history

ove Stories from the Frontier

In 1861 Phoenix founder Jack Swilling wrote a letter that was poignant, romantic and perhaps a snow job: "Remember the tree where I cut our names, near ten years ago, down on the branch of a beech tree. Oh that I was there today to take a walk with you to see if there remains any part of our name on that good old tree."

The letter was to Swilling's wife, Mary, in Wetumpka, Alabama. Swilling had left Mary and a daughter, Elizabeth, there in 1856. None of his descendants is sure why he left Alabama.

Swilling was then a prospector and miner in Pinos Altos, New Mexico. An incorrigible drifter, he would continue to adventure westward as a miner, freighter, farmer, and briefly as a soldier conscripted by Confederate volunteers. In 1867 his irrigation company would establish the community that became Phoenix.

Swilling's 1861 letter said, "I will yet live to see you again, if I thought different I would end my existence."

But as Shakespeare had noted a couple of centuries earlier: For ought that I could ever read, Could ever tell by tale or history, The course of true love never did run smooth. Especially when the lure of the frontier separated the lovers.

Swilling never again saw Mary and Elizabeth. Nor did he take his own life. He died of illness in 1878 in the Yuma County Jail, where he was incarcerated for a stagecoach robbery he probably didn't commit. And he didn't die a "bachelor." In 1864 he had married Trinidad Escalante in Tucson. It was not uncommon for frontiersmen to marry members of the Hispanic community that predated American settlement of Arizona. Trinidad accompanied the restless Swilling from farm to mine to irrigation project, bearing him seven children. When Mary realized Swilling wasn't returning to Alabama, she became a seamstress to support herself and Elizabeth; and when Swilling died, Trinidad took up the same livelihood. History is often presented in terms of conquest and conflict. But now and then an old, bittersweet love letter survives to remind us that the heart, too, played its part on the frontier.

There's a happier love story in the files of Fort Verde State Historic Park at Camp Verde. Lt. Calvin Duval Cowles of North Carolina graduated from West Point in June of 1873 and was assigned the following December to the 23rd Infantry at Fort Verde, a principal outpost in Gen. George Crook's campaign to subdue hostile Indians. The frontier was quite a change for the young Southerner whose parents ran a general store. In March of 1874, Cowles was assigned to take a patrol and rescue the family of C.E. Hitchcock. The family, en route to Big Bug Creek where Hitchcock operated an ore mill, was snowbound in the mountains above Camp Verde. There was no hope of getting the wagons out of the deep snow, so the women donned extra britches brought along by the soldiers and rode to safety astride their horses. Mary Hitchcock, 19, managed the ordeal so winsomely that she captured the heart of Lieutenant Cowles. They were married two months later at the Hitchcock home on Big Bug Creek. History does not record who wore the pants in the Cowles family. Mary followed Calvin from post to post while he served 11 years on the frontier, then to desk duty in Washington. The couple had five children, one of whom died as a toddler. According to old letters from Calvin to his parents, their love lasted until Mary died in 1905. Calvin, who retired a colonel, died in 1937.

Tell my beloved how I long for her presence, how weary I am of awaiting the time when I go to her, life without her is not to be desired.

Not all marriages lasted so long, and getting a divorce could not be done quietly. Until 1886 dissolving a marriage in Arizona Territory required an act of the Legislature. The divorce most frequently mentioned was the 1873 dissolution of the union of Territorial Governor Anson K.P. Safford and the former Jennie L. Tracy of Tucson. Safford then married Margarita Grijalva of Magdalena, Sonora. When she died, he married Soledad Bonillas of Tucson. One omnibus divorce bill in 1879 dissolved 15 marriages, including that of John J. Gosper, secretary of the Territory (equivalent to the secretary of state, an office created when Arizona became a state on Valentine's Day, 1912). Gosper had left his wife in Nebraska and wanted to remarry in Arizona.

Ah, the sad stories, most recorded from the male point of view. It would be interesting to know the feelings of the abandoned wives left in the East and Midwest.

