Yuma's Page in History

PHOTOGRAPHS BY EMIL EGER, JR.

The prison site. It was to be on a ten acre tract located on a bluff overlooking the junction point of the Gila and Colorado rivers.

Inmates for the yet to be built prison started to arrive in mid-1875 and these were lodged in the Yuma county jail. This gave the technical honor of being the first Territorial prison superintendent to William Werninger, Yuma County sheriff.

When these "prisoners without a prison" started to escape from the county bastile the board complained that another $50,000 was needed to build the projected prison. The cornerstone laying ceremony proved that the appropriation was on its way and Arizona sheriffs could feel at ease about sending their convicted murderers to Yuma, to escape the lynchings with which they had had to contend.

In June, 1876, enough of a structure had been erected on the bluff to make the prison more than just a name on the status books and George M. Thurlow posted a $5,000 bond and became the first prison superintendent with a prison to superintend.

Administration buildings, cells and walls went up and were carved out in greater number with labor supplied by an ever-increasing prisoner population.

A wall 18 feet high, eight feet wide at the bottom and tapering to a four feet width at the top ringed the cell blocks and prisoner work shops. The guards, who lived in town when not on duty, walked the wall from the lookout posts at each corner.

Captain F. S. Ingalls, pilot on steam boats which came into the seaport town that was Yuma, was appointed superintendent. Captain Ingalls, father of the present mayor of Yuma, is credited with taking the fledgling bastile and making a prison of it. He came from a long line of military men and brought a sorely needed quantity of discipline to both prisoners and guards.

Chester A. Arthur became president of the United States in 1885, however, and, as so often happens with a change in Washington administration, replacements were made all the way down the line. President Arthur appointed a new governor to the Arizona Territory. The new governor appointed Thomas Gates, of Tucson, prison superintendent at a salary of $3,000 a year.

Gates in his first report showed 169 prisoners and 17 guards. The prisoners were kept busy building and repairing the prison proper and worked at trades such as wagon making, garment manufacture, blacksmithing and lace making.

It was during Gates' term of office that one of the most famous (and infamous) of the prison's big breaks was attempted. It was a late October afternoon in 1887 when seven inmates captured Gates and tried to make their way to the river. The Gatling guns in the towers were of no use for if they opened up on the prisoners their shield, Gates, would undoubtedly fall. But B. F. Hartlee, rated the best shot to ever serve as a guard, calmly leaned against a tower support and started to pick off the captors with his deadly rifle. Four of the seven fell and one of the remaining three stabbed Gates in the neck and back. A "lifer" then went to the aid of Gates and, with the help of guards, finished the mutiny. The "lifer" was pardoned for his act but Gates never fully recovered from his wounds, resigning his position a few months after the break and later committing suicide.

Captain Ingalls was again appointed superintendent.

Shortly after this a Tombstone bartender named Buckskin Frank Leslie went too far. He had killed 13 men and after each killing Boothill marked up another addition and the matter was forgotten. But number 14 happened to be a woman and chivalry being what it was a jury of his peers sent him packing to Yuma for "life," in the company of a deputy sheriff.

Then in 1892 Pearl Hart, "Arizona's Girl Bandit" checked in at the "Hell-Hole on the Bluff" for a long stay.Under the hand of Captain Ingalls the prisoners were what could be termed "model." Despite this the desperate character of the inmates broke through. Nobody is sure just what touched off the break, whether it was planned well in advance or came "on the spur of the moment." At any rate a break there was and no Hartlee's deadly aim to pick off the offenders.

Under the hand of Captain Ingalls the prisoners were what could be termed "model." Despite this the desperate character of the inmates broke through. Nobody is sure just what touched off the break, whether it was planned well in advance or came "on the spur of the moment." At any rate a break there was and no Hartlee's deadly aim to pick off the offenders.

Some of the escaping prisoners had somehow come by firearms and as they made their way to the wall they picked off guards who tried to reach the Gatling gun in the tower.

Suddenly the Gatling gun started to chatter and the break was quelled. The person on the trigger end of the Gatling, the anecdote tellers of Yuma will say with pride, was the superintendent's wife, Mrs. Ingalls.

But there were more changes in Washington and it followed right down the line. Superintendents came and went and the early 1900's saw the beginning of agitation for the removal of the prison to a point inland.

In 1903 certain members of the legislature suggested a move to Benson but this was defeated and the bickering went on.

In 1907, however, a more concerted effort was made and the legislature awarded the penitentiary to the city of Florence and appropriated $150,000 to finance the construction.

Thomas Rynning was appointed superintendent of the prison and after spending a short time in Yuma went to Florence to supervise the erection of the new prison and ready it for the transfer of prisoners.

The spring of 1909 saw the opening of the Laguna Dam for irrigation purposes, bringing a new life and livelihood to Yuma and the final transfer of prisoners to Florence.

