by Bradley G. Courtney

Robert “Bob” Brow, born circa 1857 in Missouri, was a true western pioneer. His name is the one most associated with the early days of Prescott’s iconic Palace Saloon, the oldest, if not most historic, saloon in Arizona—perhaps even the West, and the man himself led a fascinating Old West life. 

In the early 1870s, when Bob was in his mid-teens, his father, Jacob, moved the family to the Dakota Territory where they stayed for a short time in its capital city, Yankton. In 1875 the adventurous Brows journeyed into the Black Hills, a region now part of western South Dakota. Gold had been found in a narrow canyon of the northern Black Hills called Deadwood Gulch, where Jacob saw an opportunity. He and his sons—Bob was now in his late teens—joined an expedition of miners in a supplementary role. Brow had bought a sawmill of the crudest type to set up wherever the miners decided to settle. 

By Worcester P. Bong

The American Red Cross (ARC), a nationally-recognized humanitarian organization, was founded by Clara Barton and her close acquaintances in 1881. Ms. Barton was inspired by the International Committee of the Red Cross organization while traveling in Europe. She led the ARC for 23 years, during which time domestic and overseas disaster relief efforts were the primary focus of the organization.

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the ARC organization grew tremendously under new leadership. They received financial donations and established local community chapters to recruit members and volunteers. The ARC recruited nurses to serve in the military and staffed hospitals and ambulance companies. Nurses and nursing aides were also recruited to combat the worldwide influenza pandemic of 1918. 

By Marjory J. Sente

When asked where she bought her hats, a 19th century Boston Blueblood is supposed to have said, “I don’t buy my hats. I have my hats.” The same could have been said for the ladies of Prescott during its early years. From department stores such as the Bashford-Burmister Company (B-B), Goldwater Brothers and the New York Store to sole proprietorships owned by women, including Miss Emma Ray, Mrs. Nellie B. Akers, Mrs. Mollie Evans and Madam Hunter Hilbert, millinery was big business in Prescott.

Rebuilding after the great fire in 1900, B-B added a millinery department where ladies could buy ready-made clothing and hats. In 1904 Blumberg’s New York Store hired Miss Bottoms, an expert milliner from New York City, to head its millinery department. Besides the department stores, Prescott’s ladies also patronized the small women-owned-and-operated hat shops. At these shops they enjoyed the companionship of other women while purchasing hats especially curated for them or having an old hat retrimmed for the coming season.

By William D. Kalt III 

Prescott’s Knights of Pythias Hall whirred with action and anticipation in late June 1901. Local women kept three new sewing machines running each day and part of the night, helping to stitch a massive new cloth apparatus for parachute artist Miss Hazel Keyes. The daring aeronaut’s new balloon stood 80 feet in circumference, contained more than 800 yards of muslin and required “more than a few miles of sewing to complete.” Hazel, 40 years old, brought two enormous lizards to Prescott to parachute with her, but both disappeared. Instead, she planned to fasten Palace Saloon owner Bob Brow’s pet raccoon in a basket and release it attached to a small parachute. An Arizona Weekly Journal-Miner scribe declared, “The famous toyer of death” stood “highly spoken of as a lady and certainly one of the prettiest mid-air performers ever seen hanging to a balloon.” The Arizona Republic dubbed her “the most daring and plucky little woman seen by man or woman in a lifetime.” 

America’s “Parachute Queen” electrified audiences and gained national renown during the 1890s. Soaring into the heavens aboard her hot-air balloon, the tough, attractive, determined woman provided a fascinating diversion for entertainment-starved crowds. She survived for more than a decade in a career filled with death and danger at every turn. Slammed into the rigging of a ship at Sausalito, California; smashed to earth to lay unconscious for three hours in the desert near Phoenix; and rescued from drowning in the Salt River were but a few of her near-death escapes. Battered and bruised, she returned after each perilous parachute jump to take to the sky and earn her living and fame. Now she planned her last parachuting performance for Arizona’s Mile High City. 

By Marjory J. Sente

The Ocotillo Post Office was established in 1916, and Pearl C. Orr was named its first and only postmistress, serving until it closed nine years later. In its first life, the post office was called Middleton or Middelton and served the mining town of Middleton located in the Bradshaw Mountains from 1903 to 1908. During World War I, the Consolidated Arizona Mining Company reopened the De Soto in 1915 and Middleton quickly boasted a population of 100. The post office was reestablished under the name Ocotillo because Post Office Department regulations prohibited reusing the name of a discontinued post office.

Pearl Childers was born in the Indian Territory in 1879 to Thomas N. and Melvina Childers. At the age of six, she moved with her family to Fleming, New Mexico Territory. In 1897 she married William R. Orr, a Nebraska native. Three years later, they were living in Silver City, New Mexico Territory, and already had Thelma, their first daughter. Three sons (Robert, Ernest and Floyd) and many moves later, they landed at McCabe, Arizona Territory, in 1906. They had traveled from New Mexico to Washington state (Pearl couldn’t stand the climate according to her grandson, Jack Orr Jr.) then to Arizona. Pearl’s parents moved to McCabe, too. Mrs. Childers died in 1907, but Thomas, whose primary occupation was a miner, lived until 1931. From 1909 through about 1912 he was Yavapai County’s Road Supervisor.  

By Drew Desmond

The Rough Riders were given several animal mascots, but it was the Arizona regiment’s first mascot that was by far the most popular. “The Arizona Volunteers’ mascot—the mountain lion [named Josephine]—is a great drawing card, and the boys down in San Antonio are thinking of charging a nickel a head to see [her] to swell the regimental fund,” The Journal-Miner reported. 

