The Extraordinary Mr. Weaver

Mountain Man Paulino Weaver A Life in the Wild

If you had met a trapper named P. Weaver 130 years ago, you probably wouldn't have guessed that someday people would honor him with monuments and speeches. His clothes always appeared about to fall off, one dirty rag at a time. He smelled like a sick grizzly bear, and the soldiers and miners who shared his campfires joked that if he shook his long gray whiskers, rats and gophers would leap out.

But the old mountaineer could tell stories. In a foghorn voice, he recounted experiences so astonishing that his contemporaries called him the "Arizona Münchhausen," after a German baron famous for romanticized adventure yarns.

"Did you hear about the time some Indians was attacking me, and I scared 'em off by singing their own songs?" he might begin, looking out into the night. And he'd be off on a tale that included gun battles, gold, and plenty of imagination.

Today most of Weaver's stories have been lost, or embellished beyond recognition. But a few survive, and it's still true, as oneof his acquaintances said of his life, "The simplest record of its incidents will read like a romance."

The Arizona part of the romance began early in 1830, when a thirtyish man listed as Powell Weaver joined a westering party of novice trappers in Fort Smith, Arkansas. By 1831, Weaver, now known by the Hispanicized name of Paulín de Jesús Guivar, was trapping beaver along the Gila River near the Colorado. The next year someone carved "P. Weaver 1832" on a wall at the Casa Grande Indian ruins.

For the next decade, Weaver roamed the Indian country of northern Mexico in what is now Arizona and New Mexico. Sketchy records suggest that he also acquired two wives (concurrently) and several children, but details about his family life are largely missing. One of his wives probably was Indian, and he himself was reportedly half Cherokee. Even so, he admitted that he often killed Indian men and sold the women and children.

When asked why, the bearded trapper shrugged. "They stole all our traps; as fast as we could stick a trap in the river, they'd come and steal it, and shoot arrows into our horses." The Indians wanted to eat the horses, Weaver explained. To spite them, the trappers burned the animals.

In 1846, while traveling eastward along the Gila, Weaver met Gen. Stephen Watts Kearny heading west. Kearny sent Weaver to Santa Fe to help guide Capt. Philip St. George Cooke and the Mormon Battalion across Arizona. Cooke didn't like Weaver. One day the officer sputtered in his journal that Weaver had borrowed a mule without telling anyone, causing "an unnecessary search of some hours."

After that Weaver settled in southern California. An 1850 visitor to Weaver's ranch described him as a "kind-hearted man, of strong intellect, but wholly uncultivated." In California, Weaver also met a little girl who grew up to be Arizonan Ida Genung, whose husband, Charles, was a prominent rancher and political figure. Years later Genung boasted with a laugh that Weaver taught her to speak Spanish, swear, and smoke cigarettes.

‘He was pretty much an Indian himself. He had been so much alone that his speech was part English, part Spanish, with a few Indian words thrown in’

