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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)
F. JA HU STAFFORD AS A WIDOWER
The year 1894 found Pauline pregnant for the seventh time. In a letter from Pauline to sister Clara, dated July 22, arrangements are being made for "Aunt Clara" to come to Bonita Canyon, a visit that Pauline desperately needed:
I expext to be sick by the end of August or at least by the [?] of Sept so you will see the nesecesity of starting by that time if you do not come I do not know how I will get along as it is just impossible to get help here at the present time thier is only one woman that I know of that I can get at all and she has two small children.
Evidently sister Clara did not arrive; Pauline died in childbirth on August 26. Ja Hu buried her in the community cemetery near the mouth of Bonita Canyon. The baby survived for what may have been many months, under the care or neglect of his father.42
42Pauline Stafford to Clara Madsen, August 22, 1894, Stafford Papers.
Family stories abound about the circumstances surrounding the unnamed baby's life and death. Stafford's granddaughter Naomi Moore related this popular version in an oral history:
It died of pneumonia because grandfather insisted on trying to take care of it himself and he had to take care of the orchard and the garden . . . . Mrs . Erickson tried to get him to let her have the baby for awhile because she had milk for it and grandfather didn't and he was going to raise the baby himself. Well the baby died from pneumonia because grandfather had left the baby and he had built up a big fire in the stove but then I guess he was gone quite a bit longer than he intended to be and when he came back the baby was very cold and the fire was out and this is how the baby got pneumonia and died . . . . I don't know if he even named the baby . . . .43
43Taped interview with Naomi Moore by Betty Leavengood, August 4, 1987, Stafford Papers.
Stafford's daughter Clara provided her interpretation of the incident:
He thought because he had been through the army and as a nurse in the army in the hospital that he knew as much about [it as] a doctor did about any sickness and we never had a doctor in our house when . . . we were little.
Stafford's granddaughter Helen Kenney related that Mrs. Barfoot from a nearby ranch took the baby for a while until Stafford took him back.44
44Oral history of Clara Stafford Wheeler; interview with Kenney.
Stafford found himself a widower with five children. Pansy, the oldest, left to work as a housekeeper in Willcox soon after her mother's death; later she went to school and worked in Bisbee, where she met her future husband. The other children helped as much as they could. Perhaps of the greatest help was their close neighbor, Emma Erickson, who had three of her own children. A Stafford family member described the situation:
[Stafford] raised them by himself. Of course I say by himself, but I think Mother Erickson, if it wasn't for her he may not have been able to raise them because she lived just a stone's throw from the cabin, you know, and her three children were about the same age as [Stafford's] children. Of course they played together all the time and I think they were at Mrs. Erickson's as much as they were at home . . . .45
45Taped interview with Moore.
Stafford's daughter Clara, who was only two when her mother died, recalled:
Mrs. Erickson . . . was such a wonderful woman to us, she was just like a mother and told us if we got scared or needed anything come down there so whenever it lightening . . . we were scared to death and we ran out with the lightening . . ..
The Stafford children, even the later grandchildren, referred to her as Mother Erickson, or Grandmother Erickson.
The Stafford children also contributed a great deal to the survival of the family. According to Clara, "Mother was always quite a good dressmaker. She sewed and everything for us and when Mother died . . . Anna Mae was only about 8-9 years old . . . and she took up sewing right away and she sewed for us because there were . . . 3 little girls . . . . Poppa didn't have enough for all of us anyhow and [Pansy] ran into Willcox and got her . . . a housekeeping job as a maid . . . . She come home every so often and bring us some little thing and made us . . . so happy."
Stafford kept the farm operating yet still watched the children and taught them the ways of pioneer life as he knew them. Clara later told how "Poppa was really a wonderful person. He took care of us when we were little, [and] he taught me how to shoot when I was 5 years old . . . we lived so much on wildlife, on wild things like squirrels and rabbits, better than things we could get in the line of meat . . . "46
46Oral history of Clara Stafford Wheeler.
