By Mona Lange McCroskey

John Nathan Hays was born in Missouri and taken to California by his mother after his father, Upton, was killed in the Civil War. Upton had freighted on the Santa Fe Trail in the middle 1800s.

In 1912, John Nathan came to Arizona to look for a place to raise steers for shipment to his California ranch for fattening. He and his partners in the Hays Cattle Company came on the train to Kirkland, where he ran into his old friend, Charlie Rigden. Rigden steered John to the Akard Brothers Ranch in Peeples Valley, which he purchased along with several other small ranches in the area. Having acquired the land, the partners returned to California.

By Kathleen Stack Domitrovits

For three heartfelt days in early June, nearly 250 alumni, faculty and former students of St. Joseph's Academy, gathered in Prescott to reunite, reminisce, and celebrate an unforgettable era, spanning 88 years of Catholic education in our town.

Amidst a growing population of prospectors in the 1870s, a plea rang out from the Santa Fe Railroad for the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondolet to open a hospital in the Prescott area. From the recently formed. . . .

By Garnette N. Coe

On January 16, 1877, a company of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) left St. George, Utah, being called by President Brigham Young, to travel south and establish a settlement. An explorer and returned-missionary to the Southwest and Mexico, Daniel Webster Jones, was chosen to lead this party of Saints. While in the office of President Young, and in the company with Brother Jones, Henry C. Rogers had a vision of the place they were to go. He described a place with a high bank, lined with cottonwood trees growing in a row, a flat-roof adobe house and a man riding a horse, then dismounting and gazing at them.

By Nancy Schader

On the 14th and 15th of July, Sharlot Hall Museum's Blue Rose Theater will begin a two-weekend presentation of 'The Purloined Pianist', a melodrama based on the life and times of one of Prescott's most loved musicians, Edith Gatfield Dietderich.

In 1894, Thomas Gatfield moved to Prescott from Trinidad, Colorado, as engineer for the Santa Fe, Prescott & Phoenix Railway, bringing with him his wife, Maria, and five-year old daughter Edith.

By Ryan Flahive

In the Archives of Sharlot Hall Museum, you will find countless materials related to the 'Prescott Frontier Days.' Hot Iron programs, rodeo record books, newspaper articles, advertisements and correspondence document the history of our famous rodeo. However, hidden within the rodeo material lies an 'Official Souvenir Program', published by the Arizona Journal Miner, for the 4th of July Celebration of 1908.

By Norman Delucchi

The Arizona Journal-Miner announced in 1905, that the opening of the Prescott and Mount Union Railway, Prescott's only streetcar line, and its expected effect upon the city of Prescott, "will do for this city proportionately what the electric system has done for Los Angeles."

The next major event for the Prescott & Mount Union Railway occurred in late January of 1906. The Journal-Miner reported the arrival of the second car for the railway line.

By Norman Delucchi

During the first decade of the last century, it was possible for only five cents, to take a two-mile ride on Prescott's one and only streetcar line, The Prescott and Mount Union Railway. The route went east on Gurley Street from about Garden Street (near Park Avenue) to Arizona Avenue, and then turned north along the Citizen's Cemetery and finally east to Fort Whipple.

By Karla Burkitt

The lovely and pure young woman is tied tightly to a railroad track while the villain wearing a top hat twirls his mustache. The train is bearing down. Will our hero arrive in time to save her? Mention the word melodrama and this is probably the first image that pops into the reader's mind. This is, of course, the type of dramatic presentation that we file under the name "Melodrama"; but what about soap operas, movies, and American Idol?

By Al Bates

The Walker party's route from Fort West, New Mexico, took them through Apache Pass (at night, since the Apaches after Chief Mangus' death were even more aggressive than before), through Tucson and the Pima/Maricopa villages at the juncture of the Salt and Gila rivers, and then to Maricopa Wells. From Maricopa Wells they most likely duplicated the path taken by Swilling three years earlier to encounter and then go up the unnamed river to its headwaters.

By Al Bates

Anyone who has studied Arizona Territorial history will recognize the names of Jack Swilling and Joseph R. Walker and will remember something of their contributions to those early days. But what most people do not know is the early connection between them.

Jack Swilling's best-known contribution to Territorial Arizona was his formation of a company that brought irrigation to the Salt River Valley of Arizona in 1867 and led to the founding of modern metropolitan Phoenix. Walker, on the other hand, is remembered for leading an exploratory party of gold seekers that opened the Central Arizona highlands and the Prescott Tri-City area to Euro-American civilization in 1863.