By the mid-1850s, Weaver decided he liked the outdoor life better than entertaining children or running a ranch. He returned to Arizona to trap and hunt. The year 1860 found him listed in the Tucson census as "Powell Weaver, age 63; occupation: Old Mountaineer." Since the 1850 census, his age had increased by 13 years, and his birthplace had moved from Louisiana to Tennessee. About that time, people began to credit Weaver with an instinct for locating gold. First, they said, he discovered placer gold along the Gila. Then, early in 1862, he reportedly found more glittering nuggets in a gulch east of the Colorado near presentday Ehrenberg. He poured some gold grains into the quill end of a goose feather and hurried to Fort Yuma. That led to a gold rush and the founding of La Paz. Weaver didn't have much time for prospecting, though. Union and Confederate troops were marching through the Southwest, and the Union hired him as a guide. One of the soldiers, George Washington Oaks, said of Weaver, "He was pretty much an Indian himself and liked to scout far ahead of us. He had been so much alone that his speech was part English, part Spanish, with a few Indian words thrown in for good measure. His mother may have washed him when he was little, but after he got away from home he didn't believe in using water to wash in. After a hard march, we would peel off our clothes and jump into the muddy Gila, but not Paulino. No sir! He didn't believe in washing. Said it made him sick." He also didn't like to sit around. After the Battle of Picacho Pass in April, 1862, he and the Union soldiers retreated westward and waited for further orders. At a camp near Casa Grande, Oaks reported, Weaver finally pointed in the direction of Tucson and said, "If you fellers can't find the road from here to Tucson you can go to Hell." Then he turned around and headed west. What with the Civil War, Indian unrest, and the backwash of miners from California, Arizona could hardly be said to be in anyone's control. One of the most widely repeated stories about Weaver reportedly took place about this time. Weaver understood that as more outsiders moved in, problems between Indians and non-Indians and among Indian tribes could multiply like fleas on a prairie dog. So he convened a peace council with leaders of various tribes. He assigned each tribe a hunting ground and asked them to travel beyond that as little as possible. To let strangers know the Indians wouldn't hurt them, the do-it-yourself peacemaker suggested the password, "Powlino, Powlino, tobacco." According to tradition, this worked for a while, until outsiders who didn't know about the treaty shot peaceful Indians even as they called, "Powlino, Powlino, tobacco." The story sounds apocryphal, but probably it's not. In March, 1863, a Los Angeles newspaper reported, "Old Pauline Weaver has gone to make peace between the Apache Tontos, Maricopas, and Cuchanos Indians, thereby making it safe for prospectors to go through their country." "Pauline" was the Anglicized version of "Paulin." Later that spring, Weaver guided A.H. Peeples and a party of miners from Yuma up the Colorado to La Paz, and from there to a site about 40 miles south of present-day Prescott. There the men found gold in a dry creek bed and named it Weaver Gulch. Here's one of many versions of what happened next: That same day, the men discovered the richest placer deposit in Arizona and named it Rich Hill. So much gold lay so close to the surface that before they even made camp, some miners using butcher knives as spades had dug up enough nuggets to (LEFT) Historians argue about Paulino Weaver's exploits, but one tale recounted that he had two wives at the same time, one of whom was an Indian.

fill their drinking mugs. Others picked up several thousand dollars worth of gold in a couple hours.

Within that first month, prospectors at Rich Hill scooped up an estimated $250,000 in gold. The miners named Weaver Peak, the town of Weaver, and the Weaver Mininging District in Weaver's honor. Meanwhile Weaver, who apparently didn't gather much gold himself, continued his meandering. InJuly alone, he traveled from Rich Hill to the Colorado River, then back to the Hassayampa to claim a patch of land where he could grow corn, melons, and squash. Thenhe camped on Granite Creek on the future site of Prescott.

After the establishment of Arizona Territory, Weaver explored the Verde Valley with Governor John N. Goodwin and others in February, 1864. By then the longtime scout had become the quintessential Arizona old-timer. Some newcomers found him exotic, or talkative, or taciturn. OthOthers in February, 1864. By then the longtime scout had become the quintessential Arizona old-timer. Some newcomers found him exotic, or talkative, or taciturn. Others marveled at Weaver's preference for sleeping on the ground. One journalist who met Weaver called him "an old antiquated humbug." For his part, Weaver wrote or dictated a flowery letter in which he praised Arizona's new officials: "If such men continue in power, Arizona will soon become a flourishing state."

As Weaver had predicted, troubles with the Indians grew. But now the man who once casually killed Indians fretted about the murderous urges of newer Arizonans.

"As it is at present," he reportedly wrote, "things are already bad enough and every day getting worse. It is hard to keep a hungry Indian from stealing and almost as hard to keep the whites from making an indiscriminate slaughter of them for Stealing."

In 1865 Indians attacked Weaver near Government Springs. One version of the story says the Apaches blamed Weaver for the death of some kinsmen.

Several miners died, and the rest, including Weaver, were wounded. Daniel Ellis Conner, who talked to him the next day, reported that the wounded Weaver "saved himself by quietly taking a seat upon a rock and chanting some Indian gutterals, without further noticing them. The Apaches became superstitious by this conduct and left the old man to his ghostly incantations." After dark Weaver dragged himself to a nearby mining camp.

