By Dawn Dollard

The ultimatum was implied. "If you go to Tonto," George Brown had almost said to Angeline Brigham Mitchell.  But Angie, writing in her diary on September 5, 1880, reacted to the unspoken threat: "I merely reminded him that I promised I'd go to the most 'barbarous' country I could if he ran for anything on the ticket, and he promised not to.  He broke his share of the agreement.  George had run for, and been elected, as a Republican representative to the 11th Territorial Legislature to meet in Prescott in January 1881, and I thought Tonto would answer my purpose.

By Sandra Lynch

On October 24 and 25, all day Saturday and Sunday, Sharlot Hall Museum will host its first Prescott Indian Art Market featuring over 50 Native artists.  The idea of Indian art, as market commodity, evolved within a history both Native and American.  Long before Spain's galleons put to shore in the Caribbean, American Indians had established art markets.  Pacific shell pendants, etched by acid and wax, crossed Arizona deserts in human caravans.

By Dawn Dollard and Jean Petrie

Before there was a building on the chosen site in Arizona Territory (where the Governors Mansion stands today at the Sharlot Hall Museum), the Governor's Party camped among the pines. Atop one of the tallest trees, they raised an American flag to mark the spot where the government of the new Territory would be located.

By Elisabeth F. Ruffner

Among the first in the Goldwater family to set foot on the plaza would have been Barry Morris Goldwater's Uncle Morris, although his grandfather Michael (Big Mike, according to Barry) and his father Baron would also have traversed this heart of the town.  The family members built their first store building on Cortez Street on the east side of the plaza in 1879, after leasing Howey's Hall on the next corner south in 1877.  The store on the northeast corner of Union and Cortez was called "M. Goldwater & Son" and the family operated the business there until the death of Morris, when it became the Studio Theatre and was later demolished.

By Richard Gorby

In 1865, with Prescott only a year old, the first post office, a wood frame building on Montezuma Street, just a few feet north of Goodwin, was occupied by the Reverend Hiram Walker Read, the town's first postmaster.  After a year, with a total postal return of $23.16, the Reverend Read left in disgust, and Prescott's first post office became G.M. Holaday's Pine Tree Saloon, in 1866.

There was a government rule that a post office should not be in the same room with a saloon, so the Prescott Post Office was moved across the Plaza to Cortez Street, inside Calvin White's store, and White was made postmaster. 

By Richard Gorby

The word "post" comes from the Latin "positus", meaning "placed", because horses were put, or placed, at certain distances to transport letters (or travelers).  In the time of Julius Caesar the system was already well organized and, for the most part, worked reasonably well. 

By Jean Cross

"The scenery was wild and grand; in fact, all that I had ever dreamed of; more than that, it seemed so untrod, so fresh somehow, and I do not suppose that even now, in the day of railroads and tourists, many people have had the view of the Tonto Basin which we had one day from the top of the Mogollon Range.  I remember thinking, as we alighted from our ambulances and stood looking over the Basin, 'surely I have never seen anything to compare with this' - but, Oh! would any sane human being voluntarily go through what I have endured on this journey to look upon this wonderful scene?"

By Mona Lange McCroskey and Curtis Ritter

W. Curtis Miller was born March 30, 1866 in Barrackville, West Virginia. He graduated from the University of Nashville, Tennessee and taught in rural schools in West Virginia for thirteen years. A shy, retiring man, Miller's life can only be traced through the memories of relatives and an occasional newspaper clipping.  He himself wrote, "I have always been as modest about appearing in print as I have been about appearing before an assembly to give a talk."  About 1900, Miller contracted tuberculosis and ventured to Arizona as a health seeker.  Described as a workaholic, he worked at a dairy in Phoenix during the day and also at a night job before suffering a serious relapse.

By Elisabeth Ruffner 

This is the first of two articles regarding these City Recorder's Notes.  Please read "City Recorder Keeps Prescott Posted of Early Times - Part 2," published on November 22, 1997 and in the SHM Days Past Archives.  The notes for these articles are about the Prescott City Council, 1876 to 1885. The unknown writer of these minutes kept his journal on the back of the Bashford-Burmister Company's invoice forms.

It was ever thus.. 

In the spirit of poking a little gentle fun at ourselves, the following has been excerpted from the notes of an unknown diligent recorder who created a list of city council (or precedent body) actions typed on invoice forms of The Bashford-Burmister Company, Wholesale and Retail Dealers in Groceries, Mining Supplies, Dry Goods, Hardware, Boots and Shoes, etc. The following excerpts are copied "as is" from the notes, including spelling errors: 

By Sandra Lynch

What is a Museum?  "Museums are about cannibals and glass boxes," writes University of British Columbia Museum Director Michael Ames.  For many, a place with "glass boxes" and "cannibal tours" might sound like an enticing place to go.  Ames, however, was not writing a side-bar for British Columbia's Office of Tourism.  "Museums," Ames claims, "are cannibalistic in appropriating other peoples' material for their own study and interpretation, and they confine their representations to glass box display cases."  We expect there should be more to a museum, but when the institution first came into the world, glass boxes were the drawing cards.