FOOTNOTE:

STAGE DRIVER'S LUCK

I have said that Wickenburg was a small place half-way between Phoenix and Prescott, but that is not quite right. Wickenburg was situated between Prescott and the valley of the Salt River, in the fertile midst of which the foundation stones of the future capital of Arizona had yet to be laid. To be sure, there were a few shacks on the site, and a few ranchers in the valley, but the city of Phoenix had yet to blossom forth from the wilderness. I shall find occasion later to speak of the birth of Phoenix, however.

When I arrived in Wickenburg from Tucson—and the journey was no mean affair, involving, as it did, a ride over desert and mountains, both of which were crowded with hostile Apaches—I went to work as stage driver for the company that operated stages out of Wickenburg to Ehrenberg, Prescott and other places, including Florence which was just then beginning to be a town.

Stage driving in Arizona in the pioneer days was a dangerous, difficult, and consequently high-priced job. The Indians were responsible for this in the main, although white highwaymen became somewhat numerous later on. Sometimes there would be a raid, the driver would be killed, and the stage would not depart again for some days, the company being unable to find a man to take the reins. The stages were large and unwieldy, but strongly built. They had to be big enough to hold off raiders should they attack. Every stage usually carried, besides the driver, two company men who went heavily armed and belted around with numerous cartridges. One sat beside the driver on the box-seat. In the case of the longer stage trips two or three men guarded the mail. Very few women traveled in those days—in fact, there were not many white women in the Territory and those who did travel usually carried some masculine protector with them. A man had to be a good driver to drive a stage, too, for the heavy brakes were not easily manipulated and there were some very bad stretches of road.

Apropos of what I have just said about stage drivers being slain, and the difficulty sometimes experienced in getting men to take their places, I remember that on certain occasions I would take the place of the mail driver from Tucson to Apache Pass, north of where Douglas now is—the said mail driver having been killed—get fifty dollars for the trip and blow it all in before I started for fear I might not otherwise get a chance to spend it.

The stage I drove for this Wickenburg company was one that ran regular trips out of Wickenburg. Several trips passed without much occurring worthy of note; and then on one trip I fell off the box, injuring my ankle. When I arrived back in Wickenburg I was told by Manager Pierson of the company that I would be relieved from driving the stage because my foot was not strong enough to work the heavy brakes, and would be given instead the buckboard to drive to Florence and back on post-office business.

The next trip the stage made out of Wickenburg, therefore, I remained behind. A few miles from town the stage was held up by an overwhelming force of Apaches, the driver and all save two of the passengers massacred, and the contents looted. A woman named Moll Shepherd, going back East with a large sum of money in her possession, and a man named Kruger, escaped the Indians, hid in the hills and were the only two who survived to tell the story of what has gone down into history as the famous "Wickenburg Stage Massacre." I shudder now to think how nearly I might have been on the box on that fatal trip.

I was not entirely to escape the Apaches, however. On the first return trip from Florence to Wickenburg with the buckboard, while I was congratulating myself and thanking my lucky stars for the accident to my ankle, Apaches "jumped" the buckboard and gave me and my one passenger, Charlie Block of Wickenburg, a severe tussle for it. We beat them off in the end, owing to superior marksmanship, and arrived in Wickenburg unhurt. Block was part owner of the Barnett and Block store in Wickenburg and was a well-known man in that section.

After this incident I determined to quit driving stages and buckboards and, casting about for some new line of endeavor, went for the first time into the restaurant business for myself. The town needed an establishment of the kind I put up, and as I had always been a good cook I cleaned up handsomely, especially as it was while I was running the restaurant that Miner started his notorious stampede, when thousands of gold-mad men followed a will-o'-the-wisp trail to fabulously rich diggings which turned out to be entirely mythical.

It was astonishing how little was required in those days to start a stampede. A stranger might come in town with a "poke" of gold dust. He would naturally be asked where he had made the strike. As a matter of fact, he probably had washed a dozen different streams to get the poke-full, but under the influence of liquor he might reply: "Oh, over on the San Carlos," or the San Pedro, or some other stream. It did not require that he should state how rich the streak was, or whether it had panned out. All that was necessary to start a mad rush in the direction he had designated was the sight of his gold and the magic word "streak." Many were the trails that led to death or bitter disappointment, in Arizona's early days.

