1885 - 1985
The first 100 years!
Seasons of sun and snow rolled over the
Mountain and no one was there to feel them.
Mornings fluted with birdsongs and
evenings croaked with frogsongs and no one heard.
Winter sunsets, mauve and
blue-pink hazed above the depths of forest, but no one saw them.
Dawn raised wild turkeys to pick
and scratch on grassy hillsides. Elk grazed in the moonlight and bugled
challenges across the dank tules. Deer sipped water from the seeps and springs,
ears turning in danger. But, no one killed them.
Later, much later, when people
came to the Mountain, Pueblo hunters from cities like Forestdale and Kinishba
stalked game with atlatls and spears.
Until about 1200 A.D., they
planted crops, built masonry houses, made fine pottery, established a complex
religion and government and traded with their neighbors. Then their life was
forever disrupted by drought and perhaps, enemies.
No one knows for sure when the
nomadic bands of Athabaskans came down from the north and found the mountains
to their liking and stayed. Recent evidence points to their migration into the
area about 900-1,000 years ago.
They gathered pinyons, acorns, and
juniper berries...wild grapes and berries...roots and herbs. They were hunters
and gatherers and raiders of settlements. They lived off the Mountain and took
the drought with the rain, the blizzard with the sunshine.
When Coronado with his cumbersome
band trooped up from White River in 1540, they camped at springs on top of the
Mountain and lost some men to poison hemlock which grew there. He did not see
the natives, and so assumed they were not there. His soldiers passed by on
their Andalusian horses, searching for gold and glory, and left the Sierra
Blanca as wild as they had found it.
Much later, fur trappers came
looking for beaver on the Mountain, but found the pelts inferior to those in
the northern Rockies. They left no trace.
Spanish colonists in Nuevo Mexico
came to know the marauding bands of Athabaskans well. They called them Apaches
de Navahu, from a Zuni word which meant "enemy." For more than 300 years, they
and their cousins, the Navajos, effectively blocked the settlement of Northern
Arizona, until it became an isolated island in the pattern of westward
To protect trade routes and
encourage settlement, the Army established an outpost at Camp Mogollon (later
called Camp Apache, then Fort Apache) in 1869. One of the scouts hired to
explore and survey the area was a frontiersman named Corydon E. Cooley who came
to the area in 1870, found good grass and year round water, and decided to
Because of Cooley more than any
other man, this region of Arizona was spared the bloodbath of the Indian Wars
which took place elsewhere. He married two daughters of the White Mountain
Apache chief, built a house in present day Show Low, and kept the peace with
his in-laws. By 1878, Cooley and his partner, Henry Huning, were farming along
Show Low Creek, had installed a sawmill, and were ranching on a large
In the same year, William L.
Penrod and his wife, Polly Ann Young, were called by the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints to help colonize Northern Arizona. They left Utah Oct. 26,
1878 with two yoke of oxen, a team of horses, their nine children and enough
supplies to last six months.
They arrived at the Willis Ranch
on Show Low Creek December 31st. ON New Year's Day, 1879, they awoke to three
feet of snow. As soon as William could get through, he rode to a small Mormon
colony in the Forestdale Valley. When he returned, he had made up his mind to
go back to Utah. His wife, being in poor health, refused. So John Henry Willis
hired them to take care of his ranch, and they stayed on.
Cattle and sheepmen had already
established herds on the open range of The White Mountains when the large
influx of Mormons arrived. Among the ranchers will Will Amos, Bill Morgan, Jim
Porter and George and Bob Scott. A military road called Crooks Trail was in use
from Camp Verde to Camp Apache. Hay and grain were being freighted from the Rio
Grande Valley, through St. Johns, to Camp Apache, and Col. Cooley's sold local
hay and produce to the fort.
Cooley and Huning hired William
Penrod to work for them, and for the next two years, Penrods lived on the ranch
that was to become the townsite of Show Low. They operated a mule-powered
shingle mill and sold shingles for $2.50 a thousand.
Between Camp Apache and Show Low
were open, park-life forests of yellow pine (Ponderosa) broken by a series of
mountain meadows along the drainages of streams. In September of 1886, William
Penrod moved his family to one of these meadows, near the top of the mountain
pass before the trail dropped off to Camp Apache, to take up a
The Penrods and their 14 children
lived in their wagon box for ten days while William and his son, Ralph, cut
logs and built a one-room cabin. In a 1950 interview with Norman Mead, Ralph
Penrod said they could see smoke from the cabin of their only neighbor, Johnny
Phipps (or Fipps). Phipps had been there for about a year when the Penrods
arrived, according to Ralph Penrod.
That would place the first date of
Anglo settlement at 1885. Johnny Phipps made his living buying and selling
produce and liquor and freighting throughout the mountains. Phipps was still
selling apples and oranges to settlers in the 1890's. Thelma Axline, who later
owned the property the Phipps cabin was on, said he was buried in a willow
grove in the meadow. The cabin burned down.
