By Barbara Patton

On a hot July day in 1864, a group of settlers rolled into the frontier town of Prescott.  The wagon train in the company of soldiers bound for Fort Whipple and under the leadership of Joseph Ehle had traveled down from Denver through Indian country.  Three of the wagons carried the household goods of the Ehle family, and Mrs. Margaret Ehle and their five daughters rode in a repurposed hearse.

By Cindy Gresser

The year was 1935.  At the Fair Grounds there was a giant pile of stone and debris that would make excellent base fill for roadways and foundations around the growing City of Prescott.

By Mick Woodcock

The hydraulic method of mining was developed in California in 1853 to better exploit gold-bearing gravel deposits. It used a canvas hose with a metal nozzle to direct a high-pressure stream of water to erode dirt along rivers and stream beds. The resulting slurry, gold-bearing mud and water, was then directed through a sluice box where the gold settled out and the rest was deposited at the edge of the river.

By Brad Courtney

Daniel Connor “D. C.” Thorne may have been early Whiskey Row’s most influential figure, and its most colorful. He was a story himself, and stories swirled around him. Thorne founded the Cabinet Saloon in 1874, which became the heartbeat of pre-1900 Whiskey Row.

By Kylin Cummings

Since the beginning, railroads have used a variety of signaling systems to communicate in rail yards and along the railroad line. 

By Tom Collins

Prescott’s theatregoers gobbled up the pompous press puffs that heralded the arrival on January 3rd, 1896, of Lillian Lewis’s lavish production of Sardou’s Cleopatra at Patton’s Opera House on Gurley Street.  Known in New York City as a modern drama queen, Miss Lewis was proclaimed (by her husband and manager Lawrence Marston) as “the foremost American actress” and superior, in this role, to Sarah Bernhardt herself!  Her leading man, Edmund Collier, was “the successor to that great classical actor, John McCullough.” (Miner, Jan. 1, 1896).  The scenery and special effects dazzled, but the discerning might have cringed at the acting.

By Mick Woodcock

Central Arizona’s mineral riches first drew Anglo prospectors in 1863. Gold was the original metal, but silver and copper were also discovered and mined with more or less success. Remote locations and mountainous terrain made moving the ore and building smelters to process it very difficult. Large freight wagons pulled by multiple mule teams were the only source of transport.

By Brad Courtney

One would think that the Keystone Saloon on Cortez Street had accommodated enough death. Although three suicides had taken place there between 1885-87, it hadn’t yet hosted a homicide. That would change eight years later over a dispute of seventy-five cents.

By Brad Courtney

If any early Prescott saloon was cursed, it was Cortez Street’s Keystone Saloon. It was possibly sited where Lyzzard’s Lounge is today.

Its first proprietor, Gotlieb Urfer, came to America from Switzerland sometime before the Civil War. He arrived in Prescott in 1874, opened a lodging house on Cortez in 1877, and eventually added a saloon, naming it the Keystone Saloon and Lodging House. He married Ellen Dunn of Ireland in 1878.

By Mick Woodcock

Based on the Days Past article of Nov 29, 2014.

What follows are excerpts from articles about Christmas in early Prescott. We hope this will give you an idea of what our predecessors thought of the holiday and how they observed it.