By Linda Ludington
Perkinsville, Arizona, 1963. The Hollywood movie cameras zoom in for closer shots. The frontier sheriff is about to confront the hardened outlaw who has just come into town on the train. The final episode of "How The West Was Won" is being filmed. The movie is fiction; the movie set is, however, real. What could be more authentic to the spirit of the West-its land, its history, its people-than Perkinsville and the Perkins family!
Long before there was a Perkinsville, the juniper-and-pinon Verde River country was home to Native Americans. Numerous artifacts discovered in canyons and caves and along the riverbanks attest to Yavapai people, as well as to earlier tribes, who lived on this hospitable land.
In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln sent an official party with military escort to establish the capital of the new Arizona Territory. Their first camp was at Del Rio Springs north of present site of the town of Chino Valley. a few months later the party moved to the forested area of present-day Prescott, where logs were readily available to build a fort, houses, and businesses. While at the original site, army doctor James Baker traded his horse and saddle to a squatter for his land claims along the Verde River. Baker and his partner James Campbell were soon running one of the largest cattle/horse operations in Arizona. They called it the Verde Ranch. The severe drought years of the 1890s, however, brought financial setbacks that forced the partners to sell.
Marion Alexander Perkins, the patriarch of the Arizona Perkins family, was born in 1848 on a farm near Coffeyville, Mississippi. His older brothers joined the Confederate Army, leaving the youngster to work the farm. The South was in ruins when, in 1864, sixteen-year-old Marion married Annie York and they headed west. During the following years Marion and Annie moved ever westward across the Texas frontier. For a number of years they ranched in the Davis Mountains about 150 miles southeast of El Paso. As that country filled with people and fences, Marion decided to move again. He had heard about a ranch in central Arizona Territory. It featured a year-round stream running through an open range of native gramma grass. He struck a deal to buy the Verde Ranch.
On July 5, 1899, Marion, his wife Annie, their three sons (Rob, Ben, and Nick), their three small daughters (Annie, Valeria, and Fannie), and several neighbors, set out for Arizona. Ranch wagons were filled with their household goods. Women and small children rode in a buggy or on a buckboard. A chuckwagon was supplied with necessary provisions. The men and older boys rode ranch horses and mules across arid west Texas. This odyssey would include loading the stock onto a Santa Fe train to cross a particularly desolate stretch of country. When the stock was unloaded at San Marcial, New Mexico, the trail drive was continued.
The oldest son Rob later wrote about the challenges these pioneers faced through the Datil Plains to Springerville, and eventually to Holbrook. Severe lightning storms caused stampedes. The wrangler often spent days searching for horses that had wandered during the night. Sparse water holes were sometimes so filled with alkali that some of the parched cattle were poisoned; a mule was almost lost in quicksand. Feed was short.
When this resolute family reached Holbrook, Marion learned that the Verde Ranch deal had fallen through. The cowboys were forced to turn back to the Luna Valley near the Arizona-New Mexico line where there was enough grass to winter the herd. By late summer the following year, when the spring calves were old enough to trail, and the ranch purchase had been completed, the Perkins family set out on the final leg of their journey. Six weeks later, the Baker headquarters finally came into view. It was November l, 1900.
The country was wide-open range. There were no fences except around ranch buildings and garden plots. Ranchers turned their cattle out together. When a roundup was to be held, notices were posted in the Prescott and Williams newspapers. Most ranches sent several cowboys to help gather. The entire roundup took weeks. Nick Perkins remembered gathering cattle from Granite Mountain in the west to the Dugas Ranch in the east (beyond present Cordes Junction), south to Mayer and north to Williams and Ash Fork. A chuckwagon was an essential part of every crew. Each cowboy had his own string of horses to ride. Working together and depending upon each other during the roundups allowed all the ranchers and cowboys to become well acquainted. Tom Perkins laments that the ranching community no longer enjoyed the same degree of neighborliness after the Taylor Grazing Act brought barbed-wire fence to the range in the early 1930s.
On the open range a cowboy was required to be skilled with a rope. When several hundred cattle had been gathered, cowboys held them in an outer circle while others roped stock to be branded and doctored. Rob Perkins wrote that his father Marion expected his sons to be efficient ropers. "After the work had been going on for twenty or thirty minutes, if I had been doing the calf roping, my father would observe his watch and if I had not made an average of a calf a minute, he would say, 'Young fellow, you are getting pretty slow. You had better speed up a little.'"
In the earliest days, the Perkins ranch sold slaughtered beef to feed the miners in Jerome. The copper-mine population was soaring in the early 1900s. Later, to ship cattle to market, the Perkins cowboys drove the herd to loading pens at Ash Fork or Del Rio Springs. Tom Perkins recalls that the loud steam locomotives could easily stampede the wary cattle. Tom's brother Benny was a noted cowboy poet and musician as well as a skilled cattleman. He composed a song based on his experience of driving a herd through the frigid Verde River with disastrous results. He called the song "Deep Water, Ice and Snow."
When the Santa Fe Railway built the Clarkdale to Drake standard-gauge spur right through the Perkins Ranch in 1912, the little depot constructed near the ranch headquarters was named "Perkinsville." From that time cattle could be shipped right from the ranch.
(Linda Ludington is a volunteer with the annual Cowboy Poets Gathering at the Sharlot Hall Museum. The Gathering is in less than two weeks, August 15-17, and will involve a special session about the Perkins family as well of lots of cowboy poetry)
Photograph credit: (roundup from collection)
The cattle drive from the Perkins' Ranch in Perkinsville, along the banks of the Verde River, was a long road until a railroad was built right through the homestead in 1912. The Perkins arrived in this part of Arizona in 1900 and sold beef to the miners in Jerome.