Most of the old prospectors did not see the results of their own "strikes" nor share in the profits from them after their first "poke" had been obtained. There was old John Waring, for instance, who found gold on a tributary of the Colorado and blew into Arizona City, got drunk and told of his find:

"Gold—Gold.... Lots 'v it!" he informed them, drunkenly, incoherently, and woke up the next morning to find that half the town had disappeared in the direction of his claim. He rushed to the registry office to register his claim, which he had foolishly forgotten to do the night before. He found it already registered. Some unscrupulous rascal had filched his secret, even to the exact location of his claim, from the aged miner and had got ahead of him in registering it. No claim is really legal until it is registered, although in the mining camps of the old days it was a formality often dispensed with, since claim jumpers met a prompt and drastic punishment.

In many other instances the big mining men gobbled up the smaller ones, especially at a later period, when most of the big mines were grouped under a few large managements, with consequent great advantage over their smaller competitors.

Indeed, there is comparatively little incentive now for a prospector to set out in Arizona, because if he chances to stumble on a really rich prospect, and attempts to work it himself, he is likely to be so browbeaten that he is finally forced to sell out to some large concern. There are only a few smelters in or near the State and these are controlled by large mining companies. Very well; we will suppose a hypothetical case:

A, being a prospector, finds a copper mine. He says to himself: "Here's a good property; it ought to make me rich. I won't sell it, I'll hold on to it and work it myself."

So far, so good.

A starts in to work his mine. He digs therefrom considerable rich ore. And now a problem presents itself.

He has no concentrator, no smelter of his own. He cannot afford to build one; therefore it is perfectly obvious that he cannot crush his own ore. He must, then, send it elsewhere to be smelted, and to do this must sell his ore to the smelter.

In the meantime a certain big mining company has investigated A's find and has seen that it is rich. The company desires the property, as it desires all other rich properties. It offers to buy the mine for a sum far below its actual value. Naturally, the finder refuses.

But he must smelt his ore. And to smelt it he finds he is compelled to sell it to a smelter that is controlled by the mining company whose offer he has refused. He sends his ore to the smelter. Back comes the quotation for his product, at a price ridiculously low. "That's what we'll give you," says the company, through its proxy the smelter, "take it or leave it," or words to that effect.

Now, what can A do? Nothing at all. He must either sell his ore at an actual loss or sell his mine to the company. Naturally, he does the latter, and at a figure he finds considerably lower than the first offer. The large concern has him where it wanted him and it snuffs out his dreams of wealth and prosperity effectively.

These observations are disinterested. I have never, curiously enough, heeded the insistent call of the diggings; I have never "washed a pan," and my name has never appeared on the share-list of a mine. And this, too, has been in spite of the fact that often I have been directly in the paths of the various excitements. I have been always wise enough to see that the men who made rapid fortunes in gold were not the men who stampeded head-over-heels to the diggings, but the men who stayed behind and opened up some kind of business which the gold-seekers would patronize. These were the reapers of the harvest, and there was little risk in their game, although the stakes were high.

I have said that I never owned a mining share. Well, I never did; but once I came close to owning a part share in what is now the richest copper mine on earth—a mine that, with the Anaconda in Montana, almost determines the price of raw copper. I will tell you the tale.

Along in the middle seventies—I think it was '74, I was partner with a man named George Stevens at Eureka Springs, west of Fort Thomas in the Apache country, a trading station for freighters. We were owners of the trading station, which was some distance south of where the copper cities of Globe and Miami are now situated. We made very good money at the station and Stevens and I decided to have some repairs and additions built to the store. We looked around for a mason and finally hired one named George Warren, a competent man whose only fault was a fondness for the cup that cheers.

Warren was also a prospector of some note and had made several rich strikes. It was known that, while he had never found a bonanza, wherever he announced "pay dirt" there "pay dirt" invariably was to be found. In other words, he had a reputation for reliability that was valuable to him and of which he was intensely vain. He was a man with "hunches," and hunches curiously enough, that almost always made good.

