A Perfect Chaos of Boys

One day in the year 1881, Clara Stillman of Bridgeport, Connecticut, ducked through an opening in a miner's shack, took her place behind her desk-an overturned beer barrel and began to teach in the first school in Bisbee, Arizona. At recess the students discovered a large snake, coiled and ready to strike, in a corner of the school yard. Terrified but knowing she was on trial with the children, Clara asked them to bring her some rocks; summoning all her courage, she battered the snake to death. Then, feeling ill, she dismissed the class.

In those early years, teachers through out Arizona Territory often had to call on all their resources to meet the challenges of even one short school term. For Clara Stillman, coping with the snake must have made her next hurdle seem easy. Doors, windows, and furniture were luxuries she could forgo, but she saw a blackboard as a necessity. With pioneer ingenuity she improvised by nailing two boards together, painting them, and using a piece of talc as chalk. Another teacher resorted to a simpler expedient: using the sandy floor as a "blackboard."

Luckily for Clara Stillman, parents grew worried that Indians might attack the little shack used for a schoolhouse. So they relocated classes to the comparative safety of the Miner's Hall in the Brewery Gulch section of Bisbee. But even there, Apache forays made "Indian drills" necessary. Four blasts from the mine whistle-two short, one long, one short-and everyone would troop down into a mine tunnel to wait until danger was past.

For teachers in rural Tempe, skunks added to the excitement and difficulties. Charles Pickrell, recalling his school days, said that the boys' favorite sport of an evening was to set a trap at an opening under the two-room adobe school building. "The result was invariably a holiday, but never twice by the same teacher."

Schools might be housed in anything from the miner's shack in Bisbee to the Saloon in Ehrenberg and the one-time jail in Yuma, where teacher Mary Elizabeth Post reported scribblings of prisoners on the walls were still visible through the whitewash.

Ingenious improvisations characterized school furniture. Children sat on railroad ties in one school, according to Thamar Richey, and on overturned boxes in another. Undaunted by a lack of textbooks, teachers would scavenge the area, often using books children brought from home.

Yet for most teachers, problems of language and class size posed more formidable challenges than primitive conditions, skunks, or Indian drills. In a preliminary gesture, the territorial legislature in 1864 had mandated schools for communities of sufficient size. But lawmakers failed to appropriate any money, except for a $250 matching-grant offer, and only Prescott accepted that to start a school. Augustus Brichta, an early Tucson public school teacher, had to cope with 60 students and was unpaid for two of his six months of teaching. Not until 1871, through Governor A. P. K. Safford's determined efforts, did primitive public-funded schools begin to develop in the larger communities.

"A perfect chaos of boys" is how John Spring recalled his experience as the sole teacher in Tucson's first public school under the new legislation. (In 1870 a girls' school was started by nuns, and soon after that another school was opened by Mrs. L. C. Hughes, known as the "Mother of Arizona.") By the end of the third day of classes, Spring reported, 138 students had turned up, "not one of whom could express himself intelligently in the English language." Fortunately, Spring was fluent in Spanish and conscientiously translated everything he said.

Despite his enormous enrollment and the language problem, he somehow managed to teach for 15 months, but he declined the honor of another appointment without an assistant. "He kept them Quiet, kept them clean, and taught them penmanship, arithmetic, drawing, geography, and English," wrote historian C. L. Sonnichsen.

Parents readily recognized that teachers needed to enforce strict discipline to handle their huge and motley classes. In fact, said John Spring, "a great many [parents] seemed to measure the teacher's capacity by his ability to admin ister severe corporal punishment." Many times, he remembered, parents urged him "to flog a boy to the blood." On one occasion he was asked to beat a youngster who had been sent to buy some coffee for breakfast and had not returned by nightfall, having skipped school as well.

With pupils as old as 18 enrolled in the lower grades, it is no wonder teachers needed to be firm. One of the "firmest" was George Metcalf, who taught for five years in Tombstone. "Metcalf had the bigkids buffaloed," former student Charlie Laughlin remembered. "He would pick up the children by the hair of the head and would also pick up boys and bang their heads against the blackboard." Despite a territorial prohibition against corporal punishment, the trustees were reported to have said to Metcalf, "You rule the school [even] if you don't teach them a damn thing."

Some male teachers tried valiantly to avoid whipping their charges. In 1890, Tombstone's John Rockfellow was de scribed as a fine teacher but called "too easy" on the children. So was the Rev. Alexander Gilmore, whose class in Pres cott during the 1870s was recalled by Army Capt. John Bourke as a "miniature bedlam.

