Any of you who have read my writings on this website know I’m fairly familiar with the history of Tucson and Southern Arizona. But once in a while, I find a book that is enlightening on this subject. One such book is David Devine’s Historic Tales of Territorial Tucson: 1854-1912.

For example, I knew that the Gadsden Purchase was somewhat the result of the Confederacy wanting a southern railroad route to California and the Pacific Ocean. But I had no idea how popular slavery was in the Old Pueblo.

Historian Thomas Sheridan wrote, “Tucson in 1860 was a dual, almost schizophrenic settlement, one divided between Mexican families rooted in the land and aggressive young male Anglo immigrants seeking fame and fortune on the Apache frontier.” Then, according to Devine, “Many of these wealth-seeking young men quickly sided with the Confederacy after the early March 1861 inauguration of President Abraham Lincoln. One of those advocating that rebellious choice was Grandville H. Oury, an attorney who came to Arizona in 1856 at thirty-one years of age. At a late March 1861 Tucson meeting held “for the purpose of giving expression to the feelings and sentiments of the community as to whether they would seek protection from a Northern or Southern Confederacy,” Oury was one of five European American men appointed to a committee to draft a resolution of support. When they reported back two days later, they blamed the pending military conflict on northern aggression and hostility “upon the cherished institutions of the South.” The committee proposed that all those Tucson men allowed to vote on the measure should endorse “that under any and all circumstances our sympathies are with the Southern Confederacy.” This resolution was then adopted by a substantial majority.”

Gadsden was himself a plantation slave-owner from South Carolina while he was negotiating with Mexico for the purchase of land south of the Gila River that stretched from Texas to California. I didn’t know that either. Devine writes, “More than three months after Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox in April 1865, it was still said of the community, “Nearly all the people there are of the {secession} persuasion.”

Something else I didn’t realize was how poorly treated the early Chinese were by the Anglo-Americans and Mexican-Americans of Territorial Tucson. When the Southern Pacific Railroad halted its development 60 miles north of Tucson at Casa Grande in the summer of 1879, many of the Chinese workmen settled in Tucson, where many took up farming along the Santa Cruz River. “When they did, the Star, whose editor and publisher was Louis C. Hughes, stated unapologetically that the Chinese are “an ignorant, filthy, leperous horde of beings who may have the form of a human being, but lack every element which enters into true American civilization.”

The Star also took a dim view of Blacks coming to the Old Pueblo. While the Star praised the cavalry that had made its home at Fort Lowell 7 miles northeast of downtown Tucson, “The newspaper then derogatorily added of the African Americans in the Ninth Cavalry stationed in New Mexico, “We now express a hope that these negro soldiers will never be brought into Arizona – we desire our lives and property to be protected by white men.”

This book contains many fascinating tidbits. For example, the extreme novelty of women bicyclists wearing “bloomers” or divided skirts. And then there was the coming of the automobile when, at the end of 1899, Dr. Fenner purchased the first auto, a “locomobile for $800. It was a “two-person, steam-powered vehicle, which had one tank for five gallons of gasoline and another for16 gallons of water.”

These and many other facts are found in this fascinating book, including that three different U.S. Presidents visited Tucson before statehood in 1912. There was a surge in the popularity of baseball and the outlawing of dogfighting and bullfighting. So many things of interest here. Historic Tales of Territorial Tucson: 1854-1912 (American Chronicles)