By Mick Woodcock

The area that would become Arizona still was Mexican territory when American trappers began a series of illegal entries in search of beaver pelts.  While Americans could obtain permission to live in the region, Mexican officials would not license them to trap there.  This made the trapping expeditions by American mountain men to the remote Gila, Salt and Colorado Rivers not only dangerous, but illegal and subject to fines and imprisonment as well.

By Mick Woodcock

Back in the day, camels roamed Arizona.  Of course we are referring to Camelops hesternus, the extinct Western Camel that thrived in the savannah landscapes of the Pleistocene West over 11,000 years ago.  Or are we?  There are legends of “ghost camels” wandering the southwestern Arizona deserts in territorial days.  One of the most famous of these tales was of a red camel with a headless skeleton of a man mounted on its back. Legends are generally based on some type of fact and such is the case with the desert mystery camels, for there definitely were wild camels roaming the Arizona desert in the late 19^th century.

By Gail Van Horsen

Since families first began settling in Yavapai County, the women have been making quilts.  For example, the Jacob and Mary Ritter family moved to the Bagdad area of the Arizona Territory shortly after the Civil War.  They established a cattle ranch there and raised their family.  When son Ed married, Mary made a quilt as a wedding gift.  This quilt exists today, and the Ritter family is still in Bagdad where the women continue to quilt.

By Mick Woodcock

The first of our noteworthy travelers was Canadian-born Francois Xavier Aubry, who was well known in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as a fearless traveler of the Great Plains by the time he became acquainted with what is now northern Arizona.

By Al Bates

If there had been a competition in early Prescott matching a man’s name and his occupation, jeweler Lucien Bonaparte Jewell would have been the prohibitive favorite.

He was born in New York in 1833, and came to the west as a young fortune seeker gifted with multiple talents.  In addition to experience as a watchmaker and jeweler, he was a talented musician who was remembered by a daughter as one who “could play every musical instrument except the piano and pipe organ.”

By Allan and Cathie Englekirk

In the fall of 1863 when a young Albuquerque merchant named Manuel Yrisarri learned that the U. S. Army would establish a military outpost near the recently discovered gold fields of the Central Arizona Highlands, he determined that this would be a business opportunity too promising to miss.  It was obvious that the few settlers of this isolated area were eager if not desperate to obtain essential goods and would be happy to pay for them with gold.

By Jan MacKell Collins

Prescott’s wild women—the harlots who worked on the line along both Whiskey Row and notorious Granite Street—were an interesting bunch.  They rolled into town beginning with Prescott’s establishment in 1864, and were making headlines shortly thereafter.  For nearly one hundred years, the wanton women of the town were subjected to the usual run-ins with the law, addictions, illnesses, bar fights, domestic disputes and killings common to any western town.

By Allan and Cathie Englekirk

Arizona today, with some of the most beautiful scenery, best weather and greatest variety of things to do, is one of the fastest growing states in America.  However, it wasn’t always so popular.  Only Native American tribes, adventurous mountain men in search of pelts, and perhaps a thousand Mexican citizens lived in present-day Arizona at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848.  These resident Mexican nationals had the option of claiming American citizenship (“by election”) under treaty terms that transferred Arizona (and, later, the Gadsden Purchase) to the United States.  This was not an option for those Mexican citizens who came to Arizona at a later time.

By Al Bates

A chance encounter at a Fourth of July outing in 1869 led to the adoption of an orphan Indian child and, many years later, to one of Territorial Arizona’s most bitter estate settlements.  Feelings were so intense that at one point a rifle was fired into a room occupied by a woman and her two young children.

By Al Bates 

Last week’s Days Past told the tangled story of Charles Leib, earlier an eastern politician and later an Army contract surgeon in early Arizona Territory.  This week we turn our attention to his widow and her future with a new husband.