Once a month, Arizona Oddities is now featuring a Q&A with a talented Arizona artist who is influenced by our state’s people, places and history. This month, Megan Dean shares her diverse array of work, latest inspirations and a soft spot for two Old West icons.
PRESCOTT — Copper has been an important element in Arizona’s history for more than a century, but it usually goes into the creation of such utilitarian items as tubing, electrical wiring and computer parts.
However, it took a different form in 1923, when Sharlot Hall went to Washington, D.C., wearing a copper dress.
Hall, a longtime Arizona activist and historian, was selected to deliver Arizona’s three electoral votes for Calvin Coolidge. Prior to her trip, the Arizona Industrial Congress commissioned an overdress made of copper links, and Hall wore it to the presidential inauguration.
At the peak of its prosperity, the fabled Bradshaw Mountains of central Arizona produced a king’s ransom in gold and silver. Towns and mines with picturesquely whimsical names like Bueno, Turkey Creek, Tiger, Tip Top, Oro Belle and Big Bug were peopled with boisterous devil-may-care miners aptly described as unmarried, unchurched and unwashed. Each community boasted it was built atop the madre del oro and its streets would soon be cobbled with golden nuggets.
In 1899, the vast riches inspired railroad entrepreneur Frank Murphy to extend his Prescott and Eastern Line from Mayer into the heart of the great mountains. Although Murphy was warned he’d be stopped by this maze of rugged, perpendicular grades laced with canyons so steep that big horn sheep had to shut their eyes and walk sideways, he was determined to meet the challenge of the mountains. That’s why it’s best-remembered as Frank Murphy’s Impossible Railroad.
When old Joe Walker, a big, strapping, ex-mountain man, and his party of prospectors arrived at Granite Creek in the Spring of 1863, another old mountain man, Pauline Weaver, was already camped there. The area where the future territorial capital city of Prescott would be founded was the stomping grounds of the Yavapai and Tonto Apaches. Both groups had a reputation as formidable foes of the whites who asked no quarter and gave none. Surprisingly, the earliest days of Prescott’s history were relatively free of bloodshed and the credit goes to Pauline Weaver.
Weaver is one of those ubiquitous characters who best fits the description of one who never had time to write or narrate early Arizona history—he was too busy making it. Born in Tennessee around 1800, he was the son of a white father and Cherokee mother. For a time he worked for the Hudson Bay Fur Company but preferred warmer climates, so he headed for the Southwest.
The Southern Pacific railroad stretched its steel ribbons across Arizona in the late 1870s, reaching Tucson in March, 1880. The rail station nearest Phoenix was 35 miles to the south at Maricopa. From the beginning, local citizens began clamoring for a railroad. Despite the fact that thousands of miles of track were being laid across the nation each year, seven railroad companies were organized and went broke in a 10-year period before a line was built from Maricopa to Phoenix.
During that time the stage line of Gilmer, Salisbury and Company ran a daily from Maricopa to Prescott, passing through Phoenix. A proposed railroad followed the same route, the old Woolsey Road, north to New River, then up through Black Canyon, hugging the Aqua Fria River most of the way before veering off to the territorial capital, nestled picturesquely in the Bradshaw Mountains. A tri-weekly stage also ran north to Prescott via Wickenburg.
