God's Country: The Blue Frontier PDF

1 “God’s Country” Copyright 2016. University of Nevada Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. The Blue Frontier The beauty of that spot there in the wilderness miles from...

1 “God’s Country” Copyright 2016. University of Nevada Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. The Blue Frontier The beauty of that spot there in the wilderness miles from any human habitation, the river tumbling down the gorge, the towering cliffs every color of the rainbow, and the mountainsides covered with tall pines, and the lush grass up to my horse’s belly, struck me like a blow from a sledge hammer square betwixt the eyes. I says to myself, says I, “Why spend one’s life behind a plow or hide one’s self in a tunnel seeking gold, when there is such a spot as this in the world to build a home in—just for the takin’. This is that God’s Country I used to tell the folks I would find some day.” TOLES COSPER (Cosper 1940:2) They were riding along enjoying the scenery when Nat stopped his horse, and after one long gasping breath, exclaimed to Fred. “This must be the Garden of Eden that the Bible tells us about.” “No,” said Fred, “It is the Land O’ Milk and Honey. Can’t you see those wild cattle, and—unless I am mistaken—that is a bee tree right over there, and there are wagon-loads of wild grapes right up this canyon.” FRED FRITZ to his wife Katy (Fritz, 1985:iii) THESE RECOLLECTIONS, many years after the event, reflect the mythic quality cast over their experience by the earliest pioneers into the Blue, a land of beauty and plenty, but also a frontier beset by dangers and difficulties. The cattle were there, the bees were there, also the grapes, but all were plenty wild and plenty hard to obtain: The cattle were the sharp-horned, rusty-black Mexican, wild critters that even the wildest Apache found much trouble in getting near enough to kill one for beef; the bees were wont to sting one’s eyes out when one attempted to rob their honey-store; and one had to climb a two-thousand foot cliff and hang by one hind leg to get the grapes. And the forest teemed with savage Apaches. (Fritz 1985:iv) This last detail is hardly exaggerated. The Blue River and surrounding mountains were then a traditional hunting territory of the White River and other Apache bands (Sheridan 1995:84–5). Possibly, the famous chieftain Geronimo was born on the Blue.1 Other native peoples had preceded the Apache. Pots and similar relics found along the Blue, together with traces of irrigation works, indicate the Mogollon culture. This prehistoric culture prospered in settled communities in the upper Gila region of New Mexico and Arizona from 300 BC to AD 1100. Then for unclear reasons this culture disappeared. Eventually the more warlike and itinerant Apache came to rove through the Blue but left no evidence of settlement (Down on the Blue 7, 119, 145; USFS 1988:13). The Spaniards arrived in Southern Arizona in the sixteenth century. Francisco Vasquez de Coronado’s expedition is thought to have passed somewhere through the neighborhood of the Blue in 1540 (Down on the Blue 8). (Modern U.S. Highway 191 from Clifton to Alpine, winding along the high mountain country that defines the western border of the Blue River watershed, is designated “the Coronado Trail.”) Coronado’s journal writer described this whole region of Arizona as a huge EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 2/11/2024 6:28 PM via NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY AN: 1197193 ; Jack Stauder.; The Blue and the Green : A Cultural Ecological History of an Arizona Ranching Community Account: s0000075.main.ehost 16 trackless wilderness (USFS 2000a). The early Spanish explorers named the Blue River (“Rio Azul”) after its sources in the Blue Range (“Sierra Azul”), which appeared bluish in the hazy distance (Barnes 1960:164). The sparse Hispanic settlement in Arizona stayed south of the Gila. The mountainous area to the north, over the Mogollon Rim that encompassed the Blue River, was known as the despoblado, the uninhabited land, and was ceded to Apache control. The Apache adapted quickly to the Spanish horse, and became dangerous predators on Spanish and Pueblo Indian settlements (Pattie 1831; Pitts 1996:2; Thrapp 1967:6–8). The first recorded penetration of the area by Anglo-Americans was in 1825, when Kentuckians Sylvester and James O. Pattie traveled down the Gila River with a small band of fur trappers. The Patties came to where the San