going to California. An old fellow came to me, his name was Johnson; he lived about six miles south of Prescott; he was a blacksmith ; he was raised in Baltimore and came to California during the excitement in the gold days, and drifted to Arizona, and he and a man by the name
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of Zimmerman had a ranch, they raised pota- toes, etc .; had quite a place in the hills at that time, and they had taken a contract to make shingles for the Government, four hundred thou- sand shingles for Camp Verde. He wanted to know if I and one of the boys who came with us knew anything about making shingles. This fellow with me had been in the lumber woods, but didn't know anything about shingles or shingle making, but I had made them in Canada, my father used to make them and trade them for cattle, etc. I thought the matter over, and thought that I might wait over that winter, and go to California in the spring, so I asked him what wages he was paying. He said he was pay- ing a hundred dollars a month to good hands. I told him that I thought with my knowledge of lumber and working shingles I could earn more than that; that I would not mind taking a con- tract from him for making shingles, but he said for me to come out for a week or two and let him see what I could do. He had about ten or twelve men burning charcoal for the government too. He was hauling timber to the Sterling Mill, also; had quite a bunch of men around there. So I went down to his camp and took a couple of men out with me to hunt shingle timber. I knew how to select my trees, and I made such headway in three or four days that he had me come in. He had built a camp, with a log cabin fifty feet in length, and he had three or four men working in the camp, working up the timber, and he was paying men a hundred dollars a month and they were averaging about half a thousand shingles a day; they thought that was pretty big
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work. The first week I worked in camp I aver- aged over eight thousand in one week, and the old man offered to pay me a hundred and fifty dollars a month if I would take charge of the camp. We would work until ten o'clock at night by the firelight. So I worked on that shingle proposition until about the first of June the next summer. The old man was quite thrifty and a rustler, and he and his partner had taken a con- tract, a subcontract, for the cutting of a thousand tons of hay in the Williamson Valley for the Government. There was an excellent crop of wild hay there, blue stem wire grass, red top, and one thing and another of that kind, and they had located about four hundred acres of the land, taking it up as homesteads, etc., to cut hay on it. They were to get eleven dollars a ton, put in shock, so it could be loaded on wagons. George Bowers and C. C. Bean were in together. They were getting thirty-five dollars a ton for that hay at Fort Whipple, and they made a contract with Zimmerman & Johnson to cut this hay at eleven dollars a ton, they to furnish two mowing machines, hayricks, etc. They got after me to go in with them and take a third interest in the cutting of this hay. It was a very dangerous proposition. The Indians were very bad those days, the Wallapais, Tontos and Mohave- Apaches were very bad. They had driven me out of the woods a couple of times the winter before. I remember once fifteen of them came on to where we were one morning just after we started work. We had quite a time getting out of the way. We got back to camp and armed V-22
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ourselves. The snow was on the ground and we struck their trail, and they went south on the Hassayamp. We took after them and killed two of them, and the others got away, and once after- wards we came very near getting killed. I knew this was a dangerous proposition, but I went in with them, they were to give me a third interest, and I was supposed to take all the chances and do all the work, which I did. We got out there about the 8th of June that year, and started to cut hay. Zimmerman went out for a few days, but he used to go on a drunk and didn't amount to much. Old man Johnson was kind of feeble and he stopped at the camp to look after the boys. I had two men, one to rake and one to bunch up the hay, and a Frenchman to cook. I ran the mowing machines myself. I had two machines ; in case one gave out I had the other ready to keep right on to work. I would get out at day- light in the morning, take one team until ten o'clock, and another team until two, and then work until dark with the first team. We put up about eighteen tons of hay a day. There were Indians on the hills all the time. I used to carry a gun strapped across my breast and two six shooters on me. We were all armed in about the same way, we always kept within hailing distance of each other, and we had a couple of dogs, the best scouts I ever saw. I depended on them more than on anything else. We kept those dogs scouting around and in that way I guess we saved our lives many times that sum- mer. There were eight or ten men killed be- tween Williamson Valley and Prescott at what was called the Divide, that is nine miles from
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Williamson Valley. About a month before we got through with our hay contract there were two big freight teams driven by a fellow of the name of Buchanan, which was one of the best outfits that there was there at that time. Buchanan came from Nevada, and some parties said that he had stolen the teams. There was another fellow by the name of Wood, Cap Wood, who came through as a sutler with some cavalry out- fit to Fort Whipple during the summer, and he had a team of ten mules. The government had a lot of corn at Camp Wallapai, and was short of corn at Fort Whipple, and these two fellows, Buchanan and Wood, got a contract to haul that corn from Wallapai to Whipple, and they got on the north side of the divide, and the Indians jumped them and got away with two teamsters. Buchanan himself got away and ran to Lee's ranch, about four miles from them, and got some help and went back. When they got back the Indians had got away with all the stock, about twenty-four head of stock. Several parties going back and forth there were killed there.
