Miller Valley Founders Arrested & Bankrupt

 

To most people in Yavapai County and even the entire Arizona territory, the news produced a shock as great as an earthquake. 

On March 1, 1878, Samuel C (“SC”) Miller, along with his brother Jacob (“Jake,”) was arrested, causing “great excitement here in financial circles,” the Phoenix Weekly Herald reported. “They are charged with endeavoring to put property out of their hands with intent to defraud creditors. Much of their business seems to have been transacted in a loose way.” Those who were owed money by the brothers rushed to court, and the pair were declared insolvent and bankrupt.

The Terribly Scandalous Pioneers Home Superintendent

A Journal-Miner editorial described the second Pioneers Home supervisor, Percy V Coldwell, as “a malodorous individual, infecting this city, [whose] loyalty long ago ceased to be a virtue and degenerated into a vice, the stench of which has caused people here to hold their hands on their noses.” 

The Anti-Vaccination Movement of 1918

Ad for Election Day, 1918

“Arizona has a compulsory vaccination law, but it has long been a dead letter,” the Citizen wrote. “There has been so much opposition to it that public health officers have never tried to enforce it.” That was until the Spring of 1918 when Dr. WO Sweek, Secretary of the state board of health, decided it was necessary to require children to be vaccinated to attend school.

Gurley: The Man Behind the Street Name

 

A year following John Addison Gurley’s untimely death on August 19, 1863, the first edition of the Arizona Miner wrote: “Be it ours to erect to him a lasting monument, by giving his name to one of the loftiest hills, or to a district glistening with the brightest gold.” Instead, the downtown main street of Prescott, Arizona’s first territorial capital, would be named in his honor.

The story of why is most compelling.

My Life as an Indian Scout (Albert Sieber)

Pleasure to meet you. 

My name is Albert Sieber, and I was considered one of the best Indian scouts in the Arizona Territory, if not the Southwest. I was born in Germany on February 19, 1844, and came to America as a young boy, the 13th of 14 children. 

Early in 1862, I enlisted in Company B, 1st Minnesota Volunteer Infantry. I saw some terrible sights during the Peninsula Campaign in the Army of the Potomac as a Corporal and a sharpshooter. I thought I was a goner at Gettysburg when a piece of a shell hit me in the head. I sat lying on the battlefield until long after the fighting before they found me. 

Rough Rider Cofounder Gov. Alexander Brodie

^{Because he gave his life during the Spanish-American War, it is Buckey O’Neill who is the most widely remembered Prescott Rough Rider. However, when the regiment departed the Prescott depot to go to war amid the echoes of celebratory dynamite blasts, the Arizona Republic observed: “Col. Brodie is the most popular man in the command.”}

Early Descriptions of Prescott: 1864-'71

Several early visitors to Prescott were well impressed with the young settlement. For these sojourners, the buildings were secondary compared to the inspiration they felt from the spirit of her citizens and the wonderment the area bestowed.

Their accounts in the years 1864, 1867, and 1871 offer insight into how Prescott grew from little more than a mining camp to an all-American community.

Pioneer Surveyor / Miner Robert W. Groom

Originally, Robert W. Groom came to the area to mine. However, Groom was also a surveyor, which was a rarity in Yavapai County in the mid-19th century. Soon, he would be pressed into service to plot the streets and blocks for both Prescott and Wickenburg.

Groom Creek was named in his honor.

He was also involved in one of the most bizarre duels in the history of the Southwest.

Brave Woman Fights Off Indians in Granite Dells

It was September 1867. Lewis A. Stevens must have been anxious about leaving his wife at their ranch in the Granite Dells (then known as Point of Rocks). He was required to go to Prescott to serve in the 4th Territorial Legislature, and Indians had been raiding all around the vicinity recently.

As he passed by Fort Whipple (now the VA) on the way to Prescott, he hoped that its proximity to his ranch might be a deterrent to an Indian raid.

It would not...

1867: Territorial Capital Departs for Tucson

Governor's Mansion

When word first came out that there was a movement to relocate the capital from Prescott to Tucson, most of Yavapai County thought the idea to be both unfathomable and impossible.

Traditionally, American capitals had always been located near their geographic center. Even Washington, DC, now far to the east, was centrally located in relation to the 13 original colonies.

But now there was a movement to relocate the capital hundreds of miles away from the majority of the population, close to the Mexican border, where it's so hot that "one can fry a rattlesnake without a fire."

In the end, it was politics that made the unthinkable become reality.

1915: Prohibition Threatens to Close Prescott's Library

As the New Year dawned in 1915, everyone knew the saloons of Whiskey Row would be closed, but realization quickly set in that Prescott's library would be next.

Voter-initiated Prohibition just went into effect in Arizona. But the drying up of legal liquor also meant the drying up of city tax revenues on the sales and licensing of alcohol. This led the town fathers to make some tough decisions and severe cuts to public services.

The library, for example, required an annual budget of $600 ($24,000 in today's dollars), and the money was simply not going to be raised by the city in 1915 to keep the institution open.

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