Francisco River joins the Gila. James later wrote that the stream, we discovered, carried as much water as the Helay [Gila], heading north. We called it the river St. Francisco. After travelling up its banks about four miles, we encamped, and set all our traps, and killed a couple of fat turkeys. In the morning we examined our traps, and found in them 37 beavers! This success restored our spirits instantaneously. Exhilarating prospects now opened before us, and we pushed on with animation. The banks of this river are for the most part incapable of cultivation being in many places formed of high and rugged mountains. Upon these we saw multitudes of mountain sheep. (Pattie 1831:79) In their journey up the San Francisco, the Pattie group must have found where the Blue enters it, not more than twenty miles above the Gila. Quite possibly the party set their traps up the Blue too. Although they found plentiful beaver, James Pattie reported no Indian contact in this area (Pattie 1831; Pitts 1996:2). Not until after the Civil War did U.S. citizens migrate in appreciable numbers to Arizona. At first they bypassed the rugged lands above the Mogollon Rim, the White Mountains, and the Blue Range. Land more inviting for farming and ranching was along the Gila and south of it. However, reasons for avoiding the Blue country probably also had to do with the Apache who dominated these lands. In fact, in 1872 the U.S. government initially assigned all the mountainous land from central Arizona to the New Mexico Border, including the Blue, to the newly created San Carlos Apache Reservation (Debo 1976:85). Yet the presence of rich copper deposits in the Clifton-Morenci area, among other things, led a year later to shrinking the Reservation boundary (Debo 1976:127, 172). The large strip of eastern Arizona that includes the Blue and what would become northern Greenlee County was legally opened for pioneer settlement. Clifton, about fifteen miles down the San Francisco from where the Blue enters, became the largest mining community in Arizona in the 1870s (Sheridan 1995:162; Patton 1977). During the same period, north of the Blue, Mormon colonists from Utah were moving into the lush mountain pastures around Luna, New Mexico, and what today is Alpine, Arizona (Haskett 1935:30). Arizona was filling up, relatively speaking, with new settlers in the 1870s and early 1880s. In particular, the Arizona range was filling with cattle. The building of railways, and a Western cattle boom fueled by outside capital, led to fully stocked, if not overstocked, ranges in Arizona and the private appropriation of most permanent water sites by the mid-1880s (Haskett 1935:24–26, 31, 35; Morrisey 1950:153; Sayre 1999, 2002:30–32; Sheridan 1995:132; J.J. Wagoner 1952:119). But the Blue Range country remained “Any Man’s Country,” according to Joseph Hampton Toles (“Toles”) Cosper, quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Alabama-born, he was raised near Abilene, Texas, and claimed he had always wanted to be a cowman and to “find a God’s Country to live in.” In 1883 he was working for the Diamond M outfit near Magdalena, New Mexico, and was tracking a stolen herd over into the Blue Range country when he experienced the epiphany described at the beginning of this chapter. He went back to his job and promptly took up what wages he had coming to him in cattle, which totaled a herd of 39 head of breed cows, and which he branded Y Bar Y. He then wrote his father to sell all his personal belongings, including cattle and horses, and send the money to him to buy more cattle with, stating in the letter “I have found that God’s Country.” By the end of 1884, he had 260 head of Y Bar Y cattle running loose on the open New Mexico range, EBSCOhost - printed on 2/11/2024 6:28 PM via NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 17 and at Christmas time he went home to Texas and got married.... In the fall of 1885, Toles “squatted” on his chosen spot on the Blue River, built his cabin, set up housekeeping, and then went over into New Mexico and drove his cattle over to his new range.... (Cosper 1940:1–3) But Toles Cosper and wife were not the first settlers on the Blue. According to Walter Casto, My grandfather, John Casto and grandmother Betsy Casto first went to the Blue in about 1878. Betsy was the first white woman on the Blue. They settled at or above the forks of the Upper Blue. They stayed three years. The Indians were still bad. They had to be on constant watch for them. They