According to Bourke, teacher Gilmore once tried to punish Dick Dana-"the worst imp" in class for throwing a spitball by making him stand behind the teacher wearing a dunce cap. As Dick meekly obeyed, such quiet fell over the class that Gilmore dozed off. This was the moment Dick had long awaited. Letting out an exuberant war whoop, he grabbed the teacher's toupee, rushed out the door, sprang on his pony, and raced down the street shouting, "I got ol' Gilmore's scalp, and here it is!"

Women teachers were often criticized as too gentle. Maria Wakefield, one observer commented disapprovingly, could no longer control her Tucson class when the average attendance reached 70. In Crown King, the visiting superintendent told Virgie Robbins (then Virgie Hite), "You have no discipline." Perhaps he was right, she admitted, recalling one partic ular instance when her rebuke to a youngster for waving to a passerby met with the response, "That was my daddy, I can wave at him any time I want to."

Edith Stratton Kitt, later secretary of the Arizona Pioneers Historical Society, found that a show of force could pay off. As a young woman, she taught youngsters from first to eighth grades in the mining camp of Helvetia. She once grabbed a girl taller than herself and “shook her so unexpectedly that her head bobbed forward and gave me a bloody nose.” But, she added, “all in all, we got along fine.... I never had any trouble with the parents and little with the pupils.” Another woman teacher achieved instant authority by whacking miscreant children on the hand with a ruler on the first day of class.

Interestingly enough, teachers on Army posts were not allowed to use corporal punishment. They also were subject to a double standard in the treatment of officers' children and those of enlisted men, with the officers' youngsters getting the worst of it: they could be summarily expelled, whereas in cases of enlisted men's children, the teacher's only recourse was an appeal to the post adjutant.

Creativity rescued some early teachers, notable among them two women who taught on Indian reservations. Elizabeth White, herself a Hopi, was born and reared near Hotevilla, where she eventually taught. From the start, she decided she was “not going to let these little children suffer.” Her plan was “to take the children on their level of interest from day to day. Never mind about the books.” For the first month, she helped them learn about objects familiar to them. She also visited their homes. All this time, she kept from them the fact that she was a Hopi, so they would have to learn English. Although her unorthodox methods at first drew criticism, she was eventually recognized as a model teacher.

Minnie Braithwaite of Williamsburg, Virginia, depended entirely on her creative talents when she accepted a job in Navajo country, a position everyone else turned down because of the region's inaccessibility and the irascibility of the school head, a Mr. Hammer. Minnie had no teaching experience or training but, as with Elizabeth White, a sure instinct told her to begin with what was familiar to the children. When she started the first day by having her previously listless students practice writing their own names, “they were indeed thrilled.” From that moment on, they were her ardent supporters.

Another hurdle Minnie had to overcome was Mr. Hammer's insistence that beginning and advanced students be grouped together. Minnie despaired of teaching with this arrangement until she Thought of using the more advanced students to help the beginners.

Mary Elizabeth Post was also seriously challenged when she began to teach at Ehrenberg in 1872. “I had 15 pupils not one of whom spoke English, and I knew nothing of Spanish.” She solved the dilemma by gathering adults as well as children around her and informally visiting, using a few simple words at a time as they sat outdoors to escape the heat of the schoolroom. In this way, they gradually learned English and she learned Spanish. By autumn, when she went to teach in Yuma, she had mastered several thousand Spanish words.

For teachers who didn't welcome challengelenge and adventure, probably the one real advantage of teaching school in the early days was job mobility. Male teachers typically stayed in a post only until they had learned enough law to be admitted to legal practice, and women were likely to marry after a short teaching career. But if all they wanted was a change of scene, teachers had no problem finding new opportunities. Given this situation, one of them recalled, anyone who “taught for more than two terms in one school was thought by many to be in a rut.” By the turn of the century, more than a hundred fledgling teachers had graduated from Tempe Normal School, and Arizona was well on its way to developing a territory-wide educational system. But in the preceding decades, the overload on teachers was often so great some schools had to be closed.

Even so, an occasional stalwart stayed at his post term after term. M. M. Sherman was one such individual. He stuck it out in Tombstone from 1881 to 1884, during the heyday of that raw frontier community. His handling of one recurring problem suggests perhaps as well as anything the rigors and romance of teaching in Arizona's territorial era.

“I had to order leaving six-shooters at home,” he remembered, “then take their firearms from them, and finally confiscate till the end of the year.”