By Anne Foster

Add one more to the list of Prescott’s "World’s Oldest" accomplishments. Prescott may have held the World’s Oldest Rodeo Queen contest! Certainly, Prescott’s Frontier Days was one of the first (if not the first) to include women in a rodeo event.

The occasion was the "cowboy tournament" held during the July 4th festivities in 1889. Prescott’s rodeo tradition had been founded only the year before in 1888. Apparently, the first event had been such a success that the organizing committee expanded the competition. This time, local women were invited to compete in a riding contest. Prizes included a saddle and bridle in order to entice entrants. The competition was an unqualified success. The local newspaper of the time, the Journal-Miner, reported: "The celebration of the Fourth of July closed on Friday, with a baseball game in the morning, and ladies riding and a cowboy tournament at the Driving park in the afternoon. Greater interest was manifested in the latter than in any of the previous days’ sports of the track, every available vehicle and animal in the town being pressed into service to carry passengers, business of all kinds being closed for the afternoon. The prizes offered for the best lady rider was a fine saddle as first, and a bridle for second prize. There were seven contestants: Mesdames T. Atto, Celia Book, D.W.Thorne and Misses Mollie Baker, Minnie Bargeman, Mary Boblett and Lizzie Dillon. The judges selected were Jeff Young, Orick Jackson, George Augustine, George L. Merritt, Frank Kuehne, James Rourke and Juan Leibas. The first prize was awarded to Miss Lizzie Dillon, and the second to Miss Mary Boblett".

Although no mention is made, the saddle was surely for sidesaddle riding. It would take a few more years and a bicycle craze before women riding astride was widely accepted. On the other hand, most of Prescott’s ranch women had probably already adopted the custom privately.

Unfortunately, little is known about the contestants. Lizzie Dillon lived in Prescott. On February 6, 1891, she married Thomas F. Turner, also of Prescott. After that, she disappears from the historical record. Even less is known of the married ladies or of Miss Mollie Baker.

Perhaps they were temporarily stationed with husbands or fathers at Fort Whipple. More likely, their history simply was not considered important until it was too late.

Mary Boblett, one of Sharlot Hall’s cousins, moved with her family from Kansas to Lynx Creek in 1876. Only four years old at the time, in later years she vividly recalled the nearly yearlong trip by covered wagon. She married Amos L. Hall (no relation to Sharlot) of Cordes on August 21, 1890. He must have died not long after for she later married George Ross while on a trip home to Council Grove, Kansas. She lived in Phoenix for several years before returning to Prescott. A Prescott Courier reporter interviewed Mary in 1951, while she was a resident of the Arizona’s Pioneer’s Home. "She related the story of how she happened to go to the first rodeo and ride in it", he wrote, "her brother, Edward Boblett, was to ride in the roping event and he registered her in the exhibition event with eight other women". Mary’s memory might have been a little fuzzy (the event was held in 1889 and there were seven contestants total), but she provides valuable evidence nonetheless.

Minnie Bargeman later married into the Boblett family. She married Samuel Boblett on March 16, 1890. Her family had moved from Holland to Walnut Grove, Arizona, in the early 1870′s. She died young, sometime before 1918.

Horseback riding had long been an acceptable activity for women. Even colonial-era women rode and raced on horses-not surprising in a predominantly rural society that relied on horses for transportation. By the time of the Civil War, "the sport that became most acceptable for women was horseback riding, so long as they retained their grace and femininity". Occasional riding contests had been held as early as the 1840′s and were especially popular among the plantation class in the South. By the 1880′s female trick riders were popular features of circuses and vaudeville.

Cheyenne, Wyoming’s Frontier Days offered a ladies race in 1899. Pendleton, Oregon’s first competition for women was held after the turn-of -the-century. Held ten years earlier, Prescott’s contest, then, appears to be the first women’s rodeo event ever held. Unfortunately, the event was not repeated in subsequent years. But by the 1920′s and 1930′s, women’s rodeo was in full swing and women again returned to the World’s Oldest Rodeo. Although it took nearly thirty years to be repeated, Prescottonians should celebrate this historic moment in rodeo history.

(Anne Foster is the assistant archivist at the Sharlot Hall Museum.)

Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(pb126f5i4). Reuse only by permission.