killed several people. The Castos hitched up their oxen to their wagons and moved back up north. They stayed away three years and moved back to the Blue.... They cleared some land and raised a little hay and vegetables to live on and sold some to other people. Later on Granddad put in a vineyard and raised grapes and made wine to sell.... (Down on the Blue 158) By all accounts in the Blue folk memory, the Castos were the earliest settlers. And by the Casto account the Apache were a definite deterrent to early pioneers of the Blue. Despite government attempts to confine and settle the Western Apache on reservations, bands of them rebelled and mounted raids during the late 1870s and early 1880s over southeastern Arizona, up into Blue country and across the New Mexico border, and down into Mexico, under leaders such as Victorio and Geronimo (Wagoner 1952:51). It was the last of the Indian wars in the United States. Before the railway reached Clifton in 1884, freight wagons hauling copper were often ambushed (Sheridan 1995:163; 167). In 1882, a group of a hundred warriors led by Geronimo killed more than fifty people—“prospectors, wagon train drivers, ranchers, lone travelers, everyone they encountered on their raids”—as they struck out for the Sierra Madre mountains in Mexico. As part of this bloody odyssey, a marauding party successfully plundered horses and mules up the San Francisco River (Debo 1976:144). But if Apache raids were so common over a large area of Arizona and New Mexico, their presence cannot fully explain the delayed settlement of the Blue. Terrain also played a role. The two factors reinforced each other: the more remote, rough, and sparsely populated the land, the less protection there was from Apache raiders. Ralph Reynolds grew up as a cowboy, knowing the Blue Range firsthand. His 1991 autobiography offers an opinion of the land in a chapter entitled, “A Country This Sorry Has to Be Prime.” In our time, grazing of cattle is considered lowest among the many potential agricultural uses of land. It follows, then, that people would put to grazing only that land unsuited for other use. Carrying this thought a little further, it is easy to establish that the rough and tumble Mogollon Breaks lying on either side of the New Mexico-Arizona border is country so poor that it has to be the prime cowboy land of the earth. Conceived in the fire and brimstone of Tertiary volcanoes, this wild, wooded cowboy country, ever mysterious, sometimes graceful to the eye and sometimes awesome, is almost useless to man. For where it is warm enough to grow his crops, it is too dry. And where it is moist enough for crops, it is too cold. And even if we could magically change the climate of this land, to warm the heights and moisten the steppe, it is everywhere too rough and rocky except for the toughest of cowboys and the ruggedest of cows. This land is also vastly underpopulated, thanks mainly, perhaps, to Geronimo and his ilk. Generations of pioneers were stalled from settling there, for the mountains and the valleys had long before been chosen by Apache warriors as their own. Even the Spanish kings seem to have had no enemies hated or feared enough to deserve banishment into such useless and dangerous territory. Thus, the region was never included in any of the many royal land grants that gave away much of New Mexico. (Reynolds 1991:9–10) PIONEER SETTLERS Despite rugged country and dangerous Apache, a few early settlers persisted in the 1880s, bringing their families: “There were no windows in our house on account of Indians, and we never had a light after dark. My sister Emma and I would go out every morning to look over the place before Dad came outside the house, because we had been told that Indians always killed the man in the family first” (Graham 1953:27). The Casto family had the first house on the Blue. As another precaution, EBSCOhost - printed on 2/11/2024 6:28 PM via NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 18 their house “had a sort of ‘port-hole’ arrangement so they could look around for Indians before leaving the house” (Lee 1983:68; Down on the Blue 161). The Castos, when they returned, were settled halfway down the Blue. The Johnson family with its little girls and cabin with no windows was north of them. Farther up the Blue towards Luna, Martin and Susana Noland had a “ranch” and log house where in 1885 the first child of pioneer stock was born on the Blue—William Levi Noland. (Down on the Blue 47–50). How many more