These hunches were more or less frequent with Warren. They usually came when he was broke for, like all prospectors, Warren found it highly inconvenient ever to be the possessor of a large sum of money for any length of time. He had been known to say to a friend: "I've got a hunch!" disappear, and in a week or two, return with a liberal amount of dust. Between hunches he worked at his trade.

When he had completed his work on the store at Eureka Springs for myself and Stevens, Warren drew me aside one night and, very confidentially, informed me that he had a hunch. "You're welcome to it, George," I said, and, something calling me away at that moment, I did not hear of him again until I returned from New Fort Grant, whither I had gone with a load of hay for which we had a valuable contract with the government. Then Stevens informed me that Warren had told him of his hunch, had asked for a grub-stake, and, on being given one, had departed in a southerly direction with the information that he expected to make a find over in the Dos Cabezas direction.

He was gone several weeks, and then one day Stevens said to me, quietly:

"John, Warren's back."

"Yes?" I answered. "Did he make a strike?"

"He found a copper mine," said Stevens.

"Oh, only copper!" I laughed. "That hunch system of his must have got tarnished by this time, then!"

You see, copper at that time was worth next to nothing. There was no big smelter in the Territory and it was almost impossible to sell the ore. So it was natural enough that neither myself nor Stevens should feel particularly jubilant over Warren's strike. One day I thought to ask Warren whether he had christened his mine yet, as was the custom.

"I'm going to call it the 'Copper Queen,'" he said.

I laughed at him for the name, but admitted it a good one. That mine today, reader, is one of the greatest copper properties in the world. It is worth about a billion dollars. The syndicate that owns it owns as well a good slice of Arizona.

"Syndicate?" I hear you ask. "Why, what about Warren, the man who found the mine, and Stevens, the man who grub-staked him?"

Ah! What about them! George Stevens bet his share of the mine against $75 at a horse race one day, and lost; and George Warren, the man with the infallible hunch, died years back in squalid misery, driven there by drink and the memory of many empty discoveries. The syndicate that obtained the mine from Warren gave him a pension amply sufficient for his needs, I believe. It is but fair to state that had the mine been retained by Warren the probabilities are it would never have been developed, for Warren, like other old prospectors, was a genius at finding pay-streaks, but a failure when it came to exploiting them.

That, reader, is the true story of the discovery of the Copper Queen, the mine that has made a dozen fortunes and two cities—Bisbee and Douglas. If I had gone in with Stevens in grub-staking poor Warren would I, too, I wonder, have sold my share for some foolish trifle or recklessly gambled it away? I wonder!... Probably, I should.

A FRONTIER BUSINESS MAN

—Song of the City, by T. Burgess.

A Phoenix man was in Patagonia recently and—I don't say he was a typical Phoenix man—commented in a superior tone on the size of the town.

"Why," he said, as if it clinched the argument, "Phoenix would make ten Patagonias."

"And then some," I assented, "but, sonny, I built the third house in Phoenix. Did you know that? And I burnt Indian grain fields in the Salt River Valley long before anyone ever thought of building a city there. Even a big city has had some time to be a small one."

That settled it; the Phoenix gentleman said no more.

I told him only the exact truth when I said that I built the third house in Phoenix.

After I had started the Wickenburg restaurant came rumors that a new city was to be started in the fertile Salt River Valley, between Sacaton and Prescott, some forty or fifty miles north of the former place. Stories came that men had tilled the land of the valley and had found that it would grow almost anything, as, indeed, it has since been found that any land in Arizona will do, providing the water is obtained to irrigate it. One of Arizona's most wonderful phenomena is the sudden greening of the sandy stretches after a heavy rain. One day everything is a sun-dried brown, as far as the eye can see. Every arroyo is dry, the very cactus seems shriveled and the deep blue of the sky gives no promise of any relief. Then, in the night, thunder-clouds roll up from the painted hills, a tropical deluge resembling a cloud-burst falls, and in the morning—lo! where was yellow sand parched from months of drought, is now sprouting green grass! It is a marvelous transformation—a miracle never to be forgotten by one who has seen it.