Pearl Ritter appears to be winning this race sidesaddle at the Prescott Rodeo in the 1920′s. Prescott’s claim-to-fame rodeo was only a year old when the first riding contest for women was initiated. Lizzie Dillon was the event’s first winner and took home a new saddle for her effort.

By Al Bates

Two men, one a Union Army General and the other a Confederate Army deserter, had critical roles in the decision to found Arizona Territory’s first capital at Prescott. The ex-rebel also started the events that lead to Prescott losing the capital permanently.

There is no doubt that when Governor John N. Goodwin’s party left Cincinnati for the newly created Territory of Arizona in August, 1863, that Tucson was the odds on favorite to become the site of the first Territorial Capital. Tucson was the largest town in the new territory and although it had Mexican roots there had been a significant American presence there since at least 1856. The only objection voiced was that the town harbored a significant number of Southern sympathizers.

How was it then that the first Territorial Capital came to Prescott instead? The answer at least in part lies in the friendship of two men, Union General James H. Carleton and ex-Confederate Army Lieutenant John S. (Jack) Swilling, and their common interest in the search for gold.

The best place to begin is in 1860 when miner and adventurer Jack Swilling commanded a group of volunteers from the gold fields at Gila City in a successful search and destroy mission against raiding Indian bands that took them up the Gila River and then up the Hassayampa.

During this mission, Swilling and other members of the party noted signs of gold somewhere near Wickenburg but did not pursue the search further because of the remoteness of the area. It was not until three years later, after the Gila City and southern New Mexico diggings were worked out, that Swilling would follow up on this discovery.

In the meantime, Swilling moved from Gila City to new gold fields at Pinos Altos in New Mexico, and there he became involved in the western-most extension of the Civil War. He helped establish the "Arizona Guards" a militia formed to protect the settlers of Pinos Altos against Apache attack and then, when the militia was absorbed into the Confederate States Army, became a lieutenant in the CSA. He was part of the small Confederate force that moved into Southern Arizona from Mesilla, and was present at the Confederate occupation of Tucson, but was not involved in either of the skirmishes between Union and Confederate forces in Arizona. At the time of the Picacho Peak "battle" he was on his way back to Mesilla with prisoners taken at the bloodless capture of Ami White’s flour mill at the Pima Villages.

His service with the Confederacy ended when he refused to forage livestock from friends and neighbors in the Pinos Altos vicinity. Rather than report for disciplinary action, he and several others deserted from the CSA. By then the Confederate Army in the West was on the run from the California Column lead by General Carleton. Carleton soon hired Jack as a civilian dispatch rider, most likely on the recommendation of a Union officer who recently had been Jack’s prisoner.

Swilling joined the prospecting party headed by Joseph R. Walker some time after they checked in with General Carleton after they arrived in New Mexico from Colorado. Once the Walker Party determined that the gold fields of New Mexico held little or no further promise, they moved on to areas best known to Swilling.

In the view of Arizona historians Bert Fireman and Senator Carl Hayden, Jack never received the credit that he deserved for leading the Walker party to the Hassayampa and then up to Central Arizona and its gold. Once in Central Arizona, Swilling staked claims on the Hassayampa River and Lynx Creek and had a role in the discovery of "Rich Hill" above Stanton.

A pair of nuggets from Rich Hill that Swilling sent to Carleton by way of New Mexico’s Surveyor General John A. Clark may have helped persuade Carleton that he should establish a fort near the new gold diggings. That and the fact that Carleton was registered as the owner of one of the original placer claims on the Hassayampa.

When the governor’s party arrived at Carleton’s headquarters in New Mexico there is no doubt that the General lobbied for establishing the first Arizona Territorial Capital near the gold fields of Central Arizona rather than at the "rebel hotbed" of Tucson.

The governor’s party then steered a course for Central Arizona and established a temporary headquarters at the original Fort Whipple location at Del Rio Springs. After a scouting tour of Central Arizona followed by a quick trip to Tucson, Governor Goodwin then decreed that the Capital would be established at the crude village that shortly would be named Prescott. Just as Jack Swilling had a prominent hand in bringing the Capital to Prescott in 1864, he had an equally prominent role leading to its being taken away.

