By Elisabeth Ruffner

Before Prescott’s Santa Claus arrived by helicopter, he rode into downtown Prescott on a gleaming red fire truck.  His visit on the Plaza in 1952 was promoted by The Prescott Chamber of Commerce as an ongoing gesture of goodwill for the region. The Yavapai County Courthouse Plaza has been the center of business, charitable, cultural, government and social life since the founding of Prescott as the Territorial Capital in 1864.

By Al Bates

Members of Arizona’s First Territorial Legislature, which met in late 1864, were collectively saluted for their teamwork and considerable accomplishments in establishing a firm foundation for future development.  By contrast, after the Second Legislature met a year later, only one legislator was singled out for any honors.

By Dennis O’Reilly & Brenda Taylor

Photography as we know it today literally burst onto the world scene in 1839. Its invention is attributed to Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, a painter and maker of dioramas in Paris, France.  Daguerre had invented a photographic process made on silver coated metal plates and developed in vapors of mercury. These photos became known as daguerreotypes.

By Murray Smolens

Governor John Charles Frémont and Territorial Secretary John Jay Gosper were the two top officials of Arizona Territory from 1878 to 1881.  They got off to a poor start, and then things got worse.  Letters from Frémont’s stalwart wife, Jessie, sent their relationship and their careers in Arizona Territory off the proverbial cliff.

By Tom Collins

One of the great “firsts” in the history of the performing arts in Prescott was the visit of Nellie Boyd, queen of melodrama and the first legitimate dramatic actress to grace the boards of the Prescott Theatre on Alarcon Street.  The Nellie Boyd Company, having traveled 140 miles by stage from Phoenix, opened on Christmas Eve 1880 with Fanchon the Cricket and stayed almost through the second week of January 1881.  They gave seven performances per week, packing the house with both worshipful enthusiasts and disrespectful rowdies.

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.”