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We beat them off in the end, owing to superior marksmanship, and arrived in Wickenburg unhurt. Block was part owner of the Barnett and Block store in Wickenburg and was a well-known man in that section. After this incident I determined to quit driving stages and buckboards and, casting about for some new line of endeavor, went for the first time into the restaurant business for myself.
"Stop, trying to play horse with me!" went on the doctor sourly. "Something took place between you and your partner, Lafe Wynn, at Wickenburg, and I want to know what it was." Clancy stiffened. "That's a personal matter, Doctor Ferguson," he answered, "and I don't have to explain it to anybody." "Well, you needn't get hot about it.
When I arrived in Wickenburg from Tucson and the journey was no mean affair, involving, as it did, a ride over desert and mountains, both of which were crowded with hostile Apaches I went to work as stage driver for the company that operated stages out of Wickenburg to Ehrenberg, Prescott and other places, including Florence which was just then beginning to be a town.
Many farmers from the Eastern and Southern states and from California, finding this out, began to take up land, dig irrigating ditches and make homes in Arizona. Fifteen or twenty pioneers had gone to the Salt River Valley while I was at Wickenburg and there had taken up quarter sections on which they raised, chiefly, barley, wheat, corn and hay. A little fruit was also experimented in.
"Sure, I heard the captain come out on his side porch for a drink at the olla, sir, and saw him step over and look at the doctor's place before starting for the guard-house, and I knew he'd be around this way and was thinking to meet him up yonder where Number Four is, when I heard Six down here whistling to me, and when I went Six said as how the dogs way over at the store was barking a lot, and he said had I seen or heard anything in the willows he's that young fellow that 'listed back at Wickenburg after the stage holdup and while we was talkin' he grabbed me and said, 'Listen!
It was they who gave the Mexican such a bad name on the frontier, and it was they who first earned the title "greaser." They were a murderous, treacherous lot of rascals. In the Wickenburg stage massacre, for instance, it was known that several Mexicans were involved wood-choppers. One of these Mexicans was hunted for weeks and was caught soon after I arrived in Phoenix.
Only two or three knew how Clancy had trailed Wynn to Wickenburg and had sent him back to Phoenix to take charge of the Square-deal Garage, as usual, while he Clancy was in bed in the other town for a week. Apparently all was the same as it ever had been between the two partners. In this instance, however, surface indications were not to be trusted.
A woman named Moll Shepherd, going back East with a large sum of money in her possession, and a man named Kruger, escaped the Indians, hid in the hills and were the only two who survived to tell the story of what has gone down into history as the famous "Wickenburg Stage Massacre." I shudder now to think how nearly I might have been on the box on that fatal trip.
I wound up the Indian service with loss of about $5,000 out of my own pocket. At camp on the Hassayamp, Henry Wickenburg came in with some specimens of gold quartz he had found out to the west, at a place subsequently called Vulture, and wanted me to buy the find.
Hudson reported that he had dropped information at the hotels and business places that we were here to meet a director of the Colorado Navigation Company. We also learned from him that the steamer Cocopah had arrived that morning from up-river, and was now lying at her landing, one mile below town, awaiting the return of the director from Wickenburg. Both Mr.
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