By Jim Byrkit

In February 1863, at the height of the United States' Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill making Arizona a territory separate from New Mexico. Three months later, renowned frontiersman Joseph R. Walker wrote a letter to Gen. James Carleton, whose U.S. Army command, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, included the new Arizona Territory. Walker told how he with a party of other men had found gold on the Hassayampa River about six miles south of today's Prescott. Carleton immediately decided to send an army detail to the diggings to protect Americans there from Indian attacks. He chose Robert Groom to guide the army expedition to the gold fields.

Led by Capt. Nathaniel Pishon, the expedition included John A. Clark, Surveyor General of New Mexico. On August 19th the party arrived at Granite Creek, where Prescott is today. Hearing a shot coming from upstream, Bob Groom went to investigate. He soon met the legendary Arizona gold-seeker and guide, Pauline Weaver. Groom asked Weaver if he had seen any sign of the Walker party. Weaver, actually a member of Walker's gold-discovering group and a cagey old coot, replied that he hadn't seen anyone nearby, but he had seen smoke rising further up the creek. Groom and Pishon soon found the Walker and the other men. Because Groom had met Pauline Weaver on Granite Creek, Sharlot Hall, sixty-six years later, would call Weaver "the first citizen of Prescott." 

Pishon's group soon went back to New Mexico, but Groom remained at the diggings. At about the same time, another member of the Walker party, George Lount, built the first house in Prescott. Soon after, James Sheldon, also from this group, erected a large cabin nearby and generously hosted grateful travelers. In June, another gold-seeker with Walker, King Woolsey, had built a ranch house near the Agua Fria River which other pioneers used as a refuge and way station. 

Back in Santa Fe, Capt. Pishon saw Gen. Carleton and confirmed the gold discovery. Carleton then ordered Capt. Pishon to guide a more sizeable expedition commanded by Major Edward B. Willis to go to Arizona and establish an army post there. A number of non-military people joined the caravan. Included were Ed Peck, who later became a prominent Arizona historical figure, and Albert Franklin Banta, who years later wrote a colorful account of his life in the Arizona Territory. Willis reached Del Rio Springs, twenty-four miles north of Prescott on December 23, 1863. Here he located Fort Whipple, a title Carleton had chosen to honor one of the early northern Arizona explorers, Amiel Weeks Whipple, who had only recently been killed in action in the Civil War. 

President Lincoln named Ohio ex-Congressmen John A. Gurley as territorial governor; when Gurley died in August 1863 (long before he was to come to Arizona), Lincoln replaced Gurley with John N. Goodwin. Included among the other officials was Territorial Secretary Richard C. McCormick and Associate Judge, Joseph P. Allyn. Gen. Carleton designated Lt. J. Francisco Chaves, New Mexico Volunteers, to escort this gubernatorial party to Arizona. 

In late January 1864, Goodwin's party reached Del Rio Springs. Within a few weeks the governor chose the site south of Del Rio Springs for the capital and decided to call the place Prescott, for the historian William Hickling Prescott, and he relocated Fort Whipple nearby. 

To develop the Prescott town site, Bob Groom did the initial surveying. As part of this process, the officials chose street names. Most of the east-west streets were given names honoring the region's pioneers. These names fell into several categories: early Northern Arizona explorers and guides, U. S. Army officers, Arizona territorial officials, gold-seekers and other Prescott pioneers. 

The explorers whose names became part of Prescott included Antoine Leroux, one of the most famous of the Southwest guides; Francois X. Aubry (the Prescott street is misspelled "Aubrey"), a notable Southwest trader and trailmaker; and Joseph Walker. Street names of army officers included Carleton, Whipple and Willis. Prescott's founders gave their own names to Prescott's streets: Gurley, Goodwin, McCormick. Other prominent settlers whose names appeared on street signs were Sheldon and Lount. For a short time, the first Fort Whipple, at Del Rio Springs, was renamed Camp Clark, in honor of the New Mexico surveyor general. (Many years later and a way from downtown, the names of King Woolsey and the famous Kit Carson were added to Prescott's streets.) 

However, not all of these people ever visited Prescott. Leroux, Aubry and Kit Carson did their trailblazing in other parts of Arizona. Gen. James Carleton administered the army activities in Arizona from Santa Fe. Whipple was killed and Gurley died before the gubernatorial party had started its trip to Arizona. Historian William Hickling Prescott, who died in 1859 at age sixty-three, never knew about his influence on Prescott's history. 

For several prominent people in Prescott's early history there is no street name at all: Nathaniel Pishon, who commanded the first two military groups to the Prescott area; Ed Peck, who developed and then lost a rich mine in the Bradshaw Mountains; and J. Francisco Chaves, who led the governor's party to this area and then found a better way back to New Mexico which became known as the Chavez Trail. Joseph P. Allyn, one of the first persons to write about Prescott, and Daniel Ellis Connor, who later wrote more than a thousand pages of manuscript about Prescott and Arizona are missing, too. There is a Franklin street, but it is unclear if it is attributed to Albert Franklin Banta, whose colorful memoirs about the early days in Prescott can be found in the Sharlot Hall Museum's archives. At one time there was a Weaver Street, named for Sharlot Hall's First Resident of Prescott, and who now lies buried on the Museum grounds. But years ago this street name disappeared in favor of an extension of Goodwin Street. 

The U.S. 1864 census shows Bob Groom, who led the first military expedition to Prescott from New Mexico and who was the first man to connect with the Walker party to be a miner and a resident of Prescott. Prescott's 1870 census indicates that Groom, who was the first person to survey Prescott's town site, who was elected to preside over the initial effort to appraise and sell the town's lots, and who was elected to serve in the first Arizona Territorial Legislature, still lived in Prescott. Groom Creek, five miles south of Prescott, bears his name, but the founders of the town and the residents since have omitted him when choosing names for Prescott's streets. 

(Jim Byrkit is a retired professor of history and geography at Northern Arizona University) 



Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(mil223pd). Reuse only by permission.
Taken sometime in the 1880s from what is now the Prescott Resort, this photograph shows Fort Whipple. Whipple Street got its name from the fort, which in turn got its name from the surveyor. Many of Prescott street names have obvious origins from the founders of the town.