"I had a little experience myself the first ten days I was at Williamson Valley. We had our headquarters at a little spring at the edge of the valley, about two miles from where the crossing is at the present time. A fellow by the name of Jim Fine had taken up a little ranch at the crossing, and he had a fellow working with him, cutting hay for a livery outfit in Prescott, they were using the old fashioned scythes to cut the hay, and the Indians came up on the ridge above them and fired on them, and killed this fellow who was working for Fine. Fine had
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a horse three or four hundred yards below where he was, and he jumped on it barebacked and rushed down to our camp; our camp was about a mile and a half below, and he told us what they had done. We turned out, three men besides myself, and hitched up with all our stock ; daren't leave anything there for fear the Indians might get away with it, and went to the place where the fellow had been killed. We put blankets around him and dug a hole about three feet deep and buried him. It was mighty hard to dig; it was in June, hot weather, and after we buried him, Jim pulled out at night and went into Prescott and was away two days. The In- dians were watching us, and as soon as he pulled out they knew he would bring a crowd. They had taken this fellow's clothes, leaving him naked, and between the time that Jim pulled out and got back, they had come back, dug up the remains and dragged them down to a little well near the cabin and dumped them in the well. Jim found the trail where they had dragged the body and followed it up to find the grave empty. He came to our camp and stopped all night with us, and told us what had happened, and I sent a man up with him the next day and they filled up the well, threw in some dirt, and covered it up, and dug another well some little distance away. There was a government express ran be- tween Wallapai and Whipple, and the next day after they had dug up this body and thrown it into the well, this bunch of Indians met the ex- press party, caught them on the divide, and killed the soldiers and got away with the mules.
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"I had another experience the next summer. I took a contract to make shingles for the Gov- ernment and contracted for four hundred thou- sand shingles, part for Camp Wallapai, and part for Camp Date Creek. I had four men in the camp and about once a week I used to go down to town to get supplies. We had been down there about two months and were getting along finely, and one day I started about four o'clock in the afternoon, in March, and had my two six shooters strapped on me. The road to the Ashley Sawmill passed our camp over on Groom Creek, about a quarter of a mile from Granite Creek, and I followed on down the road, which struck west and then north at Granite Creek, and after I struck the old Sterling road on Granite Creek, about three miles and a half from Prescott, I saw some Indian tracks, across the road. In those days we were generally on the lookout anyway, and I saw where the Indi- ans had travelled fifty or a hundred yards along the road and then dodged off, and then crossed back. I got along about half a mile further-a little further down the main road there is a hill, Red Hill, and right below is a canyon across the road, and just as I got to the top of the hill above the canyon, I saw something in the brush about a hundred and fifty yards below me. There was a pine stump there about three feet high, and I dodged behind that stump and kept watch, and in a few moments an Indian dropped down into the road, came off the ridge, and directly came another and another until there was five of them there. The first one that dropped down into the road had on a long buckskin shirt which
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looked to be about six feet in length; it looked like a nightshirt. They had seen me coming and got down there to cut me off. They had got on a high point and watched me coming. That was their game. I thought I was in for it, and they blazed away at me. I kept my head very low behind the stump, and I would reach up and get my gun on the top of the stump and shoot, but they were much lower and they soon discovered that I was overshooting them, and they came closer and three of them had those old Henry rifles, and two of them had bows and arrows, and they kept coming closer and closer, and I fired eleven shots at them over the top of that stump, and I was down to my last cartridge, cap and ball cartridge, and I thought I had better break for camp. By cutting across through the brush I could strike my camp much quicker than by going back on the main road to Prescott. Just as I jumped from behind the stump they shot me with an arrow in the neck. I have the scar yet. I grabbed it and broke the wooden part of it off and left the point in there. I had to run across the road, and when I jumped up the pistol, which still had one cartridge in it, fell out of the holster, my right holster, which was loose on the belt. The pistol fell out and dropped in the brush, and if you ever saw a man run, I did. I had on an old fashioned white hat, and they put a bullet through that. Clothing was scarce in those days, and I was wearing a soldier's blouse, and they fired at me from be- hind, and one of the bullets went right under my arm pit, cutting through the blouse, and I thought I was bleeding like fury from the burn
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of that bullet. I was bleeding freely from the wound in my neck. They followed me about three hundred yards and then let up and shouted and hollered like fury. How I did run until I struck three men working for me, about four or five hundred yards from my camp, and I fell right over in a heap, loss of blood and exhausted, of course. My men picked me up and took me to camp; got the arrow head out of my neck, and stopped the bleeding, and while I was not cut very deep, it made quite a wound. On Sunday, a day or two afterwards, a couple of men from the sawmill were going to town, and I went down with them, and when we came to the place where I had had my fight with the Indians, I looked around and found my pistol. The Indians had run right over it and never saw it, and I picked it up as we went down to town two days afterwards.
"That evening that they got me on the run, there was a superintendent named Baker in charge of the old sawmill, the Sterling Sawmill, over on Groom Creek, and he had a magnificent riding horse he brought over from California; he had been away from there for about three months, and after the Indians had given me this chase, they went up the road about three quarters of a mile, and old man Baker, he came along from Prescott, going out to his camp, and they jumped him there, shot his horse; the horse dropped, and the bullet that killed the horse went right through the horse and struck the old man on the ankle, kind of a spent bullet, and he got off and started to run to Johnson's camp about a mile and a half away. Johnson had an old log cabin there with a dirt floor. The first log
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formed a sill across the doorway and you had to step over it to get down in the cabin. Baker rushed to the door, struck that log, and fell over, and didn't come to for three or four hours. Johnson's outfit got back next morning. He told them what had occurred, and they went to the place where the Indians had shot the horse. All they found was the tail and the mane of the horse ; everything else was gone.
