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Mexican Arizona and the Frontier 51 3 MEXICAN ARIZONA AND THE ANgLO FRONTIER The year 1826 was a bad one for Mexican Arizona. Five years earlier, Mexico won its independence from Spain after a decade of bloody struggle. The revolution destroyed the colonial silver-mining industry and bankrupted the national treasury. Along the northern frontier, funds that had supported missions , presidios, and Apache peace camps dried up and nearly disappeared. As a result, the Apaches began raiding once again, running off horse herds and killing anyone unlucky enough to be caught outside the protection of presidial walls. Then, in early November, Ignacio Pacheco, the alcalde de policía (mayor) of Tucson, reported that “the Gila Pimas, represented by a village governor and two of his men, arrived at this presidio with news of sixteen foreigners bearing arms along the banks of their river. The Gila governor demanded papers of identification. . . . Their leader replied that they came only to visit Indians along the Gila in order to obtain mules and horses from them and to find out where there might be other rivers abounding in beaver.” Those cryptic words signaled the beginning of a new era in Arizona history . The foreigners Pacheco referred to were a group of Anglo American trappers led by Ceran St. Vrain and William Sherley Williams, better known to his fellow mountain men as Old Bill. They were not the first Anglos to slip into Arizona from their outposts in northern New Mexico, nor would they be the last. At a time when Mexico was sinking into political and economic chaos, another American colossus was stirring east of the Mississippi River, spitting forth pioneers in search of virgin rivers and cheap land. The movement began as a trickle—a few trappers and traders blazing the Santa Fe Trail—but the trickle soon became a torrent. Ten years after Pacheco warned about foreigners in Arizona, an army of largely Anglo rebels wrested Texas from Mexican hands. Then, in 1848, Mexico ceded more than half its territory to the United States, including Arizona north of the Gila River. By 1856 the Stars and Stripes was flying over Tucson itself. Pacheco and his countrymen did not know it 52 arizona then, but the days of Mexican Arizona were numbered. Their nation was on the defensive. Arizona was already part of the Anglo frontier. The Trappers The first Anglo frontiersmen were hardly an invading army. On the contrary, they were a ragtag collection of misfits, adventurers, and businessmen romanticized by later generations as mountain men. From their headquarters in Taos, New Mexico, the mountain men entered Arizona for one purpose and one purpose only: to rip the “hairy banknotes,” as they called beavers, from every watercourse between the upper Gila and the Colorado delta. No single individual was their leader, but Old Bill Williams can serve as their prototype. A young New England writer named Albert Pike described him as “gaunt, and redheaded, with a hard, weather beaten face, marked deeply with the smallpox . He is all muscle and sinew, and the most indefatigable hunter and trapper in the world.” At a time when William Henry Ashley, John Jacob Astor, and the Hudson’s Bay Company dominated most of the great trapping grounds in Canada and the Pacific Northwest, independent trappers like Old Bill flourished in the Southwest, at least until gentlemen in Europe and the eastern United States donned hats made of silk instead of beaver felt. The mountain men were both capitalists and refugees from corporate capitalism. They prized their self-reliance, yet they were as dependent on the market as any other commodity producers across the world. The first to set foot on Arizona soil were Sylvester Pattie and his son James, who spent the winter of 1825–26 trapping along the San Francisco, Gila, and San Pedro rivers. James left an imaginative account of his travels, full of dramatic encounters with bears, “panthers,” bloodthirsty Indians, and “wild hogs,” or javelina, whose tusks “were of a size so enormous, that I am afraid to commit my credibility, by giving the dimensions.” James Pattie was the first Anglo to describe Arizona and the first of many to exaggerate the ferocity of its human and animal inhabitants. The myth of the savage land springs to life in his pages. Despite its embellishments, however, Pattie’s narrative constitutes the most extensive firsthand account of early trapping in the Southwest, which was much different from trapping in the north, where Indians participated...

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