One Hundred Sixty Acres of Dirt: A History of the Pioneers of Kansas Settlement, Arizona Territory, 1909 and Stories, including The Schoolmarm's Pearl Handled Pistol

By Marsha Arzberger and Marshall Trimble

This colorful history of pioneer life in Arizona sheds light on the experiences of the homesteader families who founded the Kansas Settlement.

In 1909, fifteen families left their homes in Kansas to claim homesteads a thousand miles away in a remote region of the Arizona Territory. In this beautiful but unforgiving new home, they would realize their dream of owning their own land. They named their new community Kansas Settlement.

Those who persevered met the challenges, raised their families, and prospered. Their determination was inspiring and left a legacy of courage. In One Hundred Sixty Acres of Dirt, author Marsha Arzberger tells the tales of these remarkable people—farmers, cowboys, pioneer women, and schoolmarms—drawn from personal journals and family scrapbooks.

A descendent of one of the original Kansas Settlement families, Arzberger vividly recounts their journey West, as well as their dealings with rustlers, droughts, Apaches, and straying husbands. This carefully researched account captures the daily lives, joys, and tragedies of Arizona’s Kansas Settlement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781631951572

Book preview

PREFACE

I listened to stories. Sometimes I wrote them down; sometimes I kept them in my head for years. I found them fascinating. The stories were about life in 1909. To travel, one rode a horse or rode in a carriage pulled by a team of horses. Many people were farmers and grew most of their food. People worked hard. They dreamed of prospering, of doing well.

Land was expensive. It was the most valuable thing these people could own, for it determined how well they lived. When the agents came to Paola, Kansas, they talked of new, free land offered by the government. It sounded like a dream.

They decided to take the big chance. The fifteen families, each with their own personal reasons, began to pack up their lives in crates and bundles for the move to Arizona.

It was a long trip before them—more than a thousand miles. The fifteen families traveled by train with all their possessions. Some of the other pioneers who came to the same valley traveled by covered wagon, an arduous journey.

I heard the stories of their arrival and their lives thereafter in a special valley in Arizona. It’s named Sulphur Springs Valley. It’s a big valley, twenty-seven hundred square miles, extending thirty miles wide by ninety miles long from the foothills of the Graham Mountains to the Mexican border near Douglas and Bisbee, Arizona. The part of the valley these pioneers came to was southeast of Willcox and west of the Chiricahua Mountains. This settlement was later known as the Kansas Settlement.

I contacted descendants of the original pioneers to hear their stories and gleaned details from treasured scrapbooks and preserved historical records. All of it was fascinating and so different from our lives today.

I have enjoyed the stories. Now I give them to you.

Marsha Arzberger

INTRODUCTION

EXPLANATION OF HOMESTEAD DESCRIPTIONS

Homestead records were researched at www.glorecords.blm.gov. The Public Land Survey System is a method of subdividing and describing land in the United States.

Each land parcel is described with a township, range, section and subdivisions of a section. For those who like a detailed explanation, a township is a large square made up of thirty-six sections, all about one mile square. Each township is six sections wide and six sections long. These sections are numbered 1 through 36 in each township. Range measures east or west from the Principal Meridian, which is a designated meridian. Ranges are also usually six miles in size. Sections are further divided into quarters: the northeast, northwest, southeast and southwest quarters. A quarter section (a homestead) contains 160 acres.

Legal descriptions of homesteads are written in the following form: Twn 15S R 25E SW¼ S 24. This would read as Township 15 South, Range 25 East, the southwest quarter of Section 24. All the land descriptions in this book are east of the Gila and Salt River Meridian.

SECTION I

THEY CAME FROM KANSAS

They arrived on the train, families with great hopes and everything they owned packed into the boxcars behind them. The fourteen families disembarked from the train at the small station in Willcox, Arizona Territory. Children raced across the dock, glad for the chance to run; mothers gathered babies, toddlers and the bundles of their possessions while calling to older children to stay nearby. The women’s skirts were of dark colors, wool and serge. The men all wore coats and vests. Men found a spot to station their families and luggage, then went to see about unloading the rest of their possessions in the short time they had while the train was being restocked.

Fathers, mothers, children and a few older folk paused for a few minutes to look around. It was so different here. The land stretched out for miles of flat grasslands. In the distance were blue-tinted mountains.

Look, Papa, I can see so far! one small boy called. I can see all the way back to Kansas.

There’s that boy who’s been looking at me, a sixteen-year-old girl said to her friend a year younger. His family was in the next car from us. The girl’s bonnet had small crocheted flowers that were drooping after the long trip.

Her young friend was excited. Do you suppose there are Indians? she asked.

They came to Arizona from Paola, Kansas, a rich green farming community on the eastern edge of the state, to realize their dream to own land. Free land, said the advertisements and the government man who had come to speak to them in Paola. Many of the men had traveled to Willcox in southeastern Arizona Territory in December 1908 to look at the land the federal government had just opened for homesteading and, subsequently, to file homestead claims with the Department of the Interior General Land Office.

The large group that arrived two months later took up eight boxcars on the train for their supplies and possessions. Livestock traveled in the boxcars, including horses, cows, chickens and goats. Several men in the group were designated to take care of the animals. They also brought farming equipment, pumps, lumber, furniture and all their household possessions.

1903 train in Cochise County, similar to and possibly the same train that brought the homesteaders to Willcox

The fourteen families stepped off the train in Willcox on a beautiful day in February with a clear blue sky overhead. It was warmer than Paola, where they had left with snow on the ground, but it was still a cool day. The new arrivals stood and looked in all directions. The land was not the gentle hills they were used to. The terrain was flat, and in the distance, in every direction, there were mountains.