However, irrigation is absolutely necessary to till the soil in most districts of Arizona, though in some sections of the State dry farming has been successfully resorted to. It has been said that Arizona has more rivers and less water than any state in the Union, and this is true. Many of these are rivers only in the rainy season, which in the desert generally comes about the middle of July and lasts until early fall. Others are what is known as "sinking rivers," flowing above ground for parts of their courses, and as frequently sinking below the sand, to reappear further along. The Sonoita, upon which Patagonia is situated, is one of these "disappearing rivers," the water coming up out of the sand about half a mile from the main street. The big rivers, the Colorado, the Salt, the upper Gila and the San Pedro, run the year around, and there are several smaller streams in the more fertile districts that do the same thing.

The larger part of the Arizona "desert" is not barren sand, but fertile silt and adobe, needing only water to make of it the best possible soil for farming purposes. Favored by a mild winter climate the Salt River Valley can be made to produce crops of some kind each month in the year—fruits in the fall, vegetables in the winter season, grains in spring and alfalfa, the principal crop, throughout the summer. A succession of crops may oftentimes be grown during the year on one farm, so that irrigated lands in Arizona yield several times the produce obtainable in the Eastern states. Alfalfa may be cut six or seven times a year with a yield of as much as ten tons to the acre. The finest Egyptian cotton, free from the boll weevil scourge, may also be grown successfully and is fast becoming one of the staple products of the State. Potatoes, strawberries, pears, peaches and melons, from temperate climates; and citrus fruits, sorghum grains and date palms from subtropical regions, give some idea of the range of crops possible here. Many farmers from the Eastern and Southern states and from California, finding this out, began to take up land, dig irrigating ditches and make homes in Arizona.

Fifteen or twenty pioneers had gone to the Salt River Valley while I was at Wickenburg and there had taken up quarter sections on which they raised, chiefly, barley, wheat, corn and hay. A little fruit was also experimented in. Some of the men who were on the ground at the beginning I remember to have been Dennis and Murphy, Tom Gray, Jack Walters, Johnny George, George Monroe, Joe Fugit, Jack Swilling, Patterson, the Parkers, the Sorrels, the Fenters and a few others whose names I do not recall. A townsite had been laid out, streets surveyed, and before long it became known that the Territory had a new city, the name of which was Phoenix.

The story of the way in which the name "Phoenix" was given to the city that in future days was to become the metropolis of the State, is interesting. When the Miner excitement was over I decided to move to the new Salt River townsite, and soon after my arrival there attended a meeting of citizens gathered together to name the new city. Practically every settler in the Valley was at this meeting, which was destined to become historic.

Among those present was a Frenchman named Darrel Dupper, or Du Perre, as his name has sometimes been written, who was a highly educated man and had lived in Arizona for a number of years. When the question of naming the townsite came up several suggestions were offered, among them being "Salt City," "Aricropolis," and others. Dupper rose to his feet and suggested that the city be called Phoenix, because, he explained, the Phoenix was a bird of beautiful plumage and exceptional voice, which lived for five hundred years and then, after chanting its death-song, prepared a charnel-house for itself and was cremated, after which a new and glorified bird arose from the ashes to live a magnificent existence forever. When Dupper finished his suggestion and explanation the meeting voted on the names and the Frenchman's choice was decided upon. "Phoenix" it has been ever since.

Before I had been in Phoenix many days I commenced the building of a restaurant, which I named the Capital Restaurant. The capital was then at Prescott, having been moved from Tucson, but my name evidently must have been prophetic, for the capital city of Arizona is now none other than Phoenix, which at the present day probably has the largest population in the State—over twenty thousand.

Soon I gained other interests in Phoenix besides the restaurant. The Capital made me much money, and I invested what I did not spend in "having a good time," in various other enterprises. I went into the butcher business with Steel & Coplin. I built the first bakery in Phoenix. I staked two men to a ranch north of the city, from which I later on proceeded to flood the Territory with sweet potatoes. I was the first man, by the way, to grow sweet potatoes in Arizona. I built a saloon and dance hall, and in this, naturally, was my quickest turnover.

I am not an apologist, least of all for myself, and as this is the true story of a life I believe to have been exceptionally varied I think that in it should be related the things I did which might be considered "bad" nowadays, as well as the things I did which, by the same token, present-day civilization may consider "good."