The prison's uselessness was to last only a short while, however, for with the burning of the downtown high school in 1910 the Yuma school board decided to make use of the prison buildings as an institution of higher learning. So from 1910 until 1914, when the new Yuma Union High School was built, algebra, American history and the languages supplanted solitary, clanking chains and iron bars. Even today the influence of the four years stay of the blue and white inside prison walls is felt-all the athletic teams of the present school carry the team name, "Criminals."

The prison itself was to start a downhill slide after the students left for newer quarters, however. A few of the townspeople took visitors "up on the hill" occasionally and there is a worn spot on the southern wall where couples were wont to crawl over on a dark night to make use of an empty cell for whispering sweet nothings. But the bluff was slowly being forgotten by most and the Southern Pacific Railroad started eating into it from the west side for right-of-ways for the steam behemoths which carried the vegetables to market.

Agitation was finally started to tear down the remaining buildings and make use of that land which was becoming an eye sore and which, "could be used for something more useful than a lovers' rendezvous and a hobo jungle."

City Councilman John Huber had another idea. Other communities in the Baby-State had made capital of their old landmarks, had made tourist attractions of their points of interest. Why not do the same thing with one of the few remaining territorial prisons in the country?

Why not indeed. After much haggling Mrs. Clarissa Winsor was called in to act as museum custodian. March 28, 1941 saw the opening of The Yuma Territorial Prison Museum and the launching of a plan to restore the prison itself so that an era of history would not be left entirely to the imagination.

The museum was housed in the building which once served as the prisoners mess-hall and chapel and, later, the high school gymnasium. And heirlooms and mementoes of the Yuma that was, started to come in, loaned by interested parties for the sake of perpetuating in modern minds the life and times of the early Southwest.

Mrs. Winsor, whose father, J. K. Brown, was the Tucson sheriff who transported Pearl Hart from his jail to Yuma to start her sentence, estimates that there are at least 10,000 articles on display in the museum.

The ceiling is made up of panels, 3' x 6', painted by a Yuma Indian. Each panel is a different symbol in the Indian sign language and the painter refused to tell Mrs. Winsor what his painted message meant. She hasn't ever been able to find out.

The walls are muraled with scenes in the history of the area and one studying them would never be able to tell they were done by a Mexican lad who never had an art lesson in his life.

The six feet high by 16 feet long oil painting that depicts an Indian scene along the far wall was done in nine days by an Italian prison of war.

Set in one corner is one of the first pianos ever introduced into the Arizona Territory. It was brought around the Horn in 1875 at a reputed cost of $3,000. This piano has survived immersion in two floods yet still answers to a fingered chord.

There's the nickelodeon from the old Barrel House Salon, with its paper-punched roll of music and modern day nickels dropped in by visitors, "just to see if it will play." It doesn't.

There is a collection of 44 rifles, some of which were carried by the guards who patroled the sun-baked walls above the exercise yard.

And there is the saloon clock, with its numbers painted backwards, which can be read correctly only by looking at its reflections in a mirror-as the boys looked into the bar mirror to see if they had time for "one more before supper.' Ten thousand reminders of the west that was, including the scales that measured the dust from the King of Arizona mine and, according to a visiting Smithsonian Institute man, "A better collection of old typwriters than can be found at the Smithsonian."

There too is the hand carved wooden china closet that a lifer made for Mrs. Captain Ingalls. The case was never finished due to a governor's pardon but it contains, among other things, a book on which is written, "Walter Ingalls, Church of Scotland, Confession of Faith Dated August 1643-Feb. 1649, Printed Philadelphia by B. Franklin 1745."

In the center of the museum is a table on which sets a full scale model of the prison as it was when its gates still clanked in finality. It was made by caretaker Charles Cushing who will tell you, "I started this thing over a year ago and I haven't finished yet. Don't 'spose I'll ever finish it 'cause some old timer's always comin' in here with a picture or an article that proves that I got the tubercular cell block a couple feet west of where it oughta be, or somethin' like that."

Then old Charley will lead you down closer to the river, outside the crumbling leavings of the adobe wall. He'll take you through a gate in a wire fence and you'll be among the weather-beaten boards, each stuck in the ground at one end of a small mound of rocks. And if you look closely you'll be able to make out names and numbers and dates carved in those boards, the final chapter in the books of the real "lifers" of the Yuma prison.

And if you are one of the fortunate ones you'll visit the old graveyard late in the afternoon and, looking through the angle formed by the large wooden cross in the center, you'll gaze across a smooth flowing Colorado River and see the green of the rolling country and the hazy background of mountains.And you'll probably think of what you saw written on the wall of the only cell to bear a prisoner's words, "Have you had a kindness shown Pass It On Twas not yours for you alone Pass It On Let it travel down the years Let it wipe another's tears 'Til in heaven the deed appears Pass It On."