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CHIRICAHUA
A Pioneer Log Cabin in Bonita Canyon The History of the Stafford Cabin |
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I. HISTORY OF THE STAFFORD CABIN (continued)
C. THE STAFFORD HOMESTEAD
Late in 1880 a man with the uncommon name of Ja Hu Stafford arrived in Bonita Canyon with his new wife, Pauline. Stafford was born on June 2, 1834,5 in Davidson County, North Carolina, to John Wesley Stafford and his wife, Clementine Reid Stafford. Young Ja Hu moved with his family to Kentucky and then Missouri where he lived until 1852, when the not-yet-18-year-old enlisted in the army, stating his age as 21.6
5The date of Stafford's birth varies from account to account. Often it is given as 1836, supported by Stafford's own reports later in his life; Stafford was known to have misstated his age at times. The 1834 date is supported, however, by the 1850 census and an 1872 letter to his brother, in the Stafford Family Collection.
6Stafford's given name appears in many forms on documents and notes about him, likely because of its uncommonness. Some of Stafford's descendants apparently prefer Jay Hugh, a spelling sometimes used in later writings about the man and which appears on his replaced gravestone in the Sulphur Spring Valley Community (El Dorado) Cemetery. Other variations include Jahu, Ja. Hu., Jehu and J. Hugh. The earliest legal documents prove that the original spelling was Jehu, after the Biblical prophet (Jehu was also 19th century slang for a fast reckless driver of a stagecoach or wagon, although there is no indication that there is any connection here). However, this report accepts Ja Hu as the correct spelling, for the reason that it appears with that spelling on all surviving documents written in his hand, including his personal bible, and most of the Arizona-era official documents carry that spelling. Much of the personal information about the Stafford family comes from personal communication, largely letters, phone interviews and copies of original material in the Stafford family, provided principally by Dr. Edward Wheeler of Dallas, Texas and Colonel (Ret.) Tom Kelly of Ft. Bowie, Arizona. The other major source of Stafford family information was V.I.P./Historian Richard Y. Murray of the Western Archeological and Conservation Center in Tucson, through personal communication. Stafford's military record was obtained by Kelly in Record Group 94, National Archives.
After serving five years as a recruit and then private in Company K of the 7th Infantry at Forts Towson, Arbuckle and Washita in the Indian Territory (later Oklahoma) from 1852 to 1857, Stafford commenced to travel around the country. Stafford visited Texas, Arkansas and Kansas Territory, and along the way (possibly in Illinois) he married Dorothy Francis Hicks. He then drove a small herd of cattle to Oregon where he tried his hand at ranching and farming in the Powder River area of Oregon. After about seven years of operating a public house near Baker, Oregon, Stafford sold out his ranch and returned to Kansas a relatively rich man. For a year he owned a large herd of cattle, but sold it in 1873 and bought a number of properties in Garnett, Kansas. He left Garnett two years later and, after trying at least two new careers, including as a Wheel and Wilson sewing machine salesman, he returned only to suffer continuing financial setbacks. Around this time Ja Hu left his wife and daughter, Alice ("Allis" in Ja Hu's spelling), and his stepson, Theodore Hicks, and traveled to Colorado.7
7Many years later in adulthood Theodore reportedly visited the Arizona territory and perhaps his stepfather Stafford. This writing of Stafford's history before arriving at Bonita Canyon, and much of the Bonita Canyon era, is largely based on letters, notes and documents in the family collection, obtained through personal communications with Wheeler, Kelly and Murray.
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| Figure 1 — Ja Hu Stafford as a younger man. (CHIR 1549) |
In 1879, while in his mid-forties, Stafford went to Manti, in Sanpete County, Utah. There he met Christoffer Madsen, a Danish-born Mormon immigrant to the area. Madsen, his wife, and two daughters had traveled in 1867 as part of a Mormon company on the steamer Manhattan from Liverpool to New York, continuing by rail and riverboat to North Platte, Nebraska. The travelers purchased some sixty covered wagons there and outfitted themselves with necessary provisions. Under the leadership of Capt. Leonard G. Rice, the wagon train left North Platte on August 8, 1867 for Salt Lake City. During the trip the two daughters died, and in September a girl was born in western Wyoming and named Pauline Amelia. The company reached Salt Lake City on October 5, 1867.8
8Leonard Grant Fox, My Story: by Ruth May Fox. Salt Lake City: 1973, pp. 11-13; Wheeler, personal communication.