His store and saloon were taken
over by Walt Rigney when Phipps died. Rigney is the man generally believed to
be responsible for the name "Pinetop."
"Pinetop" was the nickname given
to Rigney by black soldiers who were then stationed at Fort Apache. According
to Ralph Penrod, they used to say "Let's go the the top of the pines and see
Old Pinetop." Rigney, said Penrod, had a fuzzy lock of red hair on top of his
Some of the early settlers wanted
to change the name of the town to Penrod, but there was already a Post Office
by that name, so they kept the original name of Pinetop.
The Penrod cabin was located near
the Phipps cabin. William Penrod set up another shingle mill in the meadow
below his cabin. In 1888, 10 years after coming to the White Mountains, William
Penrod and his sons were hired by Col. Cooley to build a new ranch house,
forage station and telegraph office south of Pinetop. The Penrods hewed the
logs, laid them and provided shingles for the buildings, according to a 1958
interview by Jim Cook. This was the famous Cooley Ranch, a stopover for all
freighters and travelers by stage on the road between Holbrook and Fort
According to a history of Pinetop
and Lakeside written by Leora Schuck, William Penrod came in 1886 and built a
cabin with the help of his son. In the spring, the family cleared land, put in
a crop and built a mule-powered shingle mill like the one they had in Show
Schuck wrote: "The following June,
Susan and husband with three children moved to Pinetop and made their home
adjoining her father's place. Then Bert, Del and Eph cam with their wives and
children. Liola, Liona (twins) and Mayzetta married and lived in Pinetop near
their father. Soon he had all his children around him. Pinetop grew to be quite
a town. It had a Post Office, store and small school."
The store belonged to a man named
McCoy. It provided staples for the families from Lakeside and Woodland as well
as Pinetop. The families of John Colvin, who built a small sawmill, and John
Adair moved into the area shortly after the Penrods had settled it. A telegraph
line between Holbrook and Fort Apache was built in 1889.
By 1891, Pinetop was a growing
community. Bill Stephens, Ed Bradshaw, Neif Packer, John Hall, Charlie Savage
and a man named Welch were living there, according to an interview with
Augustus Hansen in 1950. Settlers earned extra cash by freighting, working in
Hall's sawmill, or shearing sheep for one of the large sheep
Sheepmen had moved into the
country in the late 1880's. Will Amos bought land and sheep belonging to Kinder
and Adamson. Kinder had an old camp below Springer Mountain. The Jaques family
and Jim Porter both ran sheep near Porter Mountain. Others were Bob and George
Scott, Bill Morgan and Will Amos. The sheepmen summered in the mountains, but
drove their sheep to the Salt River Valley for the winter, returning in the
spring. (The old Heber-Reno sheep driveway is still in use.)
In the late '80's and '90's cattle
belonging to the Hashknife Outfit (The Aztec L and Cattle Company) also roamed
the range as far north as the Navajo Reservation and as far south as the White
Mountains and Mogollon Rim. There were also large herds of feral horses running
in the mountain country which early settlers trapped and broke for their own
use, or sold. Drought and blizzard broke the Hashknife by the turn of the
century, but the sheep outfits remained until the 1920's.
Most of the early settlers were
hospitable and sociable. With only a few scattered settlements, people all over
the country knew each other. Ralph Penrod said they believed in feeding the
Apaches who came around to visit, not fighting with them. The Penrods built a
six-room house which was always open to those in need. The early settlers
entertained themselves with dances, horse races and sports.
"William (Penrod) loved sports,"
said Leora Schuck. "He could ride, he could rope, he could take a joke and give
one, and he loved music and dancing. His youngest son, Ralph, had an ear for
music. His father had bought him a violin when he was about 16 years old. Soon
he played for dances, not only in Pinetop, but all around the country." The
Penrods eventually built a dance hall in Pinetop.
A few settlers were already living
in Lakeside and Woodland areas when Penrods homesteaded in Pinetop. Among them
were about six LDS families, according to the records of the Show Low
In 1884, Hans Hansen, Sr., a
native of Denmark, was called to be bishop of the Show Low Ward. In those days,
it extended from Linden and Adair (Fools Hollow) to Ft. Apache. In the Show Low
Stake History, it is written: "Bishop Hansen was a familiar figure on his
little bay mule, making his bishop's calls from town to town, (it took him a
month to make them all.)
Hans Hansen, Sr. left Show Low in
1891 when his house was burned down. He moved to the Warren Ranch in Pinetop,
where he stayed for about a year, then to Woodland in 1893. Schuck said: "He
bought a squatter's right there from Joseph Stock and added rooms to the small
log house. He paid Stock twenty head of cattle for the place. The area had been
called Fairview, and by some of the irreverent, Hog Town."
