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    Verde Valley
    Verde Valley
    Verde Valley
    Ebook216 pages53 minutes

    Verde Valley

    By William L. Cowan

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    About this ebook

    This book celebrates the colorful history of the Verde Valley from its prehistoric settlements to the Arizona State Centennial Celebration in 2012. Located in the heart of Arizona, between the Sonoran Desert and the mountain highlands of the Colorado Plateau, the Verde Valley has been a pleasant refuge for man and beast for thousands of years. In a land known for its lack of water, the Verde River and its tributaries—Clear Creek, Beaver Creek, Oak Creek, and Sycamore Creek—have attracted prehistoric people and American pioneers alike. This book will illustrate the history of the “Verde” from the ruins of the lost civilization to the first Anglo farming efforts along Clear Creek and the military presence at Camp Verde. It will illustrate the settlements at Middle Verde and along Beaver Creek, Rimrock, Oak Creek, Cornville, and Sedona. Finally, it will visit the settlement near the Cottonwoods, the exploitation of the Billion Dollar Copper Camp at Jerome, the smoke-belching furnaces of the smelters, and the elegant architecture of the planned company town of Clarkdale.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateDec 5, 2011
    ISBN9781439649879
    Verde Valley
    Author

    William L. Cowan

    Author William L. Cowan is a native Arizonan with a burning passion for the preservation of Arizona history and the time-honored culture of campfire tales, chuck-wagon cooking, cowboy poetry, and good Mexican chili.

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      Book preview

      Verde Valley - William L. Cowan

      alone.

      INTRODUCTION

      Set in a quiet valley refuge between the raging winter storms of the Mogollon uplands and the burning cactus, rattlesnake, and scorpion–infested Sonoran Desert is a little piece of heaven, right in the geographic center of the state of Arizona, known today as the Verde Valley.

      This verdant valley has provided a sanctuary since the era of what many believe to be the first presence of man in North America, the nomadic Clovis culture, whose members ventured here over 11,000 years ago. These men and women survived by hunting mammoths, and mammoth tracks are petrified now into Verde limestone along the prehistoric banks of Beaver Creek at Montezuma Castle National Monument. These hunters, who developed distinct spear points, were succeeded over the next 6,000 years by the soft, yucca-sandaled feet of Archaic hunter-gatherers who raised generations of families along quiet streams, which served as the very arteries of life to the people of the Verde Valley. The fragrant smoke from their warming fires wafted skyward, and the bounty of the valley provided sustenance and life to people who loved their homeland every bit as much as anyone alive in the Verde today.

      These Archaic people were followed by Sinagua farmers who planted the banks of the streams with the three sisters—corn, beans, and squash—and ultimately built magnificent settlements, including the village preserved today at Tuzigoot National Monument and other pueblos up and down the banks of the life-giving river and its perennial tributaries. The elders, astronomers, and shamans spent generations experiencing and studying the synchronization of the seasons and remembering the cyclical changes in the sky as well as fathoming the meaning of the movements of the sun, moon, stars, and planets. They spent years more calculating and marking planting and harvesting cycles indicated by the movement of shadows and narrow shafts of sunlight that annually crossed ancient cliff faces such as those witnessed on the solstices, equinoxes, and other significant dates at the Coconino National Forest V-Bar-V Heritage Site along Beaver Creek.

      Contemporaneous with and following the end of the Sinagua came the People of the Sun, the Yavapai, who, according to their legends, arose from the depths of Mother Earth into the current world by climbing a cottonwood tree growing up from Montezuma Well. These people felt the warm, spring sunshine, gloried in the mountain freshness, and harvested the bounty of the Verde Valley for centuries. Ultimately, they were joined by strong hunters—the Dilzhe’e (dilzay’), or Apache, people—who also believed they emerged from a world below and who lived in matriarchal bands striving to exist in harmony with the land. Like packs of coyotes or flocks of blue jays, the mothers, sisters, and aunts clung together in the vast wilderness, raising children and making the decisions as to when the time was right to move on or to stay.

      It was into this pastoral environment that the first clip-clop of Spanish horses and the clank of iron swords echoed off canyon walls as Spanish conquistadors made their initial entrada into this section of the New World—roughly 25 years before the English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia. Led by four guides from the Hopi village of Awatovi, Antonio Espejo entered the Verde Valley following a long established trade route from the northeast. Espejo was ostensibly searching for a lost Franciscan missionary, but he remarked on the beauty and bounty of the local population and sized up the richness of the land. Before leaving, he established a claim to what would become one of the richest copper, silver, and gold discoveries on the face of the earth. Espejo was followed by a series of Spanish explorers, but the land was rough, the Indians strove to protect their homes, and the burning miles seemed insurmountable. Settlement along the Rio Grande and the Little Colorado Rivers proved much easier, and the vastness of the heart of Arizona was labeled Terra Incognita (Unknown Land).

      The next incursion into the pastoral wilderness of central Arizona came with the free-spirited American mountain men setting steel traps to catch and kill beavers, harvesting their pelts for the American and European hat industries. Many of these men would just as soon kill an Indian as a beaver and were in fact operating without license or even the knowledge of the Spaniards who had tenuously claimed Terra Incognita for nearly 300 years. Ewing Young and Kit Carson traveled up the Verde River and its tributaries, harvested beavers here, and took the first widespread knowledge of this place back east with them.

      In 1847, Pres. James Polk, armed with the vision of Manifest Destiny—that it was inevitable and right that the United States expand westward—sent troops to invade Mexico. Following the end of that war, subsequent knowledge of the potential of the Verde Valley was gleaned as French fur-trapper Antoine Leroux, who had guided the Mormon Battalion across Arizona, subsequently led parties of American explorers searching for riches and railroad routes to the goldfields of California. Leroux traveled up the Verde River in 1854.

      The valley would be left to the original inhabitants for another 10 years until the turmoil of the Civil War and the headlong search for gold and silver led to the American recognition of the value of the Arizona heartland. Gold was discovered along Lynx and Granite Creeks and at Rich Hill, near the headwaters of the Verde River, leading to the establishment of Prescott as the Arizona territorial capital in 1864.

      This, then, set the stage for the wholesale exploration, settlement, and development of the Verde Valley, including the original settlement at Clear Fork, the ultimate solution of the Indian Problem with the establishment of Fort Verde, and the coming to the heartland of Arizona of the subsequent waves of settlers—continuing in seemingly ever-increasing numbers until the present. This colorful history provides the sum and substance of this work.

      This book has been a labor of love for me and the culmination of living a lifetime listening to the legends and stories of old-timers and studying and reading the classic histories of other Arizonans before me. These include the works of Thomas Edwin Farish, in his original 1915 History of Arizona, or historian James Henry McClintock, who served at Fort Whipple and left a legacy in his 1913 work Arizona: A History of the Youngest State from 1540 to 1915. My original interest in the history of Arizona stems from my family, who raised me to love and be proud of Arizona, and then getting to work for a great and much loved storyteller, Gale Wingfield at Mormon Lake Lodge. This was followed by the 1976 American bicentennial release of They Came to the Mountain: The Story of Flagstaff’s Beginnings by Platt Cline and Those Early Days . . . Oldtimers’ Memoirs of Oak Creek, Sedona and the Verde Valley Region by

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