According to a family story Ja Hu Stafford met 12-year-old Pauline Madsen in the spring of 1880 as she herded cattle barefoot and came to his cabin to get warm. On June 3, 1880, Ja Hu and Pauline were baptized into the Mormon faith in Manti, and probably married at this time, and soon left for Arizona. The couple traveled in a wagon train via Lee's Ferry on the Colorado River. An experienced Stafford helped the ferryman get the train across the river, for which he was given free crossing and a dollar.9
9Journal of Ja Hu Stafford, original owned by Rodney Wheeler, copy provided by Dr. Edward Wheeler; Pauline Stafford to her father, August 6, 1883, Stafford Papers, Chiricahua National Monument.
The Staffords arrived in what was to become Cochise County in the latter part of 1880 and made their way to Bonita Canyon. According to Stafford's daughter, Clara Stafford Wheeler:
Poppa decided that he would go to Arizona to live and he hitched up his wagon. He had an old covered wagon and a span of horses and he went out to Arizona and he came to the Riggs Ranch . . . . [Riggs] had come there three or four years before him. Poppa asked him if there was any place to settle and he told him about Bonita Canyon. . . had water in it and high grass and everything and he thought he'd like it up there so he found a place.10
10Transcript of an oral history with Clara Stafford Wheeler, 1971, originating from Wheeler and given by Kelly to Chiricahua National Monument. Mrs. Wheeler's reference to the date of Riggs' arrival is incorrect; it was little over a year before the Staffords arrived in late 1880.
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| Figure 2 — Township survey, March, 1882. Stafford Cabin marked as "house" at right. "Cabin" is near site of later Cavalry camp. (BLM) |
On October 17, 1880, Stafford filed for a homestead in Bonita Canyon, a long rectangle of bottom land and mountains consisting of 160 acres, being the south 1/2 of southwest 1/4 and south 1/2 of southeast 1/4, Section 26, Township 16 South, Range 29 East, of the Gila and Salt River Base Meridian.11
11Entry 471, Tract Book, Arizona, Vol. 166, and individual land record jackets, Washington National Record Center, Suitland, MD, as reported in Torres and Baumler; homestead records of the Bureau of Land Management, Phoenix, Arizona.
With winter coming Stafford and his wife must have constructed their one-room log cabin in haste. Stafford chose a site near the southwest corner of the homestead, on Bonita Creek. He built the fourteen-and-a-half-foot square, high-ceilinged structure of large unpeeled logs, an attribute that supports the notion that Stafford was in a hurry. Stafford squared and notched the corners and chinked the openings with wooden wedges and gravelly mud. His daughter Clara described the cabin construction, probably basing her memories on what her father had told her some sixty years earlier:
He took his span of horses and drug logs all the way up where the old picnic ground used to be in the canyon there . . . about a mile above the spring and he cut these logs and skinned them and took most of the bark off them and built the cabin all by himself with the help of mother . . . and he cut the shingles and they called them shakes to cover the house with instead of shingles he makes shakes so the house didn't cost much and there was a fireplace in the house.... 12
12Oral history of Clara Stafford Wheeler. Material evidence shows that Stafford did not peel the logs out of which he constructed the cabin.
A photograph taken some twenty years after the construction of the cabin showed large shakes covering the visible portion of the original roof. The cabin had a dirt floor.13
13Interview with Helen Kenney by the author, November 14, 1990.
In the southwest portion of the homestead Stafford planted an orchard. To the east, up Bonita Creek, lay other suitable planting areas and a good spring, in what is known today as Silver Spur Meadow; here Stafford planted a vegetable garden. The remainder of the homestead to the north consisted of rocky and mountainous ground with scattered grazing land. 14
14Bureau of Land Management, Phoenix, Fiche 1, Vol. R page 910. A survey map of sections in the area, marking a "house" on Stafford's homestead, was approved and filed July 1882.
