By Sharlot M. Hall 

Edited by Parker Anderson 

Editor's Note: The following article first appeared in the Prescott Courier on March 19, 1932. It seems particularly timely today, with all of the development that is appearing on and around Glassford Hill.

"Men make strange friendships as they go through life - sometimes beautiful as they are strange and unusual. There was such a friendship between the rounded brown hill lying to the east of Prescott, and one of the finest of the old-time army officers who served at Fort Whipple. 

Commonly this hill is spoken of as 'Bald Hill,' and much earlier it was called Malpais Mountain and so marked on maps. Then toward the end of the 1880s it appeared on topographical maps as 'Mount Glassford' - it had taken the name of its friend. 

In 1880, much of Arizona was still unsurveyed and unmapped and military posts were dotted systematically where the Apaches needed watching. Fort Whipple, a full regimental post, and department headquarters, was the official center of military activity. 

Telegraph lines were few - telephones none - communication was by mounted courier, and often word of Indian outbreaks lagged behind the swift dash of Indian ponies bearing Apaches out to kill. Already the relaying of communications by mirror flashes had been developed into the heliograph, and from the experience on the Plains in Sioux campaigns it was transferred to Arizona to out-run the Apache raiders. 

To Fort Whipple was sent a tall and slender young lieutenant who, in himself, constituted the new Signal Corps. He was William Glassford, quiet, diffident, but a genius under his thatch of brown-red hair. He knew more about mathematics than is taught in most colleges, and his hands had their own cunning. 

He turned the just-begun heliograph into a magic working machine and looking about for hilltops from which to reach across the country, he moved up on top of the brown volcanic cone back of the fort and began his own private campaign against the Indians. 

Making, re-making, experimenting - he sent his own messages across country by relays for hundreds of miles, and simplified the 'sun-talk,' as the Indians called it, until it could be used accurately by moving troops and scouts far in advance of the main force. 

William Glassford did his bit in making it more comfortable for the Apaches to stay on the reservations than to go out raiding, and some of his methods were borrowed by the English army and used successfully in northern India. 

For many years, his little camp could be traced up on the dead volcano he had chosen, and his name was given to the hill by mapping engineers - though locally known by its old names. Even yet, few Prescott people climbed to the top of this interesting mountain and traced out its crater rifts and walls of lava - or know of the wide-sweeping and beautiful view from the top. Someday it will have its own roadways as has been happily suggested for the Thumb Butte region, and Prescott will have one more wonder trip for visitors. 

Between whiles, Lieutenant Glassford reached out across to the Grand Canyon, surveying and mapping and reporting with enthusiasm on the beauty of the Coconino forest, and all the region between Flagstaff and the southern rim. 

When he was transferred to other scenes of duty, he remembered Arizona with such affection that upon his retirement he chose to return and make his permanent home in the Salt River Valley where he became one of the advance guard in agricultural experiments by which the whole region has profited. 

Mrs. Glassford was the daughter of an old-time army officer, and their home was a veritable museum of interesting things gathered in travel and service. Two years ago, they were so eager to retrace the route of Colonel Glassford's early surveys and travels that they journeyed by auto all through the northwest and back by the Lee's Ferry Bridge into Arizona. 

At Prescott, they halted to salute the mountain of his early service in the Signal Corps, and to see briefly the new Whipple and new Prescott. Plans were made to return for a longer visit, but this was forbidden by failing health and the death a year later of Colonel Glassford. 

He was a man of that fine type so aptly described as 'An officer and a gentleman,' and though his life reached so far into the past history of the west, he lived in the present and looked into the future to Boy Scouts, in whom he took a keen interest, he was a figure as fine as Dan Beard himself - and it would be a fitting thing if the Boy Scouts of Prescott should mark simply the site of his heliograph station on top of the mountain which has again been officially designated by his name." 

Note: For information regarding the Fort Whipple heliograph system, see the Days Past articles for January 16 and 23, 2000. 

Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(po0744p)
Reuse only by permission.
Major Lloyd Clark at the gravesite of Col. William Glassford, San Francisco Cemetery, September 1966.