By Gail Van Horsen

Since families first began settling in Yavapai County, the women have been making quilts.  For example, the Jacob and Mary Ritter family moved to the Bagdad area of the Arizona Territory shortly after the Civil War.  They established a cattle ranch there and raised their family.  When son Ed married, Mary made a quilt as a wedding gift.  This quilt exists today, and the Ritter family is still in Bagdad where the women continue to quilt.

By Mick Woodcock

The first of our noteworthy travelers was Canadian-born Francois Xavier Aubry, who was well known in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as a fearless traveler of the Great Plains by the time he became acquainted with what is now northern Arizona.

By Al Bates

If there had been a competition in early Prescott matching a man’s name and his occupation, jeweler Lucien Bonaparte Jewell would have been the prohibitive favorite.

He was born in New York in 1833, and came to the west as a young fortune seeker gifted with multiple talents.  In addition to experience as a watchmaker and jeweler, he was a talented musician who was remembered by a daughter as one who “could play every musical instrument except the piano and pipe organ.”

By Allan and Cathie Englekirk

In the fall of 1863 when a young Albuquerque merchant named Manuel Yrisarri learned that the U. S. Army would establish a military outpost near the recently discovered gold fields of the Central Arizona Highlands, he determined that this would be a business opportunity too promising to miss.  It was obvious that the few settlers of this isolated area were eager if not desperate to obtain essential goods and would be happy to pay for them with gold.

By Jan MacKell Collins

Prescott’s wild women—the harlots who worked on the line along both Whiskey Row and notorious Granite Street—were an interesting bunch.  They rolled into town beginning with Prescott’s establishment in 1864, and were making headlines shortly thereafter.  For nearly one hundred years, the wanton women of the town were subjected to the usual run-ins with the law, addictions, illnesses, bar fights, domestic disputes and killings common to any western town.

By Allan and Cathie Englekirk

Arizona today, with some of the most beautiful scenery, best weather and greatest variety of things to do, is one of the fastest growing states in America.  However, it wasn’t always so popular.  Only Native American tribes, adventurous mountain men in search of pelts, and perhaps a thousand Mexican citizens lived in present-day Arizona at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848.  These resident Mexican nationals had the option of claiming American citizenship (“by election”) under treaty terms that transferred Arizona (and, later, the Gadsden Purchase) to the United States.  This was not an option for those Mexican citizens who came to Arizona at a later time.

By Al Bates

A chance encounter at a Fourth of July outing in 1869 led to the adoption of an orphan Indian child and, many years later, to one of Territorial Arizona’s most bitter estate settlements.  Feelings were so intense that at one point a rifle was fired into a room occupied by a woman and her two young children.

By Al Bates 

Last week’s Days Past told the tangled story of Charles Leib, earlier an eastern politician and later an Army contract surgeon in early Arizona Territory.  This week we turn our attention to his widow and her future with a new husband.

By Al Bates

When General James Carleton needed a medical officer to accompany the Fort Whipple founding party in late 1863 he selected a former Santa Fe newspaper owner and politician with somewhat dubious medical qualifications.  Although Charles Leib claimed that he had graduated from a “Philadelphia Medical College and had practiced medicine briefly,” his checkered career was largely as a political operative in support of Republican Party objectives in Kansas and Illinois.

By Debra Matthews

“There she is, Miss America” is the line famously sung by Bert Parks that spawned many Americans to take a look at beautiful bathing beauties.  However, long before the televised Miss America pageants, there were bathing beauty contests held in places across the country, including the little frontier town of Prescott, Arizona.  Within the Sharlot Hall Museum Archives there are vintage photos of bathing beauty contests held at the Granite Dells swimming lake, later named the “Granite Dells Resort,” owned by the Wing and Payne families.