I may relate, therefore, that for some years I was known as the largest liquor dealer in the Territory, as well as one of the shrewdest hands at cards. Although I employed men to do the work, often players would insist on my dealing the monte deck or laying down the faro lay-out for them. I played for big stakes, too—bigger stakes than people play for nowadays in the West. Many times I have sat down with the equivalent of thousands of dollars in chips and played them all away, only to regain them again without thinking it anything particularly unusual. As games go, I was considered "lucky" for a gambler. Though not superstitious, I believed in this luck of mine, and this is probably the reason that it held good for so long. If of late various things, chiefly the mining depression, have made my fortunes all to the bad, I am no man to whine at the inevitable. I can take my ipecac along with the next man!

There were few men in the old days in Phoenix, or, indeed, the entire Territory, who did not drink liquor, and lots of it. In fact, it may be said that the entire fabric of the Territory was constructed on liquor. The pioneers were most of them whiskey fiends, as were the gamblers. By this I am not defending the liquor traffic. I have sold more liquor than any man in Arizona over the bar in my life-time, but I voted dry at the last election and I adhere to the belief that a whiskey-less Arizona will be the best for our children and our children's children.

During my residence in Phoenix Darrel Dupper, the man who had christened the town, became one of my best friends. He kept the post and trading store at Desert Station, at which place was the only water to be found between Phoenix and Wickenburg, if I remember correctly. The station made him wealthy. Dupper was originally Count Du Perre, and came of a noted aristocratic French family. His forefathers were, I believe, prominent in the court of Louis XIV. When a young man he committed some foolhardy act in France and was banished by his people, who sent him a monthly remittance on condition that he get as far away from his home as he could, and stay there. To fulfill the terms of this agreement Du Perre came to Arizona among the early pioneers and soon proved that he had the stuff of a real man in him. He learned English and Americanized his name to Dupper. He engaged in various enterprises and finally started Desert Station, where he made his fortune.

He was a curious character as he became older. Sometimes he would stay away from Phoenix for several months and then one day he would appear with a few thousand dollars, more or less, spend every cent of it in treating the boys in my house and "blow back" home again generally in my debt. He used to sing La Marseillaise—it was the only song he knew—and after the first few drinks would solemnly mount a table, sing a few verses of the magnificent revolutionary song, call on me to do likewise, and then "treat the house." Often he did this several times each night, and as "treating the house" invariably cost at least thirty dollars and he was an inveterate gambler, it will be seen that in one way or another I managed to secure considerable of old Dupper's fortune. His partiality to the Marseillaise leads me to the belief that he was banished for participation in one of the French revolutions; but this I cannot state positively.

On one occasion I remember that I was visiting with Dupper and we made a trip together somewhere, Dupper leaving his cook in charge. When we returned nobody noticed us and I happened to look through a window before entering the house. Hastily I beckoned to Dupper.

The Frenchman's cook was sitting on his bed with a pile of money—the day's takings—in front of him. He was dividing the pile into two halves. Taking one bill off the pile he would lay it to one side and say:

"This is for Dupper."

Then he'd take the next bill, lay it in another spot, and say:

"And this is for me."

We watched him through the window unnoticed until he came to the last ten-dollar bill. It was odd. The cook deliberated a few moments and finally put the bill on top of the pile he had reserved for himself. Then Dupper, whose face had been a study in emotions, could keep still no longer.

"Hey, there!" he yelled, "play fair—play fair! Divvy up that ten spot!"

What happened afterwards to that cook I don't remember. But Dupper was a good sport.

VENTURES AND ADVENTURES

Reader, have you ever seen the look in a man's eyes after he has been condemned by that Court of Last Appeal—his fellow-men? I have, many times. It is a look without a shadow of hope left, a look of dread at the ferocity of the mob, a look of fear at what is to come afterwards; and seldom a hint of defiance lurks in such a man's expression.

