History

If a picture's worth a thousand words, this photograph of Olive Oatman speaks volumes. Her story is remarkable.

In 1850, she and her family left their home in Illinois and headed west to California. In February 1851, they approached the Gila River in Arizona, where they were ambushed by a band of Yavapai Indians. Only three of the nine family members survived the attack — brother Lorenzo was beaten and left for dead, although he managed to seek help, and sisters Olive and Mary Ann were abducted and forced into slavery.

If it weren't for the National Rifle Matches, a shooting competition, Arizona's state flag might never have come to fruition. For years, Arizona's National Guard was the nation's only team without a flag. But enough was enough. Colonel Charles Harris, the team's captain, didn't want to compete without representation anymore, so he drew up a temporary banner for the 1910 match, according to the Arizona State Library. May Hicks Curtis Hill, the wife of one of the guardsmen, sewed the original version. 

By her own account, Eulalia “Sister” Bourne was “by no means a typical teacher.” And likewise, Baboquivari School was no ordinary school.

Located at the foot of the Baboquivari Mountains in Southern Arizona, the remote school was conducted in the 1930s in “whatever temporary quarters [were] convenient for the two landholders in the six-township district.”

A stagecoach rumbles into town, and clouds of dust billow around it. The driver tugs the reins and pulls the horses to a stop — just long enough to drop off and pick up bags of mail, load and unload passengers, eat a meal, replenish water and change horses.

It reads like a scene from a John Wayne Western, but in 1858, the stagecoaches of the Butterfield Overland Mail were real, and they provided the best means to move letters, packages and passengers westward from the Mississippi River.