settlers were living on the upper Blue in the mid-1880s is unclear—perhaps none but in any case few. Miles to the south on the lower Blue only a handful of male squatters had arrived by 1886: Bob Bell, a rancher; an old man named Benton; the Luther brothers; and a Frenchman named Rasperrie or Raspberry. Hugh McKeen of Alma, New Mexico, managed a cattle camp across the state line (Fritz 1978:67)2 Farther south Fred Fritz and his partner Nat Whittum lived in their “land of milk and honey.” Finally, Toles Cosper maintained a cabin and ran cattle on the Blue, but he had not yet brought his bride Lou Ella to live there. “Toles and his family and John [his brother] tried moving to the Blue before they were successful in doing so, but the first night out found them surrounded by Indian fires so they returned to Luna to wait another year” (Coor, in Down on the Blue 201). The small Blue population of the mid-1880s was tenuous and scattered down the winding canyons of a river that drained an area about twenty miles wide by forty miles long. Isolated cabins were more or less at the mercy of large Apache raiding parties, and most had been plundered from time to time. Cattle and horses were driven off; barns, corrals, haystacks, and cabins burned. Usually the best wisdom was to hide and not resist (Fritz 1985:v). According to Hugh McKeen’s wife, “From the experience he and his parents encountered with the Indians in Texas, he learned to stay away from the main traveled trails, thereby avoiding being killed” (McKeen 1982:167). McKeen lived over in Alma and admitted not staying much at his “ranch” on the Blue. Definitely come to settle was Fred Fritz, the son of immigrants to the German colony of Fredericksburg, Texas. As a young man, he found work in west Texas on ranches and as a stagecoach driver in Comanche country then drifted farther west, helping to build the Mexican Central Railroad out of El Paso. He tried other lines of work around the mining towns and forts of southern New Mexico and Arizona. Trapping beaver along the San Francisco like the Patties, he first encountered the Blue River and in 1884 returned with a partner, an old Army scout named Nat Whittum (Fritz 1978:65–66).3 While trapping, Fritz and Whittum hoped to establish a ranch by catching and branding the many feral “Mexican” longhorns found on the Blue, as well as wild ponies. The first two wild horses that Fritz & Whittum managed to rope and break to the saddle were stolen right in front of their very eyes, so to speak—just taken in broad daylight. Since there were about fifty or more of the Indians and only two white men—with little ammunition—they just kept quiet and let them take the horses. Along in October (1884) Fritz and Whittum had a corral full of mavericks ready for the branding iron the next morning, when just at dusk, while they were eating supper, a band of perhaps one hundred or more Indians rode up to the corral, opened the gate and stampeded the cattle. All the Indians carried rifles, which was something new to Fritz and Whittum.... (Fritz 1985:v) In 1886 the Blue saw the last Apache raid in the Southwest that caused fatalities. Providentially, Bob Bell and Toles Cosper were elsewhere when the Apaches struck, but Toles’s cabin was burned and most of his stock stolen. Fred Fritz was also absent, selling furs and laying in supplies of food and ammunition in Clifton. There he heard that Indian raiders were crossing the country. Hurrying back to his cabin on the Blue, he drove up to the back door and called to Whittum; there was no answer. He went in and found Nat Whittum in a pool of blood on the floor near the fireplace; Nat had been in the act of making biscuits and still had fresh dough on his hands and his body was still warm. (Fritz 1985:ix). Whittum had been shot in the back. Fritz rode to warn McKeen, whose camp was off the river trail. By the time the two returned to the Fritz place it was on fire and painted warriors were leaving. EBSCOhost - printed on 2/11/2024 6:28 PM via NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 19 Most of the small population on the lower Blue had been wiped out. Benton, Raspberry, and the Luther brothers were killed. Also on the San Francisco, near the Blue, the Pippin ranch had been attacked, with Mrs. Pippin slain and Mr. Pippin left for dead. Fritz helped bury them all. Nat Whittum was buried on a mound overlooking his Garden of Eden, but Fritz went ahead with plans to establish his ranch in this now bloodied land of milk and