I have seen and figured in many lynchings. In the old days they were the inseparables, the Frontier and Judge Lynch. If a white man killed a Mexican or Indian nothing was done, except perhaps to hold a farce of a trial with the killer in the end turned loose; and if a white man killed another white man there was seldom much outcry, unless the case was cold-blooded murder or the killer was already unpopular. But let a Mexican or an Indian lift one finger against a white man and the whole strength of the Whites was against him in a moment; he was hounded to his hole, dragged forth, tried by a committee of citizens over whom Judge Lynch sat with awful solemnity, and was forthwith hung.

More or less of this was in some degree necessary. The killing of an Apache was accounted a good day's work, since it probably meant that the murderer of several white men had gone to his doom. To kill a Mexican only meant that another "bad hombre" had gone to his just deserts.

And most of the Mexicans in Arizona in the early days were "bad hombres"—there is no doubt about that. It was they who gave the Mexican such a bad name on the frontier, and it was they who first earned the title "greaser." They were a murderous, treacherous lot of rascals.

In the Wickenburg stage massacre, for instance, it was known that several Mexicans were involved—wood-choppers. One of these Mexicans was hunted for weeks and was caught soon after I arrived in Phoenix. I was running my dance hall when a committee of citizens met in a mass-meeting and decided that the law was too slow in its working and gave the Mexican too great an opportunity to escape. The meeting then resolved itself into a hanging committee, broke open the jail, seized the prisoner from the arms of the sheriff and hung him to the rafters just inside the jail door. That done, they returned to their homes and occupations satisfied that at least one "Greaser" had not evaded the full penalty of his crimes.

Soon after a Mexican arrived in town with a string of cows to sell. Somebody recognized the cows as ones that had belonged to a rancher named Patterson. The Mexican was arrested by citizens and a horseman sent out to investigate. Patterson was found killed. At once, and with little ceremony, the Mexican with the cattle was "strung up" to the cross of a gatepost, his body being left to sway in the wind until somebody came along with sufficient decency to cut it down.

Talking about lynchings, reminds me of an incident that had almost slipped my mind. Before I went to Wickenburg from Tucson I became partners with a man named Robert Swope in a bar and gambling lay-out in a little place named Adamsville, a few miles below where Florence now is on the Gila River. Swope was tending bar one night when an American shot him dead and got away. The murderer was soon afterward captured in Tucson and lynched in company with two Mexicans who were concerned in the murder of a pawnbroker there.

In Phoenix I married my first wife, whose given name was Ruficia. Soon afterwards I moved to Tucson, where, after being awarded one child, I had domestic trouble which ended in the courts. My wife finally returned to Phoenix and, being free again, married a man named Murphy. After this experience I determined to take no further chances with matrimony. However, I needed a helpmate, so I solved the difficulty by marrying Paola Ortega by contract for five years. Contract marriages were universally recognized and indulged in in the West of the early days. My relations with Paola were eminently satisfactory until the expiration of the contract, when she went her way and I mine.

Before I leave the subject of Phoenix it will be well to mention that when I left I sold all my property there, consisting of some twenty-two lots, all in the heart of the city, for practically a song. Six of these lots were situated where now is a big planing mill. Several lots I sold to a German for a span of mules. The German is alive today and lives in Phoenix a wealthy man, simply because he had the foresight and acumen to do what I did not do—hang on to his real estate. If I had kept those twenty-two lots until now, without doing more than simply pay my taxes on them, my fortune today would be comfortably up in the six figures. However, I sold the lots, and there's no use crying over spilled milk. Men are doing today all over the world just what I did then.

I had not been in Tucson long before I built there the largest saloon and dance-hall in the Territory. Excepting for one flyer in Florence, which I shall speak of later on, this was to be my last venture into the liquor business. My hall was modeled after those on the Barbary Coast. It cost "four-bits" and drinks to dance, and the dances lasted only a few minutes. At one time I had thirteen Mexican girls dancing in the hall, and this number was increased on special days until the floor was crowded. I always did good business—so good, in fact, that jealousy aroused in the minds of my rivals finally forced me out. Since then, as I have said, with the single Florence exception, I have not been in the dance-hall business, excepting that I now have at some expense put a ballroom into my hotel at Patagonia, in which are held at times social dances which most of the young folk of the county attend, the liquor element being entirely absent, of course.[2]