Swilling just three years later founded a community in the Salt River Valley that eventually won out over both Prescott and Tucson as the site for the Territorial and later State Capital of Arizona. The community Jack founded in 1867 became modern metropolitan Phoenix. But even there he is scarcely remembered and another man is usually given credit for naming the town Jack started.

(Al Bates is an avid historian and a regular contributor to Days Past)

Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(citn140pb). Reuse only by permission.

In 1877 the Post Office for Phoenix was the place to meet. Jack Swilling founded the town in 1867. Ironically, he helped to locate the new capital of the territory of Arizona right here in Prescott only 4 years earlier.

by William Bork

The "Balentine building" on the northwest corner of Montezuma and Gurley streets in downtown Prescott is currently occupied by the Christian Book Store and adjacent businesses. However, from the mid-teens to the mid-1940s the "Owl Drugstore" perched on that corner and watched Prescott change.

Back on July 14, 1900, downtown Prescott was almost completely destroyed by the fire which ravaged the business district. Before the fire, structures were a melange of frame and other wooden buildings with a few brick structures thrown in that dated as far back as 1864. After the fire, brick buildings became the prescribed legal standard in the City of Prescott.

Two of the new century’s first structures stood on opposite sides of Gurley Street on Montezuma Street – the Burke Hotel (now Hotel St. Michael), and the shoe and clothing store of Joseph W. Wilson (now the Balentine Building).

As soon as the Burke Hotel building was at a stage in it construction which made the corner of the basement accessible from Gurley Street, Fen S. Hildreth opened a drugstore there. Later he moved upstairs into the first floor corner by a coffee shop. By 1903 or 1904 Hildreth was in trouble with his creditors. Albert William Bork, my father, was a young pharmacist in St. Paul, Minnesota who had suffered an attack of typhoid fever and remained in a weakened condition. His physician recommended that he avoid the severe winters of the north by finding employment in the Southwest. The Goodrich-Gamble corporation in St. Paul was one of the creditors of Hildreth, and they asked Bork to take over in Prescott. Other creditors, apparently with larger sums owed by Hildreth, had asked another druggist, Leon C. Corbin, to take over on their behalf. The partnership of Corbin & Bork, Druggists, was thus formed and took over from Hildreth.

The precise chronology of the many changes and manipulations of things at the Owl need some careful research, but the entries in the early of the directories (c.1905) at the Museum show Ed Shumate as owner-operator of the St. Michael Hotel. Shumate also owned a candy and ice cream factory and store at ground level on South Montezuma Street just south of the hotel.

In 1915, Joseph W. Wilson, owner of the clothing store across Gurley, died of a heart attack and his widow was unable to continue the business. When the building became vacant, the now prosperous young druggists and Ed Shumate decided to form a new partnership and established what they had earlier named the Owl Drug & Candy Company in Wilson’s old building. The new firm occupied the basement with its candy and ice cream factory. Upstairs at street level the drugstore was on the left hand side as one entered the building from the corner. The retail bakery, candy store, a soda fountain with booths were on the right. There was also a wide entrance into a spacious dining room and restaurant area. This business became the center of Prescott’s social and cultural activities into the 1940s. The Prescott Rotary Club, chartered in 1921, held their monthly meetings at the Owl and each year they hosted a luncheon for the high school graduating class. The Owl opened its doors at about eight in the morning and shut down at one the next morning. The bakery, ice cream, and candy factory kept traditional hours of such businesses with breadstuffs available from early dawn.

Ed Shumate through some sort of legal and financial manipulations took over the firm with his son Harry and his wife Nora. My father became a hired druggist and for a time he worked with the Wingfield Commercial Company in Camp Verde and later with a small drugstore in Wickenburg. He also worked as a substitute pharmacist at other drugstores in Prescott. Later, he contracted a duodenal cancer and died on March 9, 1921. Corbin left Prescott for California. His wife, who had always been fascinated with Hollywood doings, managed to have her daughter Virginia Lee become the first childhood movie star in Hollywood with a leading role in "Jack and the Beanstalk."

The story of the Owl would not be complete without mention of Nora B. Shumate (Mrs. Ed Shumate). When I knew her in the mid-20′s she lived over the store in an apartment in the St. Regis Hotel, which I believe she also managed. It was said by frequent customers that she was the real brains of the whole operation. Nora was usually serving the public in the business establishment as cashier, but she also kept things in the food service and catering on an even keel. The family residence of the Shumates was at 201 S. Marina Street, but Nora usually lived in the downtown building.