It was called Hog Town because of
Al Young's hogs which ran wild in the woods. Later, the area was named
"Woodland" by Mormon President Jessie M. Smith.
In addition to the Stock family,
other settlers in the Woodland were Albert Crandall, Alex McCleve, John Marvin,
Al Young, and Ezra West. Rufus Crandall was the first child born in Woodland. A
spanish family who "appeared rich" were among the earliest settlers, according
to an interview with Augustus Hansen. Their names were Ojeno and Jose
Hansen and his son, Hans Hansen,
Jr., began working at his building trade. He was a mason and brick layer. He
and his son, Hans, Jr. did all the rock work at Fort Apache, many of the first
houses in Whiteriver, and nearly all the two story brick houses in the
Hans and Loretta Hansen, like the
other Pioneers, raised vegetables they could keep the year round in underground
root houses. With their own pork, chickens, eggs, milk and a few staples from
the store, they could survive.
The only store in Lakeside was run
by Billy Scorse, an Englishman, for whom Billy Creek is named. He was the only
permanent year round resident until the Mormon families came. Scorse grew some
hay, sold a few groceries, but made the bulk of his living selling liquor to
soldiers from Fort Apache at his "Last Chance Saloon." Scorse had 40 acres on
the creek and squatters rights to some land in town, according to a 1950
interview with Hans Hansen, Jr.
Soldiers created trouble every
time they went to the dances, said Augustus Hansen. At one drunken brawl after
a dance, they took a sheepman out and castrated him, he said.
The 1890's saw the development of
farms and orchards, legal battles over water rights, and the first attempts at
schooling. The first schools were held in homes, woodsheds and root houses. In
1896, a school district was formed. Catherine Whipple, a descendant of those
Pioneers wrote: "In those early days the schooling the children received was
very scanty, two to five months in a year, but meager as it was, some will tell
you that it was more practical than what some of their grandchildren are now
getting with nine or 10 months of school a year."
In 1903-04 all the water on the
Mountain dried up except Adair Spring, and Pinetop settlers had to haul water
from it. The following year, the Pinetop-Lakeside settlers experienced the
wettest year they had seen. That may have contributed to a decision to build a
reservoir in 1904. Niels Hansen surveyed Show Low Creek in that year and
decided where to build dams and irrigation ditches.
A story is told that a neighbor,
seeing him work with his homemade instruments, said, "Niels, you are trying to
make that water run uphill. It will never work."
Unperturbed, Niels said, "Never
mind. Plow your ditches where the stakes are and your water will run." It did,
and that first dam on Rainbow Lake held.
In 1905, the bottom fell out of
the sheep market and many of the sheepmen had to sell out. Niels Hansen, Han's
younger brother, took the opportunity to buy the Will Amos ranch in December,
1905 (he built the adobe house for Amos earlier for $300). He moved his wife
and six children tot Lakeside in the spring of 1906.
At the south end of Niels Hansen's
barn one spring day in 1906, six men sat in the sun and named the town
"Lakeside." They were John L. Fish (who later bought out Billy Scourse), John
Heber Hansen, Joseph Peterson, Louis E. Johnson and Alof Pratt
Leora Schuck, daughter of Joseph
and Amanda Peterson, said her father had suggested the name. When the men
decided on it, Belle Hansen tied a red cloth to a broom handle in lieu of a
flag, and waiving it call out, "Hurrah for Lakeside!"
Some of the men rode out to the
area horseback to take stock of its assets. Arriving at Adair Spring, one
member proposed a toast. Lying down flat, they drank the pure mountain water
and toasted "the mayor Lakeside."
When the founders of Pinetop and
Lakeside came to the mountain, it was a different prospect from ours that they
Leora Schuck said, "Countless
mature trees stood tall and straight, their trunks smooth and free of branches
many feet off the ground. With a minimum of underbrush, one could see vistas
through the trunks for hundreds of yards...It may be that sheep kept the small
stuff grazed off, or that fires from the lightning cleared the ground. At any
rate, it was only after the sawmills came in and cut down many old trees that
new young pines suddenly sprang up in jungle-like proportions."
Even as late as 1924, the
essential character of Pinetop and Lakeside were not changed. An account in the
Globe "Silver Belt" said: "Several mountain streams are nearby. One of these,
fed from a great spring, serves for the irrigation of the acre home lots of the
villagers...In winter, thousands of wild ducks visit the streams fed from the
springs in the vicinity to feed on watercress."
There are few left whose memory
goes back to the days of Leora Schuck's childhood "when we roamed the forest
from Show Low to Paradise Creek and from Lake Mountain to Forestdale,
unstymied, unfenced, unrestricted, except for a scattering of homesteads that
we had to go around. And we knew everybody. Ah, yes, those were the