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The Freighters and the Railroads 111 6 THE FREIGHTERS AND THE RAILROADS In 1875, at a time when many Anglo Americans despised Mexicans as a “race of mongrels,” the citizens of Tucson elected Don Estevan Ochoa mayor of the town by the overwhelming margin of 187 to 40. A native of Chihuahua who had immigrated to the United States in the 1850s, Ochoa was a soft-spoken little man with dark, liquid eyes and a neatly trimmed beard. He was also Tucson ’s leading citizen during the 1860s and 1870s. He served in the territorial legislature for three terms; he helped found the Arizona public school system ; and he and his partner Pinckney Randolph Tully built one of the largest, most diversified economic empires in the Arizona Territory, combining longdistance freighting with merchandising, mining, and stock raising. At its peak, Tully, Ochoa, and Company employed hundreds of men and owned more than one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of freighting equipment. By 1880 the firm had become the largest taxpayer in Pima County. Then the Southern Pacific Railroad arrived. Before the railroads, all goods reached the interior of Arizona by oxen or mule. Anyone with a wagon and a string of animals could become a freighter, and scores of independent operations lumbered across Arizona’s rugged terrain. But the railroads sliced through the heart of the frontier, binding Arizona to the rest of the United States with bands of iron and steel. The Southern Pacific could transport goods for one and a half cents a pound and haul them from Yuma to Tucson in a day. Firms like Tully, Ochoa, and Company charged five and a half to fourteen cents per pound and took up to twenty days. Animal power simply could not compete with steam. In November 1880 a Southern Pacific locomotive ploughed into two of Tully, Ochoa, and Company’s freight wagons, smashing the vehicles and killing their mules. That accident symbolized the end of an era and the passing of the frontier. For two decades Ochoa and his fellow freighters had dominated the isolated young territory, running its politics and getting rich off government contracts. But when the railroads unleashed their “irresistible torrent 112 arizona of civilization and prosperity,” Ochoa and other merchants drowned. By 1888, the year he died in genteel poverty, Don Estevan and most of his contemporaries were relics of another age. They had become as obsolescent as Chato or Geronimo. The railroads destroyed them as surely as the frontier society they fought to build. Freighting on the Frontier While it flourished, however, that society was more egalitarian than the extractive colony that took root in its corpse. During the 1860s and 1870s, Arizona was too isolated and dangerous to allow any major industries to develop, so the scale of the territory’s economy remained small enough to prevent the entrenchment of a rigidly stratified social structure. Livestock were the natural prey of the Apaches. Agriculture flourished around Yuma, Tucson, Florence, Wickenburg, Prescott, military outposts, and mines, but the markets were local, not regional or global. Technological innovations had not yet transformed copper mining by allowing the extraction of low-grade ore. Unless an individual struck it rich in the goldfields, the only way to make a fortune on the Arizona frontier was long-distance freighting. Nearly everything , including most basic foodstuffs, had to be imported from outside the territory. Wheat and corn came from Sonora and Chihuahua. Manufactured goods arrived from the eastern United States. Army posts were Arizona’s biggest markets, and they received their clothing and equipment from San Francisco . But even though those supplies could be carried by ship around the Baja peninsula to the Colorado River and upriver by steamboat, they still had to be hauled by wagon or muleback across hundreds of miles of desert and mountain . The tide of the industrial age may have lapped at Arizona’s western borders , but the great dry heart of the territory could only be penetrated by sweat and muscle, not steam. For two and a half decades, then, Arizona’s most important vehicle of transportation was a wooden leviathan known as the Murphy wagon. Named after its inventor, Joseph Murphy of St. Louis, the Murphy wagon was designed to ride the waves of the Great Plains. Its bed was sixteen feet long and four feet wide. Its wooden sides rose six feet high. The rear wheels alone measured seven feet in diameter—taller than the tallest bullwhacker or muleskinner, even if...

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