The Story the Gravestones Tell

Masked by scraggly oleanders, obscured by years of neglect, there lies near downtown Phoenix an ancient cemetery. It's an anachronism, this quiet patch of land at the eastern edge of the state capitol complex. But it will, if you look closely, tell you volumes about the history of Phoenix.

The cemetery is situated between 13th and 15th avenues and spreads from Jefferson Street southward to Harrison Street, which borders the rail-road tracks. It was opened in 1884 and closed in 1909.

Today occasional maintenance work is done by the city. And history-minded people calling themselves the Pioneers' Cemetery Association are doing their level best to keep the place from going to ruin.

The association also wants to remind the people of Phoenix that their roots begin beside the railroad tracks. “What we have down there,” says Algona Winslow, treasurer of the association, playing nicely on words, “is living history built around the dead.” One of those ancients, for instance, is the Lost Dutchman. Legend recounts that Jacob Waltz (1808-1891) found gold in the Superstition Mountains and then died without telling where somebody else could find it.

You know how Phoenix started, don't you? A rumpled, moustachioed, long haired rakehell named Jack Swilling, ex-miner, ex-Confederate soldier, ex-heaven-knows-what-else, drifted down from Wickenburg about 1867. He saw the still-visible tracings of the prehistoric canals devised by the Hohokam to irrigate the fertile desert land and decided he would do likewise. So he organized a ditch company to put water on the land and grow hay to sell to the Army at Fort McDowell. And a bibulous, poetic Englishman named Darrell Duppa named the newborn town Phoenix (“A great civilization will rise, phoenix-like, from these ashes of the past”).

Well, Jack Swilling isn't buried in the old Phoenix cemetery. He died in the Yuma County Prison, where he was sent (some say unjustly) for robbing a stagecoach.

But Duppa was buried at the old cemetery and then, some years after,

BY JOSEPH STOCKER

reburied at Greenwood Cemetery, near where Van Buren Street passes over the Black Canyon Freeway.

Some other pioneers are buried in the old graveyard, too. John Tabor Alsap helped organize one of the first ditch companies and was one of the first four attorneys in Maricopa County. He was the first mayor of Phoenix, the first treasurer of the territory and the first proBate judge of the county.

And Columbus Gray, famous mainly for being the husband of Mary Adeline Gray, the first white woman to live in the Salt River Valley. Columbus Gray, a miner, developer, and rancher, built the first building for the Masonic Lodge and sold it to the Goldwaters. Adeline Gray is buried somewhere else-nobody seems know where or why.

The very first elopement in Phoenix of which there is any record was that involving Ethalinda Murray and William L. Osborn. They eloped to California on the back of a single horse, with Ethalinda's folks in heavy pursuit. Ethalinda was sixteen and Osborn was in his late twenties.

James D. Monihon is out there, too. He ran the Phoenix Livery Feed & Sales Stables (“plenty of hay and grain of the best quality”) and was mayor in the '80s. He and Captain Hancock built the first county courthouse. Land and building both cost them $1400.

There are some people in the old cemetery who really didn't have very much to do with starting the town. But they wrote their own pages-some quite colorful, some down-right bloody-in Arizona's history.

King S. Woolsey was a rancher, miner, Indian fighter, and a kind of cross between John Wayne and Caligula. He led punitive expeditions against Apaches who raided settlements and ran off with the settlers' cattle, and the settlers saw King Woolsey as a knight-errant. The Apaches took a somewhat less ennobling view of him.

Woolsey died in Phoenix at the age of forty-seven. His grave has a weathered headstone about five feet high. It proclaims that Woolsey “braved the dangers and hardships of frontier life for nineteen years with success and was the hero of many battles with the Apaches of Arizona.” Headstones are subjective rather than objective chroniclers of history.

No matter. They do tell us about those who came before us...who got our civilization going and, in a more instant case, got Phoenix going. They tell us at least something about our history. Edwin Wilmot Connelly, state cemetery director of Rhode Island, calls them “these very fragile works that reflect our heritage.” A contributor to Highways since the late 1940s, Joseph Stocker has been a reporter and public relations man. He continues free-lance writing full-time.