While Stafford is remembered fondly by his daughter, she told of his difficult side as well:
Poppa made awful bread . . . it was old yellow bread and I will never forget it . . . if we got out of anything he wouldn't let us borrow anything. People borrowed from us all the time. One day he was making this sourdough bread like the miners baked and he had put a cloth above it over it to keep it warm and when he came back in Tommy's little kitten was asleep on top of the dough and he was so mad he took the little kitten out and killed it and when Tommy and I came home why we wouldn't eat any supper and Poppa told us that we had to eat and we couldn't eat . . .
I had a little pet squirrel and we all loved it and the neighbors around did too and people that came to buy fruit there they loved the little squirrel and when winter came he was storing up things fast and he carried off apples . . . so many that Poppa had saved for us to eat in winter time and so Poppa killed him and had him all fried nice and brown when we came home from school one day . . . we wouldn't eat a bite of that squirrel and he didn't either.47
47Ibid.
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| Figure 8 — "Stafford Cabin in early days, Mr. Staffor (sic) on top - shingling" (noted by Neil Erickson), circa 1898. This is the lean-to addition; note salvaged lumber in foreground. (WACC) |
Stafford ordered a mail order bride and was married on August 23, 1898 in Tombstone. In his excitement he reportedly had his hair and beard dyed to hide their whiteness. The new bride, Carrie Goddard of Missouri, found herself faced with a sixty-two year-old widower with four or five children, all living in a two-room log cabin on the edge of a desert wasteland; she soon returned alone to her home state.48
48Ibid.; notes on marriage from Col. Tom Kelly. A number of humorous stories have circulated about Ja Hu's hair dyeing episode; reports of the resulting color range from red to black to purple. One story, told by Lillian Riggs and related by Richard Y. Murray, says that a Willcox barber, as a practical joke, dyed Stafford's hair and beard green just before he was to meet his bride at the railroad station.
Late in the century Stafford made a major improvement on the cabin. In a photograph dating from about 1898, Stafford stood on the roof of a shed or lean-to addition on the west side of the cabin, apparently nailing shakes, while four of the children (Pansy was absent) stood behind a large pile of lumber. The addition was of vertical board and batten, with a window on the south side and a door on the west side visible in the photograph. The addition appeared to be almost completed, yet a large pile of lumber remains. Possibly Stafford used the lumber to construct a larger addition to the cabin a few years later. Stafford may have purchased the lumber from the Riggs sawmill in Pinery (or Pine) Canyon, or salvaged the lumber from Fort Bowie, which had been abandoned in 1894. A number of nearby residents obtained construction materials from the vacated buildings at the fort. These materials could have been used to build the third addition, or "ell", on the cabin some years later. This addition, the last made while the Staffords owned the homestead, was a rectangular frame room with board-and-batten sides. Placed on the north end of the cabin, it gave the home an "L" shape and appears to have almost doubled the size of the dwelling. It is estimated that Stafford constructed this last addition about 1900, when he was still in good health and four children remained at home.49
49Utley, A Clash of Cultures, p. 83; Torres and Baumler, Faraway Ranch, p. 66; Murray, personal communication.
In 1898 and 1899, Neil Erickson wrote in his diaries of planting beans and sweet corn in Stafford's field; either Stafford no longer used the gardens or Erickson helped Stafford with the work at times, or the two shared the field. Also, Erickson noted the presence of a flume on the other side of the creek; where this flume was located or whether this supplied Stafford's land is unknown.50
50Neil Erickson diaries, March 28-29, 1898, August 1899, copies at Chiricahua National Monument, made from Faraway Ranch Papers.
Bonita Canyon residents traveled to Dos Cabezas, Willcox, and other Cochise County towns for postal services (the Brannick post office had a short life) and/or merchandise. After the smelter town of Douglas was platted in the southeast corner of the Arizona Territory in 1901, much of Bonita Canyon's commerce shifted there, although slowly. The El Paso and Southwestern Railroad passed through Douglas, and the Bonita Canyon families appeared to have traveled more often to the new town by the 1920s.51
51Arizona Republican, February 12, 1901, p. 3; Meinzer and Kelton, Geology and Water Resources, p. 15. By 1900 the Brannick Post Office was obsolete.
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Last Updated: 25-Aug-2008