Besides paying a heavy license for the privilege of selling liquor in my Tucson dance hall, I was compelled every morning, in addition, to pay over $5 as a license for the dance-hall and $1.50 collector's fees, which, if not paid out every morning as regularly as clockwork, would have threatened my business. I did not complain of this tax; it was a fair one considering the volume of trade I did. But my patronage grew and grew until there came a day when "Cady's Place," as it was known, was making more money for its owner than any similar establishment in Arizona. The saloon-keepers in Tucson became inordinately jealous and determined to put an end to my "luck," as they called it. Accordingly, nine months after I had opened my place these gentlemen used their influence quietly with the Legislature and "jobbed" me. The license was raised for dance halls at one bound to $25 per night. This was a heavier tax than even my business would stand, so I set about at once looking for somebody on whom to unload the property. I claim originality, if not a particular observance of ethics, in doing this.

One day a man came along and, when he saw the crowd in the hall, suggested that I sell him a share in the enterprise.

"No," I replied, "I'll not sell you a share; but, to tell you the truth, I'm getting tired of this business, and want to get out of it for good. I'll sell you the whole shooting-match, if you want to buy. Suppose you stay tonight with my barkeep and see what kind of business I do."

He agreed and I put two hundred dollars in my pocket and started around town. I spent that two hundred dollars to such good purpose that that night the hall was crowded to the doors. The prospective purchaser looked on with blinking eyes at the thought of the profits that must accrue to the owner. Would he buy the place? Would he? Well, say—he was so anxious to buy it that he wanted to pass over the cash when he saw me counting up my takings in the small hours of the morning. The takings were, I remember, $417. But I told him not to be in a hurry, to go home and sleep over the proposition and come back the next day.

After he had gone the collector came around, took his $26.50 and departed. On his heels came my man.

"Do you still want to buy?" I asked him.

"You bet your sweet life I want to buy," he replied.

"You're sure you've investigated the proposition fully?" I asked him.

The customer thought of that four hundred and seventeen dollars taken in over the bar the night before and said he had.

"Hand over the money, then," I said, promptly. "The place is yours."

The next morning he came to me with a lugubrious countenance.

"Well," I greeted him, "how much did you make last night?"

"Took in ninety-six dollars," he answered, sadly. "Cady, why didn't you tell me about that $25 tax?"

"Tell you about it?" I repeated, as if astonished. "Why, didn't I ask you if you had investigated the thing fully? Did I ask you to go into the deal blindfold? It wasn't my business to tell you about any tax."

And with that he had to be content.

I was now out of the dance-hall business for good, and I looked about for some other and more prosaic occupation to indulge in. Thanks to the deal I had put through with the confiding stranger with the ready cash, I was pretty well "heeled" so far as money went, and all my debts were paid. Finally I decided that I would go into business again and bought a grocery store on Mesilla street.

The handing out of canned tomatoes and salt soda crackers, however, speedily got on my nerves. I was still a comparatively young man and my restless spirit longed for expression in some new environment. About this time Paola, my contract-wife, who was everything that a wife should be in my opinion, became a little homesick and spoke often of the home she had left at Sauxal, a small gulf-coast port in Lower California. Accordingly, one morning, I took it into my head to take her home on a visit to see her people, and, the thought being always father to the action with me, I traded my grocery store for a buckboard and team and some money, and set forth in this conveyance for Yuma. This was a trip not considered so very dangerous, except for the lack of water, for the Indians along the route were mostly peaceable and partly civilized. Only for a short distance out of Tucson did the Apache hold suzerainty, and this only when sufficient Papagos, whose territory it really was, could not be mustered together in force to drive them off. The Papago Indians hated the Apaches quite as much as the white man did, for the Papago lacked the stamina and fighting qualities of the Apache and in other characteristics was an entirely different type of Indian. I have reason to believe that the Apaches were not originally natives of Arizona, but were an offshoot of one of the more ferocious tribes further north. This I think because, for one thing, the facial characteristics of the other Arizona Indians—the Pimas, Papagos, Yumas, Maricopas, and others—are very similar to each other but totally different from those of the various Apache tribes, as was the language they spoke. The Papagos, Pimas, Yumas, Maricopas and other peaceable Indian peoples were of a settled nature and had lived in their respective territories for ages before the white man came to the West. The Apache, on the other hand, was a nomad, with no definite country to call his own and recognizing no boundary lines of other tribes. It was owing to Apache depredations on the Papagos and Pimas that the latter were so willingly enlisted on the side of the White man in the latter's fight for civilization.

