Chapter 5
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
_Hush! What brooding stillness is hanging over all? What's this talk in whispers, and that placard on the wall? Aha! I see it now! They're going to hang a man! Judge Lynch is on the ramparts and the Law's an "Also-Ran!"_ --WOON.
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.