S. Fred Noon, Attorney at Law
October 3, 2008
Samuel Frederick Noon was born in San Jose, California in 1879, but came with his family to Oro Blanco, AZ at the age of one. His parents were Dr. Adolphus and Emma Noon, who had come to the area because of mining interests and the potential for a new start in a growing state. Dr. Noon practiced medicine, raised cattle, and mined in the Oro Blanco-Nogales area until his death in 1931 at the age of 93.
Ramón Ahumada
September 1, 2008
The first Arizonan to be inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City was Arivaca’s own Ramón Ahumada. Although he had no children of his own, a generation of young men, too numerous to mention, proudly bear the name of Ramón, Ray or Raymond, in honor of the gentleman who managed the Arivaca Ranch for forty years.
Don and Carolyn Honnas: Ranching on the Pocahonnas
August 1, 2008
The Honnas family arrived in Arivaca in 1960, when they bought the Las Jarillas Ranch from Homer and Dottie Osborne. The Honnas family’s roots in Arizona go back to the late 1800s when Don’s grandmother Della and stepfather Peter Honnas arrived in the Sonoita area to do some homesteading. They had their own homestead, but also purchased others as they came up for sale by people who couldn’t make a go of it. Don’s father Cecil married Lottie Moore, who had been teaching at the Empire Ranch School in the late 1920s. Lottie’s mother, Nancy Moore, had come to Arizona about the turn of the century. Lottie was raised in Marana, where she was in the first graduating class of the high school there. Lottie and Cecil were serious ranchers who intended to make a go of it no matter what. Cecil sometimes had to work off the ranch while Lottie took care of the horses and cattle. But Lottie was also the mail carrier on the route to Greaterville. Lottie and Cecil had two boys, Ray and Don.
The Adventuresome Sykes Family
July 1, 2008
Is the adventurous engineer (naturalist, scientist) a lost calling? Today those types are few and far between. One such person was Godfrey Sykes, whose life story is worthy of a movie, and yes, it has been documented in a book.* Godfrey’s son, Gilbert, was the Nogales District Forest Ranger for many years, so he had a local connection to Arivaca.
JPS Brown—the Cowboy’s writer
June 1, 2008
If you have not yet met Joe Brown, there is still time. He is one of those local writers who made good. He is known country-wide as J.P.S. Brown (Joseph P. Brown) for his true-to-life stories about ranch life in Arizona and Mexico. He will open your eyes to real life on the Mexican border—both sides of it.
The Contzen Family
May 1, 2008
In considering the German influence on early Arizona history, another pioneer family comes to mind. Fritz Contzen was another of the 1850s settlers in Southern Arizona. Fritz was born in Germany in 1831, into an educated family. His father was the Chief Forester of the principality of Waldeck. (Germany was not yet a united country.) Fritz came with his older brother, Julius, and a group of Germans to help settle Texas in about 1848. The brothers joined the Texas Rangers to fight Comanches. They became separated when Julius met Herman Ehrenburg who was going to Arizona. After the Gadsden Treaty was signed, Fritz joined Major Emory’s boundary survey and served as an assistant to the surveyor, because he had been so educated in Germany. After completing the survey, Fritz met Pete Kitchen somewhere near present-day Nogales and he decided to settle here. On a trip to Hermosillo, Fritz found his brother Julius who was living in Tubutama and they joined up again. Arriving in Tucson, they found the presidio with Mexican troops, but soon the U. S. troops arrived to replace the Mexicans. The Contzens were here, with the very few other Americans, when the U. S. flag went up in Tucson. Just south of the San Xavier Mission, in 1856, Fritz and Julius established a ranch at the Punta de Agua (point of water, where the Santa Cruz River went underground.) On a trip to Hermosillo for supplies, the brothers were attacked by a band of Apaches, near Imuris. Some O’odham who had accompanied them went to Imuris for help. In the meantime, Fritz was shot through the knee and Julius received numerous flesh wounds, but they held out until help arrived. Julius eventually died of the wounds, two years later. This episode didn’t stop Fritz from traveling, however, because he accepted the dangers as just part of living here.
The German Vanguard in Southern Arizona
April 1, 2008
Sometimes it is good to take a different perspective on history, so as to see things in a new light. It may not be well known that the largest ethnic group (17%) in the United States claims German ancestry. So it is not surprising that persons with German origins were in the vanguard of exploration and development in the Pimería Alta or what we now call Southern Arizona and Northern Sonora.
Revisiting the Boundary Survey, 1894-96
March 1, 2008
Naturally, it was something that happened just south of Arivaca that caused the redrawing of the U.S.-Mexican boundary in the1890s. Last month we talked about how the border was surveyed in 1855 and the markers placed erratically along the diagonal azimuth line between Nogales and Yuma. In the late 1850s, U.S. miners began working the mineralized areas around Arivaca and south into California Gulch and Holden Canyon (not named yet). Also in the area were a large number of Mexican miners. No one really knew where the border was, and there was an 18-mile span between Tres Bellotas Road and a point south of (what is now) Peña Blanca Lake where there were no markers at all. This wasn’t the greatest unmarked span along the whole border—in one case there was over a hundred miles between markers. No wonder there was trouble.This country had been vacant and undeveloped in the 1850s, but by the 1870s, the Apache being on the reservations, U.S. citizens were beginning to move into the area, mostly for mining. In 1873 the Oro Blanco Mine was “discovered” by American citizens. By early 1874 there were reportedly some 400 Mexican miners working the area also. (It is likely that this area had been mined since Spanish times.) The new owners were from Tucson, so they soon had the Sheriff out to run off the Mexicans. The Mexicans begged to clarify, saying they were in Mexico. This incident led to an agreement between the two states to appoint engineers to determine the location of the border in relation to the mine. Carlos Federico Seelé of Sonora and John W. Hopkins of Arizona conducted a survey and found the Oro Blanco Mine to be about 2.5 miles inside the U.S. line. The governor of Sonora, Ignacio Pesqueira, did not question the survey. However, the subsequent governor, Vicente Mariscal, disputed the survey. Hopkins had actually been a stockholder in the company that owned the Oro Blanco and some others in the vicinity, and so his opinion could be called into question. The Mexican governor even had some questions about Seelé.
Drawing the line: the Mexican Boundary Survey, Part 3
February 1, 2008
Return to the boundary between the U.S. and Mexico, 1853. When we last left the boundary story, a stalemate had been created and no acceptable boundary line had been successfully surveyed from 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, until 5 years later. Political reasons for this abounded.
Trying to Draw the Line: The Mexican Boundary Survey, Part 2
December 1, 2007
John Russell Bartlett: the American representative to the Boundary Commission