Reaching Yuma without any event to record that I remember, we took one of the Colorado River boats to the mouth of the Colorado, where transfers were made to the deep-sea ships plying between the Colorado Gulf and San Francisco. One of these steamers, which were creditable to the times, we took to La Paz. At La Paz Paola was fortunate enough to meet her padrina, or godfather, who furnished us with mules and horses with which we reached Sauxal, Paola's home. There we stayed with her family for some time.

While staying at Sauxal I went to a fiesta in the Arroyo San Luis and there began playing cooncan with an old rancher who was accounted one of the most wealthy inhabitants of the country. I won from him two thousand oranges, five gallons of wine, seventeen buckskins and two hundred heifers. The heifers I presented to Paola and the buckskins I gave to her brothers to make leggings out of. The wine and oranges I took to La Paz and sold, netting a neat little sum thereby.

Sixty miles from La Paz was El Triunfo, one of the best producing silver mines in Lower California, managed by a man named Blake. Obeying an impulse I one day went out to the mine and secured a job, working at it for some time, and among other things starting a small store which was patronized by the company's workmen. Growing tired of this occupation, I returned to Sauxal, fetched Paola and with her returned to Yuma, or Arizona City, where I started a small chicken ranch a few miles up the river. Coyotes and wolves killed my poultry, however, and sores occasioned by ranch work broke out on my hands, so I sold the chicken ranch and moved to Arizona City, opening a restaurant on the main street. In this cafe I made a specialty of pickled feet—not pig's feet, but bull's feet, for which delicacy I claim the original creation. It was some dish, too! They sold like hot-cakes.

While I was in Lower California I witnessed a sight that is well worth speaking of. It was a Mexican funeral, and the queerest one I ever saw or expect to see, though I have read of Chinese funerals that perhaps approach it in peculiarity. It was while on my way back to Sauxal from La Paz that I met the cortege. The corpse was that of a wealthy rancher's wife, and the coffin was strung on two long poles borne by four men. Accompanying the coffin alongside of those carrying it were about two hundred horsemen. The bearers kept up a jog-trot, never once faltering on the way, each horseman taking his turn on the poles. When it became a man's turn to act as bearer nobody told him, but he slipped off his horse, letting it run wherever it pleased, ran to the coffin, ducked under the pole and started with the others on the jog-trot, while the man whose place he had taken caught his horse. Never once in a carry of 150 miles did that coffin stop, and never once did that jog-trot falter. The cortege followers ate at the various ranches they passed, nobody thinking of refusing them food. The 150 mile journey to San Luis was necessary in order to reach a priest who would bury the dead woman. All the dead were treated in the same manner.

While I was in Yuma the railroad reached Dos Palmas, Southern California, and one day I went there with a wagon and bought a load of apples, which, with one man to accompany me, I hauled all the way to Tucson. That wagon-load of apples was the first fruit to arrive in the Territory and it was hailed with acclaim. I sold the lot for one thousand dollars, making a profit well over fifty per cent. Then with the wagon I returned to Yuma.

On the way, as I was nearing Yuma, I stopped at Canyon Station, which a man named Ed. Lumley kept. Just as we drove up an old priest came out of Lumley's house crying something aloud. We hastened up and he motioned inside. Within we saw poor Lumley dead, with both his hands slashed off and his body bearing other marks of mutilation. It turned out that two Mexicans to whom Lumley had given shelter had killed him because he refused to tell them where he kept his money. The Mexicans were afterwards caught in California, taken to Maricopa county and there, after trial by the usual method, received the just penalty for their crime.

From Yuma I moved to Florence, Arizona, where I built a dance-hall and saloon, which I sold almost immediately to an Italian named Gendani. Then I moved back to Tucson, my old stamping-ground.

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