“[She] is fastened to a cage by a long chain and is given perfect freedom, so far as the chain will allow. Adults and children crowded about the animal all day long. Several of the visitors tried to stroke the animal's head, but Josephine was in a vicious mood and repelled their advances with a show of teeth which was calculated to make a stout-hearted person feel uneasy." 

By Drew Desmond

While discussing the explosion and sinking of the USS Maine, Mayor "Buckey" O’Neill, Alexander Brodie, and James McClintock hatched an idea to raise up a volunteer cavalry from the Arizona territory to fight in Cuba. O'Neill wanted to raise a regiment of hardcore frontiersmen who were able to survive under harsh, dangerous and deadly conditions as such men would make excellent soldiers.

The men they recruited became the origin and core of the First US Volunteer Cavalry that won great fame and glory under Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War. They would become known as "The Rough Riders." 

According to the article “Buckey O'Neill and the Rough Riders” by Lorine Morris in The Prescott Courier on 4/11/1975, O’Neill wired President McKinley for authorization to muster 1000 Arizonan "rough riding" soldiers. McKinley authorized 250 men, which he thought was more realistic for the sparsely populated territory. O'Neill was named Captain of Troop A of the 1st Volunteer Cavalry and immediately resigned his position as mayor. The ranks were quickly filled.

By Mick Woodcock

William Owen “Buckey” O’Neill was born February 2, 1860, likely in St. Louis, Missouri, to Irish immigrant parents. In 1879 he came to Arizona, and after stays in Tombstone and Phoenix, arrived in Prescott in 1882. He was nicknamed "Buckey" for betting heavily in faro games, (called "bucking the tiger" for the tiger illustrations on faro cards).

During sixteen years in Prescott, O’Neill worked as a court reporter, editor of the Arizona Miner and editor and publisher of Hoof and Horn—a paper devoted to the Arizona cattle industry. Elected Yavapai County Probate Judge and School Superintendent, Yavapai County Sheriff and Tax Assessor and Mayor of Prescott, Buckey also ran unsuccessfully for territorial delegate to Congress.

In 1884 Captain W. F. R. Schindler was posted to Fort Whipple, bringing his wife, Rosalie and daughter, Pauline, who taught elementary school in Williamson Valley. O’Neill first saw Pauline at a traveling medicine show and wrangled an introduction. When Pauline married O’Neill in April 1886, her husband announced his happiness in Hoof and Horn, prescribing the “right kind of girl” as what every man needed to keep his head above water. 

On January 1, 1889, O'Neill became Yavapai County Sheriff. On March 20, four bandits robbed the Atlantic and Pacific Railway’s eastbound passenger train during a wood stop at Canyon Diablo, which was within Yavapai County at the time. Sheriff O’Neill formed a posse to arrest them. By April 15, he was back with four prisoners after a chase that led into Utah. 

By Bradley G. Courtney

Whiskey Row of Prescott, Arizona is arguably the most fascinating, historical quarter-city block in the western United States. The centerpiece of this historic, jam-packed street has been the magnificent Palace Saloon, today the Palace Restaurant and Saloon. It is no wonder that one of Arizona’s favorite sons, Barry Goldwater—whose ties to Prescott are well documented—once lamented, “My only regret is that I didn’t buy The Palace when I had a chance.” 
 
His friend, Tom Sullivan, who in 1977 believed he had purchased the Palace (it was still under contract at the time of the letter mentioned below but the deal fell through eventually), knew this. When writing Goldwater on July 26th of that year, his incentive was rather thinly veiled—his guilt quite transparent. 

The bulk of his letter, however, disclosed his plans to restore the saloon to its early 1900s glory and to share its considerable history with patrons. “I know of your very deep and sentimental interest in Prescott and any help that you may be able to give will be greatly appreciated." Goldwater’s response was a truly honest, magnanimous and typically humorous letter, dated August 10, 1977. It began with a good-natured, “You rascal, you went and bought what had long been my desire to own. When I was in China during World War II, I received in a Christmas package a book, and I knew when I opened it there would be the deed to the Palace Bar which, at that time, was available.” According to Goldwater, the asking price then was a mere $20,000. He went on to share a story said to have occurred in 1889 regarding the transference of the territorial capital from Prescott to Phoenix. 

By Tom Collins

The comic operetta “Pinafore” has been a favorite with Prescottonians ever since December 1879, when the nationally renowned burlesque star, Miss Pauline Markham, rumbled into our territorial capital on the stagecoach from Tucson. Pauline was celebrated for her beauty, her shapely legs, her velvet voice and her broadly publicized horsewhipping of a Chicago critic who branded her and her fellow British Blondes as harlots. 

Pauline brought with her a very small supporting cast of professionals that included three male talents: Harry Carpenter (in the 1890s a Republican representative from Yuma), Joseph Dauphin (a light opera character actor in San Francisco) and Frank Roraback (a nationally experienced light opera tenor). She relied on local Prescott amateurs to build the deck of Her Majesty’s Ship Pinafore on the stage of the Prescott Theatre on Alarcon Street, and she required them to recruit the chorus of sailors (Fort Whipple soldiers) and “the sisters and the cousins and the aunts” of Sir Joseph Porter. Pauline played Josephine, “the lass that loved a sailor”; Carpenter was Captain Corcoran, Josephine’s father; Roraback sang his heart out as Ralph Rackstraw, the sailor who falls for “the fairest flower that ever blossomed on ancestral tree”; and Dauphin personated Sir Joseph, Ralph’s preposterous rival. It is unclear who played Little Buttercup, a dockside vendor infatuated with Captain Corcoran.