The land that had been opened for homesteading in December was twelve to seventeen miles east and south of the town. As soon as their horses and wagons were unloaded from the train, the families hitched the team horses to the wagons, loaded possessions into the wagons and moved about a half mile out of town to camp for the night. In the morning, they loaded water barrels into their wagons as they had been advised and set off east then south to see where they would live for at least the next five years—and where they would own 160 acres of farming land after they proved their homestead. The rest of their possessions were left on the railroad dock to be watched by the railroad employees until they came back for them.

When they took a break, again the children ran around and whooped and blew off energy that had been suppressed on the train.

Johnny tripped me and I fell on my nose, a little girl whimpered to her mother, her face smeared with dirt and tears.

Johnny, get in the wagon, the mother ordered. Now!

The line of wagons followed the road east. Just out of town they got their first look at the Dry Lake. [This is the term used by the locals. On early maps it is called Alkali Flat, and today it is Willcox Playa.] It was a great expanse of sand, quite impressive, with mountains in the distance. The men who had come before to look the area over assured their families that they would not be farming on sand. It was different ground where they’d filed their homesteads. The great dry lake continued to hug one side of the road as they drove the wagons seven miles east then turned south for another five miles.

Willcox Playa (courtesy of Carol Wien)

After they turned south on what was then known as the Douglas Road they took a rest stop. [Douglas is a town on the border of Mexico about sixty miles south.] One of the men reached down and scooped a handful of dirt in his hand.

It’s sandy, he said.

We’re too close to the alkali lake, another man commented. The soil is a lot better where we’ve filed our claims. It’s about five or so miles farther.

It was late afternoon when they reached the place where they would build new lives. Their claims were already registered, each one a quarter section: 160 acres. The Kansas immigrants chose claims clustered east and west of the road from Willcox. Just as the government man had promised, the land was covered with tall grass.

It’s not green here, one of the men said. No trees like we’re used to. But the grass certainly looks good.

The country was definitely not as green as Kansas, and the few trees were short mesquite trees with low branches that spread out like crooked fingers. Since it was winter, the branches were bare. The mountain slopes had trees on the higher elevations, but they were far away. The grass was different from the grass they were accustomed to because it grew in clumps instead of spreading across the ground. The grass was brown right now, but the government man had insisted it was good forage even in winter.

Most of the homesteaders were families, though there were several single people. For all of the homesteaders, it was urgent that they dig a well and build a house.

MAP #1—Area Map Showing Kansas Settlement

AN ORDINARY DAY WHEN THEY FIRST ARRIVED: A STORY

[A few journals of the early pioneers exist to tell stories. Memories and stories passed down orally to children and grandchildren add some details of their lives. The stories that follow came from collected memories and tidbits of records to paint a picture of their lives as imagined by the author.]

Adelene Booth, a single woman, spent the first weeks camping in her wagon nearby her sister, Jennie, and Jennie’s husband, Leon Perkins. The two women made several trips to the town of Willcox with the team of horses and wagon to pick up more of the possessions they had left at the railroad storage.

Today we’re bringing the lumber home, Jennie said one day. We’ll have to hire a man to load it on the wagon.

We also need to stop at the feed store, Adelene said. We’re almost out of chicken feed, and we need some grain for the horses. And I need to buy a new butter churn. Mine was broken on the train.

Don’t forget your bonnet. The sun is wicked here.

While the women made the daylong, twelve-mile trip to town, Leon Perkins was working at digging a well. He made fairly good progress for a few feet, then struck a layer of hard white clay. He decided to walk down to Robert McHenry’s place, a quarter mile west, to see if he had a pickax he could borrow.

I ran into the same hard layer that you did, Robert told him. I have two pickaxes. We’ll make more progress if we work together. Let’s get your well dug, then we’ll work on mine. Later they learned that the hard clay layer was called caliche.

After we finish your well, I could use your help with my sister-in-law Adelene’s well, Leon said.

I’ll help. I heard some are hitting water at twenty-some feet. That’s good news.

After the wells were dug and the pumps installed, everyone started building their houses. Some families had brought lumber with them. Others purchased the building supplies in town.

It is small, so much smaller than our house in Kansas, said Etta Brown.

It will do for a start, her husband, named Elmer but called E.J., said. We’ll add on to it later.

Twelve feet by twelve feet was a common size for those early cabins. Sometimes a second room to serve as the kitchen was built. There was a lot of work to do at the beginning. Corrals had to be built to hold the horses and milk cows. Some pioneers brought a few beef cattle, and some brought hogs. Most of them had chickens and needed to build a chicken coop to shelter them.

They worked. They learned new ways of doing things. They found that water boiled faster and wasn’t as hot at the valley’s elevation of 4,200 feet. It took longer to cook a pot of beans. Yeast bread rose faster and the women had to adjust their recipes.

Nick Ludwig’s and Alfred A. H. Jelley’s claims were adjacent to each other. A. H. decided to ride his horse over to his neighbor’s one day.

You’re working on your well, I see, he greeted Nick.

I think most everybody is, Nick said.

I started on the outhouse first. I finished it, but I can’t raise it up by myself. I wondered if you have time to give me a few minutes of help.

Sure, I can do that. I could use a break from this digging, anyway.

Others joined together to share the work as they dug their wells with a spade and a pickax, lined the wall with brick and positioned the pumps. There were also other structures to build—houses, corrals for the horses and cows, a chicken coop. The weather was mild even though it was February; they decided the livestock would be all right and they could build the barns later.

oon the area was named the Kansas Settlement. Plans were quickly underway to establish a school, and the families worked together to construct it. Nellie Cowen donated a piece of land from her homestead for the school, and it was built by the fall of 1909. It was given the name Kansas Settlement District. It had twenty-four pupils. Nellie was the teacher.

Kansas Settlement School Class, 1921

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