Photo: Richard McCormick who named many of the streets of Prescott
The streets surrounding Courthouse Plaza present an odd pairing. Have you ever wondered why the north-south thoroughfares are named after Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez and Aztec emperor Montezuma and the east-west streets recognize the first appointed governor of Arizona Territory Robert Gurley and his successor Robert Goodwin?
The decision to name the town after a Massachusetts historian – William Hickling Prescott – who never set foot in his namesake and died before the town was founded, provides the answer.
Photo: William Hickling Prescott
Richard McCormick, the first secretary of the newly created Arizona Territory, came from New York. The second north-south street west of the Plaza on Gurley St. is named after him. McCormick’s limited knowledge of the west came from a book, History of the Conquest of Mexico, written by Prescott in 1843. Much of the book focused on Cortez’s conquest of the Aztec empire under Montezuma in 1521. Marina Street was named after Doña Marina, Cortez’s Yucatan-born interpreter and mistress, the most prominent woman in Prescott’s book.
There is no mention of Arizona in the book, yet McCormick considered Prescott an authority worthy of naming the town after him. The names Audubon, Granite City, Fleuryville, Gimletville and Aztlan (ancestral home of the Aztecs, which some mistakenly thought to be central Arizona) had been rejected.
Early Prescott settlers named streets after Spanish explorers – Captain Hernando Alacrón and General Francisco Coronado, who famously searched for the rich Seven Cities of Cibola. There’s an Aztec Street and a Cibola Circle in Prescott.
McCormick had the foresight of bringing a “little antiquated hand press and a limited assortment of well-worn type” with him, according to Founding a Wilderness Capital by Pauline Henson. The first issue of the Arizona Miner was published on March 9, 1864, which provided an account of the governor party’s difficult travel from Cincinnati to Arizona Territory where they staged a formal inauguration ceremony during a snowstorm in Navajo Springs near Holbrook on December 29, 1863.
The July 20, 1864, edition of Arizona Miner justified McCormick’s choice by praising William Hickling Prescott’s “…perseverance under difficulties, including the blindness of his later years; his purity and amiability of character, and his love of country, which should make us proud to have his name associated with a settlement for which we have faith to believe there is a prosperous future.”
The east-west streets in the vicinity of the Plaza bear the surnames of those who played important roles in the establishment of Prescott as the first Arizona territorial capital in 1864: mountain men/guides (Aubrey, Leroux), the first territorial officials (McCormick, Goodwin, Gurley), army officers (Carleton, Willis, Whipple) and prospectors (Walker, Sheldon, Lount) who found gold on the Hassayampa, Lynx and Antelope creeks in 1863.
The discovery of gold and the strong Confederate support around Tucson galvanized President Abraham Lincoln, amid the Civil War, to claim Arizona Territory for the Union through the Arizona Organic Act on February 20, 1863, which annexed parts of New Mexico Territory and forbade slavery. He chose two Republican congressmen who supported the bill but had lost re-elections – Gurley of Ohio and Goodwin of Maine – to be the first governor and chief justice respectively. Gurley never made it. When he died before the group of territorial officials departed for Arizona, Goodwin replaced him. The east-west street on the northern border of the Plaza honors Gurley; the southern border, Goodwin.
Heading south out of town on Montezuma toward White Spar Road, the east-west streets are Carleton, Aubrey and Leroux in succession. General James Carleton promoted Prescott as the best site for the territorial capital. Francois X. Aubry, a French Canadian, and Antoine Leroux were mountain men who guided expeditions mapping northern Arizona for the feasibility of railroads and wagon routes. Aubrey became known as the “Skimmer of the Plains” after making the fastest horseback ride known on the frontier. Aubry’s actual name is misspelled on the street sign as Aubrey.
Photo: U.S. Army Lieutenant Amiel Whipple
The leader of one of those expeditions was U.S. Army Lieutenant Amiel Whipple, a Massachusetts-born topographical engineer who directed a survey of the 35th parallel as a possible route for a railroad from Fort Smith, Arkansas, to Los Angeles. Part of the route dipped south into the northwest part of Yavapai County. The fort and street in Prescott are named after him. Before embarking on his trip, Whipple sought advice from Aubrey, who had been part of an 1854 party that drove wagons from San Jose, California to Albuquerque in 29 days. Leroux served as one of Whipple’s guides.