"In the spring, in February, 1871, I started for California, in fact, I started for Puget Sound, Washington Territory. I had been rus- tling pretty lively for the Government, cleaning up eight or nine thousand dollars in a couple of years; made thirty-five hundred dollars out of the hay; and the next winter I made four thou- sand dollars out of the shingles, and in March, 1871, I started for California and for the Sound country. At Wickenburg I fell in with a couple of men who were going to South America. They told a story of a fellow having mines in Peru, and they wanted me to go with them. By the time we got to San Francisco, we went to Los Angeles first and then took a steamer to San Francisco, they talked me into going to South America with them. So we took passage on a sailing vessel to the San Blas country. I made the trip into the mines with these fellows, stopped there about three months, got disgusted, thought it wasn't the place for me as I wasn't a miner, and I got so disgusted that I came back to the coast. Took a roundabout way to get back to the coast; spent about six months travelling around to get back to the coast. Finally got to the Sound country. I went over to New West-
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minster, now a suburb of Vancouver, and spent about two weeks over there waiting for an ex- pedition going about three hundred miles up the coast, and while there I met some fellows who had been there the year before and they told me what hardships they had undergone going in and coming out. They told me that there was about two hundred and fifty miles of lakes, etc., to travel over, and everybody had to pack grub, etc., and I gave that up. On my way back I took a steamer to Seattle, at that time a town of about seven hundred inhabitants, and on the steamer I struck an old California miner, and I was in- quiring about farming interests and land inter- ests there in the Sound country. I got ac- quainted with two fellows, and one of them had a big claim, and he wanted to sell out. I went down to look at his property which was about twenty miles from the present town of Belling- I
ham. It was tide country, like Oakland. finally made a deal for it and spent about nine months filing on it under the old pre-emption law. Lived on it long enough to make final proof. The land was surrounded by a slough, and the water would back up when it was high tide, on the land, and I had to throw up a levee about five feet high; each one of us around there had to do his share. I had about a hundred and seventy rods of levee to build. I went to work and got mine completed, and the others were a little slow, and were not ready to join me, so, after I had made final proof on the property, I thought I would come over to Portland, over into Oregon, so I came over there in the fall of the year, and the old railroad, now the Southern Pacific, was
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building at that time, and there was an outfit there, they were putting in pile drivers, and I came up there and took charge of the crew for the winter.
"After I got through there I decided I would go into the cattle business, and I came over to Eastern Oregon, had a young fellow with me, and we went up there looking for a cattle ranch. It was a fine country for that purpose. That was the spring of 1873. I spent about four months there, then came over to the Grand Round, from there to Spokane, and went clean up to the British possessions, travelling around looking for a cattle ranch. We located about twenty-five miles from the Columbia, about sixty iniles from the Dells, and then we came back and I bought a bunch of cattle. I didn't expect to stick to them myself very long, but I put this young fellow to work. When I left Arizona I left about two thousand dollars in money uncol- lected. C. C. Bean owed me about $1700, and he was to send it to me, but, 'out of sight, out of mind,' and the money didn't come, so I left this young fellow in charge of about fifty head of cows with calves, and about a hundred and fifty head of yearling heifers and steers, and I came back to Arizona, and found there was but little show of collecting this money from Bean at this time. Before I left Arizona, however, I had sold Bean the possessory right to some land in Williamson Valley, and he had just got title to it when I got back, so I took a mortgage on the proposition. I knocked around for six months, took a contract for jobbing for the Gov- ernment, putting up buildings, and remained in
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Arizona for about three years before I got things straightened out, and then I went back to Ore- gon, and drove the cattle I had there over here to Arizona. That was in 1877, and I have been here ever since in the cattle business."
Mr. Sullivan is an old bachelor, and is passing the evening of his days in the State to whose prosperity and advancement he has contributed the best years of his life. He is among those pioneers remaining with us who braved the dan- gers incident to the early settlement of Arizona, "in the days that tried men's souls," when he carried his rifle on his machine while mowing hay, to protect himself from the incursions of savage foes.
John H. Marion was a man of great force of character; of bulldog tenacity, exceptional abil- ity, and great perseverance. He was born in Louisiana in 1835; came to California in the later fifties, and, being a printer by trade, was employed for some time at Oroville, Butte County, on a weekly paper there. He came to Arizona about the year 1865, being attracted here by the reported rich gold discoveries. He spent a year or two in prospecting; had several brushes with the Indians; finally located in Pres- cott and became part owner of the Prescott Miner about the year 1866. He continued as its editor for about ten years. When party lines were drawn in the Territory in 1870, he aligned himself with the Democratic party, and was always an able exponent of the principles of Democracy as held by the party to which he gave his allegiance. He was a public spirited man ;
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