DREAMERS OF THE OLD WEST

The dreams of men are often preposterous — especially when they come true. Take George Warren, a hard-rock miner who built Bisbee's first smelter in April 1878. He had within his grasp a $20 million fortune from the Copper Queen Mine and could've lived out his days in a mountaintop estate staffed with stable boys and enjoyed mint cocktails served promptly at 5. But one day, George got drunk and bet G.W. Atkins that he could run 100 yards, circle a stake in the ground and return to the starting point before Atkins could do the same on horseback. George wagered his one-ninth share of the Copper Queen and lost. Oh, well. As far as he was concerned, another $20 million awaited around the next mountain anyway, so set up another round, boys. It's difficult now to see George Warren as anything but a wastrel and a fool, and make no mistake, he was both. But take another view, in light of his own times, and we see that he was a dreamer, too. How else to describe a man with the grit to venture into unknown territory, empty except for snakes and Apaches, without reliable water or food, hotter than a tin of camp coffee, and spend every day eyeballing death to build the life he wanted? Such an act, regardless of how it turns out, makes a glorious epitaph. Warren's stamping ground in what is now Cochise County, the heart of Arizona's frontier West, was built by such pioneers, and their stories still reverberate today. Months before Warren threw up his smelter on what was to become Bisbee's Main Street, Ed Schieffelin filed two mining claims 23 miles to the northwest on Goose Flats. He'd been prospecting 18 years and had earned mostly blisters. "I determined I would follow no more excitements and pay no attention to anything that anybody else had found," Schieffelin wrote, "but I would try something of my own, and I did." A soldier told Schieffelin before he set out from Camp Huachuca that the only thing he'd find in those Apache-infested hills would be his tombstone. But he always believed the mother lode was one more swing of his pickax away. Against all odds, he foundit, and by early 1878, the boomtown of Tombstone was born. Schieffelin chose to spend eternity near where he made his first camp in the Tombstone hills. His grave, now a public monument, lies 3 miles west of town.

Cochise County didn't become a separate political entity until February 1, 1881, when its boundaries were carved from Pima County. But we can rightly say that its birth was a product of Schieffelin's bold and, yes, foolish dream.

When word of his silver strike spread, hordes streamed into the camp on horseback, hanging from buckboards and on foot. Some tossed aside comfortable lives in the East to join the rush.

John P. Clum had been a divinity student at Rutgers, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Reverend Endicott Peabody went to college in England and seminary school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They were privileged young men with no particular need to decorate their faces with the dust of Tombstone.

But they wanted to try their hand at something big and new. Dreams again.

Clum, who had begun his adventures in Arizona Territory in 1874 as an Indian agent on the San Carlos Indian Reservation, went on to found the Tombstone Epitaph, a newspaper that still publishes. Clum, an ally of the Earps, also served as Tombstone's postmaster and mayor. And Peabody, after helping found the still-functioning St. Paul's Episcopal Church, returned to Massachusetts to start prestigious Groton prep school. He was its headmaster for 56 years.

Both men lived large, but so did the rest of Tombstone. As Peabody wrote: “The town contained a great body of men and women unmoral, shameless and cruel. There was no such thing as public opinion, for the community was unorganized and each person did as he chose to do.” This captures the essence of what the West has come to mean freedom, opportunity, open space, the chance to indulge every wild longing.

Cochise County attracted men who came to shed their pasts and reinvent themselves. In 1872, Henry Hooker founded the Sierra Bonita Ranch, which ranged across Graham County and down into the northwest corner of Cochise County. He once explained how he went about making a hire: “We take a man here and ask no questions. We know when he throws

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his saddle on his horse whether he understands his business or not. He may be a minister back slidin', or a banker savin' his last lung, or a train robber on a vacation we don't care. A good many of our most useful men have made their mistakes. All we care about is, will they stand the gaff? Will they sit 60 hours in the saddle, holdin' a herd that's tryin' to stampede all the time?"

Rancher William Greene made the ultimate mistake. He shot and killed Jim Burnett outside the O.K. Corral on July 1, 1897. Still, a jury let Greene, a popular man, walk.

A few years later, he bought a copper mine in Cananea, Mexico, just as electricity was coming into wide use. When the explod-ing demand for copper for wire cables made him fabulously rich, Greene insisted on being addressed as Colonel.

With $50 million stuffed in his boot, a fellow could go from cold killer to colonel in a sparrow's breath.

The juxtaposition of wealth and misery, gold coins clinking alongside dangling corpses, became a peculiar feature of the early days. On September 11, 1882, a mob of Bisbee miners lynched a man who'd shot up a saloon.

"While the body was hanging," wrote historian James McClintock, "one of the principal owners of the Copper Queen Company, just arrived on a trip of inspection, was driven by [mine] superintendent Ben Williams past the swinging body."

The boss, an Eastern tinhorn, was aghast, but he made a fastrecovery when he got a gander at the massive ore body on what's now Copper Queen Hill. By the time the mining stopped in the 1970s, it yielded some 8 billion pounds of copper. The town's story is told at the Bisbee Mining and Historical Museum and dur-ing hardhat tours of the big mine.

As Tombstone and Bisbee mushroomed, ranches sprouted in the backcountry.