It makes a great story, and from what we know of Weaver, it could be true. But equally plausible accounts by other acquaintances tell it differently.

In another version, Weaver had only one companion, a man named Baker. Recounted William Fourr, an Arizona settler who knew Weaver, "They crippled the old pioWeaver, Weaver, so he had to lay down behind some rocks." Baker, also wounded, had lost his pistol, so Weaver handed up his own gun, a muzzleloader that could fire only once between loadings. Baker wanted to shoot, but Weaver urged him just to aim the gun because the Indians could see it was a muzzleloader. As long as Baker didn't fire, Weaver figured they wouldn't approach.

Then Old Man Weaver rolled himself a cigarette.

"How can you smoke and crippled so bad and me trying to keep them red devils off of us?" Baker demanded.

"Well, I will smoke even if I was half dead. You just keep that gun pointed at them when one bobs his head above a rock, and they may leave us."

According to Fourr, the standoff lasted four hours. Then armed miners happened along, and the men's attackers vanished.

Whatever the exact details, Weaver's wounds were real. Even after surgery, an arrowhead remained under his left shoulder blade, and it hurt.

But that didn't keep the old scout from working. During August he earned $5 a day as a spy and guide at Fort Whipple. Then he transferred to Fort McDowell, then back to Whipple. In November he moved over to Camp Lincoln, on the Verde River. Down toward the water, a little way off from the soldiers, he made camp.

There, his health declined. Some said it was a return of rheumatic fever. Some said it was malaria, born in the river swamps.

Some said it was the arrowhead festering in his shoulder.

On June 21, 1867, a soldier who went to check on Weaver found him dead in his tent. His obituary in the Arizona Miner said he died of congestive chills. "His body sleeps as he would have it, amidst the grand mountains which he loved to explore and the rude solitude of which he preferred beyond all the excitement and ease of civilization and society. Earth lie gently on his aged bones."

By that time, the old wanderer had become a real-life fictional character. It was hard to find two people, or two documents, that agreed about the details of his life.

After his death, fact and fiction grew together like cactus and spines. Recalling one of his campsites, the people of Prescott

decided he must have been the first citizen

A Life in the Wild

Of Prescott. Overlooking thousands of years of Indian history and centuries of Spanish colonial and Mexican travel, a newspaper writer in 1896 proclaimed him "the first man in Central Arizona." In 1927 an octogenarian former acquaintance of Weaver, Edmund Wells, published a strongly fictionalized account of the trapper's life in Argonaut Tales. In a twist that probably would have amused Weaver, the public and even some historians accepted the story as straight biography.

In 1929 Weaver's bones were reburied in Prescott. The widely attended ceremony included the dedication of a monument that reads: "His greatest achievement was as peacemaker between the races, understanding as few ever did the true hearts of

the two peoples." By 1950 history writers

called Weaver "one of the creators of modern Arizona."

Today historians, like Weaver's contemporaries, disagree about the details, right down to the question of his true first name. (Probably it was Powell; most call him Pauline.) If the old mountaineer came back today, I doubt he'd bother to separate fiction from fact. In fact, the issues people argue about would surely make him consider us odd critters.

Take the question of the Casa Grande inscription. Some say he carved that himself. Others insist he couldn't write; a companion etched the name in the wall. Still others To label the graffito a hoax and claim the inscription didn't appear until the 1890s. That sounds plausible except that Charles Poston described it in an address to Congress in 1865.

But for all the contradictions and arguments, most records concur about Weaver's character and the evolution in his actions and thought.

I like to think the old mountain man symbolizes his era. He experienced and embodied the rawness of the Old West, and the intertwining of fact and fiction that persists about the West. He did many things we wish he hadn't. But his life, like ours, grew out of a complex interaction between the circumstances of his times and the wisdom and confusion in his own head and heart.

Earth lie gently on his aged bones. M