honey (Fritz 1985:xi). “Somewhere in Alma, New Mexico country, the soldiers, after a fight, captured the Indians and returned them to the reservation” (Fritz 1978:67). This raid through the Blue occurred the same year that Geronimo was forced to surrender to U.S. troops in Mexico (Debo 1976:281–312; Thrapp 1967:350–367; Wagoner 1952:51). Whether any of the Apache who raided the Blue were sent with him and his followers to exile in Florida, or were punished at all, is unclear. After 1886, there were no more fatal raids, but “even in the early 1900s people thought that the Indians were responsible for stealing many horses on ranches. They always blamed the “Apache Kid,” but no one ever remembered seeing him” (Cleo Coor, Down on the Blue 7, 209; Graham 1953:27). Stories of theft and the fabled Apache Kid aside, Indians occasionally left the reservation to hunt their old grounds on the Blue. Nowhere in the Blue pioneer accounts is any mention of them killing Apache, or even shooting at them. The settlers hid, if they were lucky, and left the Indian fighting to the U.S. Cavalry. Rustlers, however, were a different story. Prices to the East and West were sliding down to rock bottom due to overstocked markets, but even with the decline, Toles felt that he could have made money in the cattle business had it not been for the rustlers and raiding Apaches. Each time he managed to get a herd ready for market something happened—Indians or rustlers helped themselves—until Toles became ‘fighting mad.’ (Cosper 1940:4–5) He hired some gunslingers from Texas to work for him, and joined with other ranchers on the Blue and San Francisco Rivers to deal with the threat to their livelihood. The soldiers were doing a very good job taking care of the Apaches, but were having their hands full at that; it was up the ranchers to take care of the rustlers with the only law they knew anything about, “Gun Law.” When any new outfit, single, or in groups, were discovered on the range, they were met with a very unfriendly welcome and were watched with open hostile suspicion until they proved themselves worthy of staying there; and if they failed to measure up to the standards set by those first settlers, they either left the country or else—and there were many bleaching bones and unmarked graves scattered over the Blue range. Toles says, “It was not a case of overcrowded range, as some people are wont to opine, as there was plenty range for all at that time, nor was it a case of Big-I-and-Little-You, with us ranchers. Each of us realized that live men—who are men—build up a country and dead ones have to be buried. It’s unsightly to run across human coyote bait when riding the range, so we usually buried ‘em. We were just plumb fed up on being burned out and stolen blind.” (Cosper 1940:4–5) Fred Fritz also discovered rustlers messing with his brand: his 3—X (Three Bar X) was altered to 8—X (Eight Bar X). Cosper’s Y—Y (Y Bar Y) could be carved into the same rustlers’ brand, unknown locally. After spying on a rustler camp on Pipestem Mountain, and discovering a party of at least six strangers, Fritz and his men gathered neighboring cattlemen to pursue the outlaws but failed to catch up to them before they had shipped the stolen cattle from Silver City. Afterward Fritz adopted a new brand harder to alter: XXX. That wholesale rustling got the “danger up” among the ranchers on Blue River and they began to mistrust their neighbors to the west of the mountain ridge, knowing full well that whoever rustled that herd must have known the country pretty well or they never could have made their getaway so easy—and too, all the rustled cattle in that herd seemed to have belonged to the ranchers to the south and on Blue River. Every newcomer to Blue River after that was viewed with suspicion and watched like hawks, but every precaution the ranchers took seemed to fail until most every one of them were about “cleaned” out of cattle and horses. They grew so hostile toward newcomers that it just wasn’t safe for a stranger to make the least false move. (Fritz 1985:xiv–xv) Rustling was a problem for ranchers throughout Arizona in the 1890s and into the new century EBSCOhost - printed on 2/11/2024 6:28 PM via NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 20 (Wilson 1967–68:33–35). The Blue was not spared. It did avoid, however, the war between sheepmen and cattlemen that raged at times across the mountains in the vicinity of Magdalena, New Mexico (Down on the Blue 119), for the simple