The Owl Drug & Candy Company was not only a drugstore, a bakery and pastry shop, a fine restaurant and meeting place, but also a kind of vocational education and training center. There was a need in our community for this type of service since Prescott High School stuck mostly to academic functions and included only a few courses in typing, shorthand, bookkeeping, and accounting. One can recall that some of the youngsters prepared at the Owl for careers in the food industries. Most notably was Frank Hee, a member of the Prescott High School Class of 1925 and a companion of mine from about the first grade through the high school where he played football. After high school he worked at the Owl under the direction of Myers, a fine baker, confectioner and pastry cook. He became an expert like Myers and went on to work in a principal hotel in Oakland, California. He headed the food service at that hotel, I believe, for at least 25 years until his career was interrupted by abdominal cancer. The Bashford-Burmister general store, Goldwater’s, the Bank of Arizona and the Arizona Mine Supply Company were the centers of employment for young men and women in the community along with the Owl. Not many families in those days could afford to send their sons and daughters to colleges and universities, although some did attend normal school or received scholarships to the University of Arizona.

If you are one of the few who remember pre-War Prescott, the Owl is probably foremost in your mind. However by the mid-thirties there were other eateries and meeting places you might recognize. When the Hassayampa Hotel opened in 1927 and the Great Depression altered our small town society in the thirties and World War II began, the Owl slowly lost its function as a downtown meeting place and social center. With the national changes that economic depression and war brought, coupled with the fine dining rooms at the St. Michael and the Hassayampa, the Owl’s days were numbered.

After the restaurant and food factory activities were no longer functioning, the drugstore was taken over by other operators. When I returned to Prescott in 1980, after 50 years in an academic career in the United States, Mexico and Peru, the old Owl had become the Rohrer-Bloom Drugstore. All that remains of the former configuration can only be recalled in the minds of a few persons of advancing age. Those very few people can look at the windows in the south wall and only picture the early establishment. The Owl was an important institution in community history.

Today’s drugstore dispenses medicines and provides products which are almost exclusively manufactured and received in their formal state and ready for the patients. The pharmacist is no longer a formulator from the "simples" of the Pharmacopoeia as in 1905. As the building that held the Owl at the corner of Montezuma and Gurley changed its druggists watched the evolution of the drug industry. Early national drug companies such as Rexall Drug and the more modern distributors of today such as Walgreens and supermarket chains have almost completely pushed out the small town pharmacist like the one that stood on the corner of Montezuma and Gurley all those years ago.

(William Bork is a long time resident of Prescott)

Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(pb150f3i7). Reuse only by permission.

The Interior of the Owl Drugstore around 1920. The Owl, serving as a social and economic center of town, provided goods and services as well as jobs and training for the up and coming students.

By Richard Gorby

Early in 1863, the new Arizona Territory had been signed into law by President Lincoln. By March of 1864 the territorial officers, headed by Governor John Goodwin, had arrived in the new territory and had picked this site for the first capital.

A few other young men, mostly seeking after mining wealth, were already there. Joseph Reddeford Walker and his Walker Party had moved into the "Links" Creek area and were mining with some success. Van C. Smith, a young adventurer from California, had built a small cabin and was accepting the stock on immigrants to graze and to care for at one dollar and fifty cents per head per month, and had been elected Recorder of the Walker Mining District. And he spelled the name of the area "Lynx".

Upon meeting Governor Goodwin’s party Van Smith immediately agreed to give a portion of his land for a town site. He probably possessed only squatter’s right to the land, which included much of today’s Prescott, since the first homestead entry in the area was registered in 1871.

Van Smith must have made a good impression on Governor Goodwin, as he obviously had on Walker. At a meeting in the only real building in the area (later called Old Fort Misery and moved to the grounds of Sharlot Hall Museum) on May 30, 1864, he was appointed one of three "Commissioners to represent the interests of the Government in the disposition of lots in the townsite of Prescott as surveyed by R.W. Groom."

About thirty days after the birth of the new Capital, a Fourth of July celebration was held on the Plaza, using the following announcement: "Fourth of July and Inauguration Celebration at Prescott. Van C. Smith, Esq., Marshall of the Day."