In 1884, John and Viola Slaughter purchased the 65,000-acre San Bernardino Ranch, which covered an area from southeastern Cochise County into Sonora, Mexico. It had been abandoned for 50 years because of Apache raids, and everything suggested the Slaughters' fate would be dire.

Even with death at her shoulder, Viola used the language of dreams to describe the San Bernardino: "I shall never forget that first sight of the ranch, the valley stretching far out before us down into Mexico, rimmed and bounded by mountains all around. Nor shall I forget the thrill of knowing it was all ours, our future lay within it. It was beautiful."

But the early years were lean, and by 1890, when his term as Cochise County sheriff had ended, Slaughter announced they were getting out. Viola, every ounce as tough as her famous lawman-husband, wouldn't hear of it.

"We'll go out there and put our shoulders to the wheel," she urged. "We can't give up now and I can help . . . just you give me a plain house with wide board floors, muslin ceilings and board finish around the adobes. That's all I want."

She got it. And her ranch remains, 10 miles east of Douglas, a museum and landmark to indomitable pioneer will.

Viola was one of many women who planted their hopes in the dry ground of southeastern Arizona, without the fanfare accorded men.

Tombstone photographer Camillus Sidney Fly became wellknown for his historic images of Geronimo and others from the Apache campaigns. But his wife, Mollie, an accomplished photographer in San Francisco before she married, taught him the picture-taking skill.

Mary Bernard Aguirre, one of the area's first teachers, worked in a one-room, dirt-floored adobe, boards thrown across candle boxes serving as desks. But frequent Apache raids forced her to close her school at Tres Alamos, on the San Pedro River, in 1876.

Many of the area's ranchers got their start supplying beef to military posts established to protect the pioneers. Sierra Vista's Fort Huachuca opened March 3, 1877, and later served as home to the Buffalo Soldiers, the unheralded black troops who helped tame the West.

But quite a few "ranchers" dabbled in the illegal side of the beef trade. Badman Curly Bill Brocius came to Arizona about 1878, driving cattle to the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation. No one can say for sure, but it's a good bet they were stolen.

In one sense, Brocius and others of his ilk differed little from respectable pioneers. They viewed Arizona as a chance to ditch their pasts, and in some cases the lawmen who chased them, and start again.

But that meant running "wet" beef up from Mexico, a trade so violent that officials in Washington mulled sending troops to quell Brocius, the McLaury boys and the Clantons.

Wyatt Earp and his brothers tried to stop them, causing a gunfight, which, for good or ill, has come to symbolize the West. But the O.K. Corral wasn't a triumph for Earp, even though he was the only man there who didn't take a bullet.

Earp came to Tombstone to get rich running a stagecoach line and wound up losing brother Morgan to an assassin and seeing brother Virgil crippled in an ambush. Wyatt felt the tragedies so deeply he could never bring himself to talk about them.

Others found happiness in smaller dreams. Author Earle Forrest, writing in 1965 in the Journal of of Arizona History, told of an unnamed man who approached Henry Hooker at the Willcox stockyards and asked for a job: "He looked as if he had just been kicked off some freight train. Hooker pointed to the worst outlaw in the remuda, a horse that no cowboy on the ranch had been able to master, and said rather impatiently, 'If you can ride that horse you've got a job.'"

"The tramp borrowed a pair of spurs from one of the cowboys, a saddle and bridle, or probably a hackamore, from another, andthey all joined in helping him saddle up. They were looking forward to a lot of fun..

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"The tramp climbed aboard the hurricane deck, and with a wild yell slapped the surprised outlaw on the head with his hat.... That horse went straight up. He sunfished and pitched fence-corners; he swapped ends and tried every trick known to the wild bronco trade; but the tramp not only rode him high, wide and handsome, but all the while he kept yelling and slapping that horse with his hat."

Hooker's word was good, and the ragged-looking stranger evolved from tramp to chief bronco twister for the Sierra Bonita. As for George Warren, he nosed within a few feet of wealth Sometime-lawman and former sheriff of Cochise County, "Texas" John Slaughter ran cattle on a 65,000-acre spread near the Mexican border east of Douglas. His 1890s house and out-buildings have been restored, providing a glimpse of 19th-century ranch life in Arizona Territory. JACK DYKINGA several times but always managed to mess up. He died in 1892 in Bisbee, a pathetic drunk.

But when it came to finding an image to represent Arizona on its official seal, the politicians chose a Fly photograph of dirty old George. It shows him wearing a floppy hat and standing beside a rifle and shovel at the mouth of a mine. He's leaning on a pickax as if trying to affect a rakish look.

And he remains there today, the state's poster boy another dreamer from Cochise County.

Additional Reading: Inspired by his passion for Territorial Arizona, Leo W. Banks wrote Stalwart Women: Frontier Stories of Indomitable Spirit for the Arizona Highways' Wild West Collection. This book, the sixth in a lively series on the Southwestern frontier, is available for $7.95, plus shipping and handling, by calling toll-free (800) 543-5432. In Phoenix or from outside the United States, call (602) 712-2000.

Tucson-based Leo W. Banks has traveled the back roads of Cochise County in search of Arizona's Territorial past. He also wrote about the Tucson Gem, Mineral and Fossil Showcase in this issue.