reason that no one tried to bring sheep onto the Blue. Fred Fritz went back to Fredericksburg, Texas, in 1894 to marry Katy Knapp, also of German ancestry. The Indians had been quelled by that time, but there were still the rustlers and killers of every caliber to contend with through this section of Arizona territory. Fred refused to expose his bride to such dangers so he built her a house in Clifton where she spent two long, lonely years. (Fritz 1985:xv) In 1896 she finally went to live on the Blue, riding the thirty-two miles side saddle and “holding her daughter in her arms, over a mountain trail no more than three feet wide, with a 700 foot drop on the canyon side” (The Copper Era newspaper, Feb. 8, 1957, Down on the Blue 220). The home where he brought her was built “as a hide-out, for this close to the Blue River the cabin could not be seen from the river” (Fritz 1978:67). In 1895 Toles Cosper also brought his growing family onto the Blue, and in 1897 acquired the place that became the Cospers’ Y Bar Y Ranch (Down on the Blue 197). By the 1890s, the Blue appeared relatively safe enough so that many families were settling there. They were ending the local frontier, one of the last in Arizona and the West. The national frontier as a whole would officially be proclaimed “closed” in 1890 by the Superintendent of Census, as noted three years later by the famous historian Frederick Jackson Turner (Turner 1962:1). Despite Apaches, rustlers, rough terrain, hardship, and risk, the Blue was irresistible to those who wanted land. It was not of course the beauty of the rugged landscape that drew the pioneers, though its beauty did not escape them. What made the Blue God’s Country, and a potential Land of Milk and Honey in their eyes was something simple, relatively scarce, and of utmost value in the Southwest: the water of the Blue River itself. As Fred Fritz Jr., who lived eighty years on the Blue in the secluded spot where his father brought his mother, wrote, when I was a boy I asked my father why he passed through some of the best range in western New Mexico and eastern Arizona with those long horned cattle... and then located in the roughest part of Arizona, the Blue River country. His answer was “water.” During my lifetime on the ranch I discovered how right he was. (Fritz 1978:93) NOTES 1. Some locals have believed so (Reynolds 1991: chapter 3). On the other hand, historians make a good case for Geronimo’s birthplace on the upper Gila, north of present day Silver City, New Mexico (e.g. Roberts 1994:104, 327). Angie Debo, however, points out that while Geronimo located his birthplace at the headwaters of the Gila, he always insisted he was born in Arizona. The matter could be adroitly resolved if, in Geronimo’s ethnogeography, the Blue River was seen as a headwaters of the Gila, its westernmost branch. General Crook, the later pursuer of Geronimo, apparently made the same terminological assumption that the Blue was a branch of the Gila (Thrapp 1967:99). Nomenclatures can differ, but geographically the Blue is in fact an upper branch of the Gila River system. 2. In “Hugh Bronson McKeen: His Family History” (McKeen 1982) he is said to have moved to the area in 1888. But in the same history his wife places him in the area at the time of the 1886 massacre, and both Fritz accounts (Fred Fritz 1978:67; Katy Fritz 1985:vi) agree he was present in 1886. 3. Whittum is sometimes Wittum or Widdom in different accounts, but Whittum was the name officially adopted by the early post office named after him (Down on the Blue 173). More importantly, some significant differences exist between the history given by Fred Fritz Sr.’s wife, Katy (Fritz 1985), and that of his son Fred Fritz Jr. (Fritz 1978). The son’s account has Fritz Sr. coming onto the Blue with cattle in the fall of 1885. The wife’s account has Fritz and Wittum arriving in 1884 without cattle. Such differences point to the pitfalls of relying on testimony from memory, especially decades after the fact. In this case, I choose to follow Katy, because she lived closer in time to the actual events, and also her account appears to have been written down long before her son’s. The manuscript by Lathrop n.d. (see Fritz 1985) has no definitive date, but circumstantial evidence in the manuscript files of Kathlyn Lathrop points to around 1940. By the time Fritz Jr. wrote his history, his mother was dead. EBSCOhost - printed on 2/11/2024 6:28 PM via NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 21