Since Prescott was now officially the capital, when time came for the Governor to convene the Arizona Legislature the problem arose as to where it would meet. The new territory had a "capital, but no "capitol". Goodwin received proposals for building, but the lowest of these so much exceeded the amount which he felt authorized to spend that he was in doubt as to what to do until Van C. Smith, Esq., offered to put up a structure "for business purposes," that would be temporarily fitted up for the use of both branches of the Legislature. "It is to be of hewn logs, carefully put up, and will be upon Gurley Street, on the north side of the plaza."

There were two short reports on the progress of the building, one saying it was "well advanced", the other, that it was large and comfortable, though plain in its appointments and under the circumstances, "all that could be asked for."

Judge Joseph Allyn, one of the Governor’s aides, didn’t agree: "The building erected for the legislature was just made tenantable, and resembles a large livery stable; there was no floor, and the partitions dividing it into rooms did not reach the roof, so that the murmur of voices in one could be distinctly heard in all the others. The furniture was of the simplest kind, consisting of pine tables and chairs, unpainted. (Two of the chairs can be seen today in the Governor’s Mansion). The presiding officers were upon slightly raised platforms, the tables being covered with fancy blankets and the American flag hung up behind them."

Soon called "The Old Capitol Building", it ran seventy-five feet along Gurley, including today’s The Shoe Box, to Plaza Cafe and TCBY.

Still in 1864, Governor Goodwin appointed Van Smith sheriff of Yavapai County, the first in Yavapai County and the only sheriff in all of Arizona. From the Arizona Miner:

"In this delicate position Mr. Smith was equal to the duty demanded. He was seldom in the office but constantly in the field. He assisted miners in going out and coming in, and through his efforts life and property were relieved of alarm. He was of gentle disposition, but on the line of duty, c more courageous man never lived."

After six months as sheriff, Smith, seemingly always on the move, spent some time mining in Mexico and then New Mexico, apparently with some success. Arriving in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1870, he purchased from James Patterson "—All his interests in this immediate section: house, goods, and a considerable stock of horses and cattle."

Smith sent to Lincoln, New Mexico, for adobe makers and layers, and in an incredibly short time had three rooms added to Patterson’s original one. He also sent to Fort Stanton for lumber and carpenters, raised the roofs, and made the building one and one-half stories high, and placed the first shingle roof ever seen in that Valley.

Away from Prescott for less than five years, Van Smith was, apparently, still mining successfully. It took money for his building and cattle-buying. So Smith entered a partnership with Frank Wilburn to engage in the mercantile business. The firm commenced the erection of a store building in Roswell, a blacksmith shop and a meat house, and "an immense stock of goods."

With their store and hotel, Smith and Wilburn offered an assortment of comforts and pleasures for the weary cattle-drovers who frequented the place while their herds were passing through the area. "The best whiskey and cigars that money would buy, faro, monte, poker and other card games allured many."

Van Smith never married, and no mention of any relationship with a woman could be found until this 1878 account by John Chisum implies that Smith and Wilburn may have offered other services as well. Chisum allows that Van C. Smith was engaged in the "income business", which Chisum defined as "living with a good-looking Mexican woman who lives in town and has a room and a clean Bed and has an income from her customers, and she divides her income with her lover."

Historian Frederick Nolan (The Lincoln County War: A Documentary History, 1992) takes this to mean that Roswell’s first "hotel" was the first of the bawdy houses which would be a part of the Roswell scene for the next hundred years.

Van Smith, after all of his wanderings, must have happily remembered his youthful early days in Prescott. He returned and died in the Pioneer’s Home in 1914 at the age of 77.

(Richard Gorby is a volunteer at the Sharlot Hall Museum Archives and Library. It is not too late to come down to the Museum today for the annual Folk Arts Fair and see Ft. Misery and the Governor’s Mansion)

Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(st117pg). Reuse only by permission.

Van C. Smith offered to put up a structure "of hewn logs [on] Gurley Street, on the north side of the plaza." that would temporarily serve both branches of the Legislature in 1864. This 1877 photo shows the building (with the roof tilted toward the street) being occupied by the Arizona Brewery, the Prescott Market and other businesses.