Southeastern Arizona was contested ground. The few Americans who dared its dangers called the region the “Purchase,” after the 1854 Gadsden Purchase from Mexico that had added the Mesilla Valley and the land south of Arizona’s Gila River down to the 31st degree of latitude to New Mexico Territory. The Spanish and the Mexicans had called it Apacheria, after the Indian tribe that frustrated their efforts to settle the land.
Charles Poston, the self-styled “Father of Arizona,” had reached an agreement with Mangas Coloradas, greatest of the Apache chiefs, to allow his miners and lumbermen to work the land south of Tucson unmolested. Poston had also lobbied Secretary of War Jefferson Davis to provide troops to protect his new mines.
Poston’s Sonora Exploring and Mining Company established its headquarters at the abandoned Spanish presidio of Tubac in 1856. Not long after, Capt. Richard Ewell of the 1st Dragoons, later to be a famed Confederate general, established Fort Buchanan on a plateau above Sonoita Creek, just to the east of Tubac. This most isolated outpost of the republic had no outer walls and was constructed of logs chinked together with adobe. It offered little in the way of protection to the settlers, but it did open a valuable new market for cattle and crops to them. By the end of 1856, as Poston’s mining company thrived, nearly 1,000 people were settled around Tubac.
Critical to this repopulation of the Santa Cruz Valley was Poston’s agreement with Mangas Coloradas. While Chiricahua Apache raiding parties continually traveled past Tubac on their way south to raid in Sonora, they usually did not molest the miners, ranchers, lumbermen or farmers. Although the land remained wild and dangerous, with American and Mexican outlaws everywhere, Poston felt as if he had founded a frontier Eden: “We had no law but love, and no occupation but labor. No government, no taxes, no public debt, no politics. It was a community in a perfect state of nature.”
About 30 miles to the east of Tubac was the Sonoita settlement, which consisted of seven ranches along the dozen miles of the valley floor. The census of 1860 listed 51 citizens in the valley, identified as farmers, teamsters, laborers, a cook, a clerk, a shoemaker, a lawyer, a printer and one simply as an “idiot.” Fort Buchanan provided nominal protection, for the soldiers could barely guard their own horse herd, and Apaches once made off with several of the officer’s tents. Not far from the fort stood the local general store of White and Grainger. Four miles south of the fort was James “Paddy” Graydon’s United States Boundary Hotel, a rollicking establishment that everyone called Casa Blanca. Just below Graydon’s saloon was the ranch of Felix Grundy Ake, who had settled there with his tempestuous brood in 1855. Johnny Ward’s ranch, at the western bend of Sonoita Creek, was next in line, followed by the farms of William Wadsworth, B.C. Marshall and old Elias Green Pennington, and finally a gristmill operated by William Finley and Nathanial Sharp. The Sonoita Valley, proclaimed Tubac’s The Weekly Arizonian, was a “treasure beyond price to the farmers in the neighborhood.”
In time, a few American women also came into the valley. The most noted were the daughters of the eccentric Elias Pennington. He was known to all in the “Purchase” as Old Man Pennington and was a true pioneer as well as a wild, roving spirit. He had moved his growing family from Tennessee to Texas in 1839, but after the death of his wife, he pushed on west. He ran out of steam, but not determination, in June 1857 at Fort Buchanan while en route to California. His daughter Larcena had come down with a fever. While she recuperated near the fort, the Apaches ran off several of Elias’s oxen. Making the best of a bad situation, Elias moved his brood of 12 children—four boys and eight girls—down to the east bank of the Santa Cruz River, close to the Mexican line, where the family dug irrigation ditches and planted crops. The family sold their crops to the soldiers at the fort and to the miners at Tubac. The Apaches