While I was farming on the Sanford ranch a brother-in-law of D. A. Sanford, Frank Lawrence by name, came to live with me. Frank was a splendid fellow and we were fast friends.

One day during the Rodeo we were out where the vaqueros were working and on our return found our home, a 'dobe house, burned down, and all our belongings with it, including considerable provisions. My loss was slight, for in those days I owned a prejudice against acquiring any more worldly goods than I could with comfort pack on my back; but Frank lost a trunk containing several perfectly good suits of clothes and various other more or less valuable articles which he set great store by, besides over a hundred dollars in greenbacks. We hunted among the ruins, of course, but not a vestige of anything savable did we find.

Three days later, however, Sanford himself arrived and took one look at the ruins. Then, without a word, he started poking about with his stick. From underneath where his bed had been he dug up a little box containing several hundred dollars in greenbacks, and from the earth beneath the charred ruins of the chest of drawers he did likewise. Then he stood up and laughed at us. I will admit that he had a perfect right to laugh. He, the one man of the three of us who could best afford to lose anything, was the only man whose money had been saved. Which only goes to prove the proverbial luck of the rich man.

Not long after this experience I moved to Crittenden, where I farmed awhile, running buggy trips to the mines in the neighborhood as a side line.

One day a man named Wheeler, of Wheeler & Perry, a Tucson merchandise establishment, came to Crittenden and I drove him out to Duquesne. On the way Wheeler caught sight of a large fir-pine tree growing on the slope of a hill. He pointed to it and said:

"Say, John, I'd give something to have that tree in my house at Christmas."It was then a week or so to the twenty-fifth of December.

I glanced at the tree and asked him:

"You would, eh? Now, about how much would you give?"

"I'd give five dollars," he said.

"Done!" I said. "You give me five dollars and count that tree yours for Christmas!" And we shook hands on it.

A few days later I rigged up a wagon, took along three Mexicans with axes, and cut a load of Christmas trees—I think there were some three hundred in the load. Then I drove the wagon to Tucson and after delivering Wheeler his especial tree and receiving the stipulated five dollars for it, commenced peddling the rest on the streets.

And, say! Those Christmas trees sold like wildfire. Everybody wanted one. I sold them for as low as six-bits and as high as five dollars, and before I left pretty nearly everybody in Tucson owned one of my trees.

When I counted up I found that my trip had netted me, over and above expenses, just one thousand dollars.

This, you will have to admit, was some profit for a load of Christmas trees. Sad to relate, however, a year later when I tried to repeat the performance, I found about forty other fellows ahead of me loaded to the guards with Christmas trees of all kinds and sizes. For a time Christmas trees were cheaper than mesquite brush as the overstocked crowd endeavored to unload on an oversupplied town. I escaped with my outfit and my life but no profits—that time.

On December 15, 1900, I moved to Patagonia, which had just been born on the wave of the copper boom. I rented a house, which I ran successfully for one year, and then started the building of the first wing of the Patagonia Hotel, which I still own and run; together with a dance-hall, skating rink and restaurant. Since that first wing was built the hotel has changed considerably in appearance, for whenever I got far enough ahead to justify it, I built additions. I think I may say that now the hotel is one of the best structures of its kind in the county. I am considering the advisability of more additions, including a large skating rink and dance-hall, but the copper situation does not justify me in the outlay at present.

I am entirely satisfied with my location, however. Patagonia is not a large place, but it is full of congenial friends and will one day, when the copper industry again finds its feet, be a large town. It is in the very heart of the richest mining zone in the world, if the assayers are to be believed. Some of the mining properties, now nearly all temporarily closed down, are world-famous—I quote for example the Three R., the World's Fair, the Flux, the Santa Cruz, the Hardshell, the Harshaw, the Hermosa, the Montezuma, the Mansfield and the Mowry.

This last, nine miles from Patagonia, was a producer long before the Civil War. Lead and silver mined at the Mowry were transported to Galveston to be made into bullets for the war—imagine being hit with a silver bullet! In 1857 Sylvester Mowry, owner of the Mowry mine and one of the earliest pioneers of Arizona, was chosen delegate to Congress by petition of the people, but was not admitted to his seat. Mowry was subsequently banished from Arizona by Commander Carleton and his mine confiscated for reasons which were never quite clear.

My purpose in writing these memoirs is two-fold: First, I desired that my children should have a record which could be referred to by them after I am gone; and, secondly, that the State of Arizona, my adopted home, should be the richer for the possession of the facts I have at my disposal.

I want the reader to understand that even though the process of evolution has taken a life-time, I cannot cease wondering at the marvelous development of the Territory and, later, State of Arizona. When I glance back over the vista of years and see the old, and then open my eyes to survey the new, it is almost as though a Verne or a Haggard sketch had come to life.Who, in an uneventful stop-over at Geronimo, Graham county, would believe that these same old Indians who sit so peacefully mouthing their cigarros at the trading store were the terrible Apaches of former days—the same avenging demons who murdered emigrants, fought the modernly-equipped soldier with bow and arrow, robbed and looted right and left and finally were forced to give in to their greatest enemy, Civilization. And who shall begin to conjecture the thoughts that now and again pass through the brains of these old Apache relics, living now so quietly on the bounty of a none-too-generous government? What dreams of settlement massacres, of stage robberies, of desperate fights, they may conjure up until the wheezy arrival of the Arizona Eastern locomotive disperses their visions with the blast of sordid actuality!

For the Arizona that I knew back in the Frontier days was the embodiment of the Old West—the West of sudden fortune and still more sudden death; the West of romance and of gold; of bad whiskey and doubtful women; of the hardy prospector and the old cattleman, who must gaze a little sadly back along the trail as they near the end of it, at thought of the days that may never come again.

And now I myself am reaching the end of my long and eventful journey, and I can say, bringing to mind my youth and all that followed it, that I have lived, really lived, and I am content.

THE END.