The first soldiers sent to protect the miners and settlers in Prescott as well as the first Arizona Territory governmental party traveled over the “Whipple Route.” Whipple served in the Union army from the first Battle of Bull Run until he was fatally injured at the Battle of Chancellorsville.
Major Edward Willis established Fort Whipple in Del Rio Springs (Chino Valley today) on December 23, 1863, before it was moved to the present location in Prescott.
Captain Joseph Walker
Joseph Walker organized the first verifiable exploration of the Prescott area in May 1863, with 30 prospectors including James Sheldon, for whom the road leading to Yavapai College and Route 69 is named. One of the settlements was “Walker Gulch” on Lynx Creek. Walker Road off Route 69 leads to the town of Walker today. Sheldon, tragically, was killed in an Indian raid in 1869.
“Such a set of ragamuffins were the ‘Walker Party’…is not seen or imagined often in one lifetime,” wrote Daniel Ellis Conner in his book Joseph Reddeford Walker and the Arizona Adventure, “…patched, sewed, tied, strapped and ribboned off like a Kentucky Bluegrass horse in all patterns, fancies, and designs.” Conner had first-hand knowledge. He was part of Walker’s group.
Photo: General James Carleton
General Carleton, the military commander in New Mexico Territory, was assigned to find a site for a military post in the new Arizona Territory. He became Prescott’s biggest booster, writing letters to Washington that enclosed copies of “communication in relation to extraordinary discoveries of gold and silver in Arizona Territory, particularly at a point or region lying southwestwardly from the San Francisco mountains,” according to Founding a Wilderness Capital.
When Carlton met the governor’s party at Fort Union, New Mexico, he encouraged them to look for Thumb Butte as a landmark of a promising site for the capital. His persuasive pitch extolled the advantages of Prescott. The capital would be “without Mexican or secession influences, within a land wherein rich discoveries had been made, favored by abundant water and timber and by a delightful climate, would seem destined to soon fill with a high class of American residents,” according to We Call It ‘Preskit’ by Jack August, Jr.
It worked. Jonathan Richmond, a traveler in Goodwin’s party, said everyone was “gold-struck” and “the fever raged furiously.” Instead of just one street named after Carleton, perhaps a tribute can be added to the nearby Chamber of Commerce building on Goodwin.
With the exception of Marina Street, all the other streets have one thing in common – they are named after men.
Photo: The author at Gail Gardner Way
So, I was stunned at a traffic light on West Gurley to see Gail Gardner Way heading north. I later found out that he was a she. Even more remarkable, he attended two of the finest schools in the East – prep school (Exeter) and college (Dartmouth). His son James graduated from the Ivy League school in 1952.
Photo: Gail Gardener
“It really disappointed my mother when I became a cowpuncher, after I’d had all that education,” Gardner told the Arizona Daily Star.
Upon graduating from Dartmouth in 1914, Gardner high-tailed out of Hanover, New Hampshire, 2,600 miles for Prescott, where he lived a colorful life as an historian, postmaster, songwriter, rancher and rodeo contestant except for a short year in Texas and as an Air Service cadet in World War I.
His most famous cowboy poem, “Tying the Knot in the Devil’s Tale,” details the return to camp of two cowboys from Prescott’s Whiskey Row.
“Oh, they starts her in at the Kaintucky Bar, At the head of Whiskey Row. And they winds up down by the Depot House Some forty drinks below.”
The Devil waits for the two along the path home but such expert cowpunchers are able to rope and dehorn him, tie a knot in his tail, and leave him tied to a “black-jack oak.”
Named Arizona’s “Poet Lariat” by Governor Bruce Babbitt, Gardner still provides inspiration at the annual Arizona Cowboy Poets Gathering that has taken place in Prescott for 36 years.