Ja Hu and Pauline Stafford became the first to settle permanently in Bonita Canyon. Near the mouth of the canyon lived Louis Prue, a cattle rancher who had come to the Sulphur Spring Valley in late 1878 or early 1879. A few miles farther northwest lived Brannick and Mary Riggs, pioneers who had arrived shortly after Prue. The Riggses raised ten children and their family and descendants have enjoyed prominence in the area for over a century. In a letter to her sister, Pauline Stafford wrote that "for several years after we first came here we only had one neighbor nearer than him [Brannick Riggs]." This "one neighbor" would have been Louis Prue.15
15Pauline Stafford to Clara Madsen, March 8, 1894, Stafford Papers; communication with Richard Y. Murray; Will C. Barnes, Arizona Place Names. University of Arizona Bulletin, General Bulletin No. 2, Vol. VI, No. 1, January 1, 1935. Tucson: University of Arizona, 1935, p. 61, states that Prue arrived in December, 1878, and was the first settler in the area.
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| Figure 3 — Ja Hu Stafford's homestead certificate, May 23, 1888. (WACC) |
A man named Newton, by some accounts a squatter or army deserter, built a cabin in Bonita Canyon at an unknown date before 1885. This cabin, about a quarter mile west of the Stafford cabin and outside of the Stafford homestead, became the officers' quarters at the the cavalry encampment during 1885-1886. Emma Erickson purchased it, by some accounts from Ja Hu Stafford, in 1886. However, no evidence of Stafford's ownership has been found, and nothing is known of Newton except his name and the existence of his cabin.16
16Louis Torres and Mark Baumler, A History of the Buildings and Structures of Faraway Ranch. Historic Structure Report, Historical and Archeological Data Sections. Denver: Branch of Planning, Alaska/Pacific Northwest/Western Team, National Park Service, Denver Service Center, 1984, p. 22-23; Murray, personal communication; Anonymous, "The History of Faraway Ranch," states that Emma Erickson bought the cabin from Stafford.
The earliest nontechnical description of the Stafford homestead appeared in a diary entry dated April 16, 1882, when young Pauline Stafford wrote:
Mrs. Pauline Stafford and J. H. Stafford live in Bownita Canyon Arizona in a log cabin / the wind is blowing very much today / We have to [sic] horse and 18 chickens / the grass is about 1 inch high / April 7 we had a very heavy frost / froze the water up in the wash pan / that was about 2 inches thick.17
17Journal of Ja Hu Stafford, original owned by Rodney Wheeler, copy provided by Dr. Edward Wheeler. The excerpts herein from the journal and family letters retain their original spelling and grammar.
Mrs. Stafford mentioned only two horses and a number of chickens; Stafford must have had no other livestock at this time or his wife probably would have mentioned them. Pauline Stafford wrote to her father in 1883:
Be sure to bring good cows all that you are able to buy . . . for they will bring cash here. I do not think that you can get a good Utah cow here for any less than 80 or 100 dolars. Thier [sic] are scarcely any good cows here at all and none to sell, thier [sic] are several men here who would like to get to buy a cow if they only could get a chance.18
18Pauline Stafford to her father, August 6, 1883, Stafford Family Collection. There is no evidence that Pauline's father visited the Arizona Territory or the Stafford homestead.
Cochise County, in the southeast corner of Arizona Territory, had been formed out of Pima County on February 1, 1881, with the county seat in Tombstone, 97 miles southwest of Bonita Canyon. Ja Hu Stafford traveled there to register to vote in October of 1882, listing his occupation as "rancher".19
191882 Great Register, entry #3059, Cochise County Recorders Office, Bisbee; Murray, personal communication. The county seat was moved to Bisbee in 1929.
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| Figure 14 — Map of Fort Bowie and area, circa 1886, including Bonita Canyon. Riggs and Fife residences shown. Unintelligble writing near "Bonita Canon." (Arizona Historical Society) |
Stafford officially acquired his homestead on April 6, 1886. On the documents filed with the land office Stafford listed improvements such as a double log house, chicken house, smoke house, corral, and a four-acre fenced-in garden. At some time before this date, Stafford had added a second room to the cabin, made of larger logs than the first room. This addition also measured about fourteen feet square. According to family tradition this part of the cabin featured a dirt floor with a stone-curbed well.20
20Entry 471, Tract Book, Arizona, Vol. 166, and individual land record jackets, Washington National Record Center, Suitland, Maryland; Gordon Chappell, National Register of Historic Places--Nomination Form, July 1979, Section 7, page 1. Interview with Helen Kenney by the author, November 14, 1990.
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| Figure 5 — Brand of Ja Hu Stafford, 1887. (Brand Book, Cochise County Recorders Office) |
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Last Updated: 25-Aug-2008