Love Stories from the Frontier

Not that the woman was always the one abandoned. John Marion was the outspoken and sometimes vitriolic editor of the Arizona Miner at Prescott, one of the Territory's leading newspapers. A staunch Democrat, he frequently attacked Republican officials appointed from Washington and waged word wars with other editors.

In 1873 Marion married Flora Banghart, daughter of a prominent rancher. They had three sons, one of whom died in infancy, and began to raise their family on a fine ranch they developed near Prescott.

But in 1884, Flora left town in the company of the district attorney, Charles B. Rush. He was a family friend, and Marion had editorially supported his candidacy for the prosecutor's job.

In a time of lively, slashing journalism, rival newspapers reported the affair with a restraint they would not normally have afforded Marion. The editor pined for three years, hoping Flora would come to her senses. But he never saw her again.

Finally, in 1887, he divorced her, and the following year he remarried.

According to Prescott historian Melisa Ruffner Weiner, who paid more attention to researching matters of the heart than a male historian might have. She also tells the sad story of the Miller brothers, for whom nearby Miller Valley was named.

Sam Miller came to Prescott with the Walker Party, which discovered gold in the Bradshaw Mountains early in the 1860s. His brother Jake joined him, and they formed a prosperous freighting business.

But after a few years, Jake wanted to return to his wife, Jane, and their children in Illinois. Sam didn't want to lose his brother, so he forged divorce papers and told his brother Jane had left him. And he wrote to Jane, not one of his favorite people, that Jake had been killed by Indians.

Many years later, one of Jake's children learned that he was alive and wrote to him at Prescott. Jake hurried to Illinois, but learned there that Jane, believing herself a widow, had remarried. Jake returned to Arizona Territory without seeing Jane, but some of their children came to Arizona to live with him.

Jake grieved over the loss of his wife until his death in 1899. His last words were of Jane, they say.

Immediately after his funeral, the family received a telegram saying Jane died the day after Jake's death. Supposedly, her last words were of Jake.

was a man who knew how to keep romance alive. His letters are sometimes poignant, but they had a happy ending.

Murphy came to Arizona in 1881 as a contractor building roadbed for the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad (later the Santa Fe Railway) across northern Arizona. His wife, Laura, and four children accompanied him, riding in a grain wagon.

W.J. moved to the Phoenix area where he built the Arizona Canal, opening a large area of the Salt River Valley to farming. Then he became a big-time developer of land and water.

But his ambitious enterprises required him to be away from home for long stretches of time, trying to raise money in Chicago, New York, or Edinburgh, Scotland. Laura stayed behind and oversaw his development projects.

W.J. and Laura set aside each Sunday evening as their "trysting hour." They agreed that each would spend Sunday evenings thinking of the other. Frequently they wrote letters to each other at that time. He wrote from Chicago in 1885, "When I sit down to write to you there is but one thing that my heart dictates - 'Tell my beloved how I long for her presence, how weary I am of awaiting the time when I go to her, life without her is not to be desired.' If I followed this dictation my letters would all be alike and very monotonous so I try to write of other things.... But tonight I can't write much else. My soul is like a harp with one string - it can sound only one note."

Indeed, there is a sameness to W.J.'s pining love letters, preserved at Arizona State University. But he did vary his message in playful language. In 1886 he wrote, "I have been building castles far from canals and creditors in which is to dwell a Queen and I am to be her doughty knight and protect her from any venturesome marauders and lay at her feet the beasts of the forest.

And from Edinburgh in 1893: "Am writing my sweetheart, writing to get her consent to my calling on her next month. True I don't have the same anxiety and perturbation of spirit that possessed me on a former occasion when I asked your consent and yet I look forward to the call with no less interest. "I didn't know fully then how devoted and lovable a wife I was asking for. How I long for our home Sabbaths again, for our part of it, the evening twilight."

Murphy's loving letters apparently did their job. The couple had been married 49 years when he died in 1923.

Plainly, the term "romance of the Old West" referred to more than sunsets and dashing cowboys.