History
A fertile haven tucked
into the arid
mountains of Southeastern Arizona and Southwestern New Mexico, the
Upper Gila Valley renowned as the birthplace of the legendary Apache
warrior Geronimo, though the exact location is not known. The
surrounding area is rife with history of Apache-white conflict, and
some of those incidents are memorialized by markers along the Old West Highway.
The Gila River itself was once the
border between
Mexico and the United States; what is now Duncan was Mexican territory
until the Gadsden Purchase of 1854, which
pushed the US border southwards to make way for a new east-west rail.
Indigenous Peoples
The original people of
the Upper Gila
Valley, known today as the Mogollon (mö-go-yon), practiced
horticulture and led settled, materially rich lives in the fertile
plains fed year-round by mountain streams. Their relics date from about
300 BC to 1100 AD. Why they disappeared is unknown.
One of the most notable accidental
discoveries of an
ancient Mogollon village happened in the 1920s in what is now Virden,
New Mexico, just over the border from Duncan in the Gila
River’s
lush agricultural plain. The village site, a collection of ruined stone
buildings, appeared to have been abandoned suddenly many years before.
In one of the structures, two inquisitive farmers found the mummy of a
warrior seated on the floor against the wall with knees raised. Laid
out straight, the mummy’s discoverers claimed, the man would
have
stood nearly seven feet tall.
In more recent centuries, Apache people made their homes in the Upper
Gila, and were eventually forced from the area.
Mexican Heritage
Mama's
Santos: An Arizona Life,
by Carmen Duarte, is a touching, detailed chronicle of a family from
northern Mexico who settled in the Duncan area early in the 20th
century. Ms. Duarte is a staff writer at the Tucson-based Arizona Star,
which published this story of her family as a multi-part series.
There has been considerable attention in
recent
years on the roles of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the great
copper mines of Greenlee County. “Los Mineros,” a
documentary film produced in 1991 by Hector Galán and aired
on
PBS’s The American Experience, probes the struggle of
Mexicans
laboring in the copper mines of Morenci in the early 20th century to
end a discriminatory dual pay system. Read the Los
Angeles Times' admiring review of the film.
Also set in Morenci and neighboring
Clifton, the
“great orphan abduction” of 1904 still rankles as
one of
the most notorious chapters in Arizona’s history. The case
went
all the way to the Supreme Court and fastened the attention of a
disapproving nation on the anti-Mexican mob rule of white residents of
the segregated mining community. The Simpson Hotel itself features in
the ongoing legacy of this disturbing tale. Ask us about it when you
visit.
The orphans’ story has
captivated many writers
over the last century, most recently the historian Karen Wells, whose
scholarly book, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, was published in
2004 by Harvard University Press. Borrow our hotel library copy while
you stay with us.
Mormons and Arkansans, Italians and Romanians
The lure of the
world’s greatest
copper mines drew workers and families from lands much further away
than the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts of Northern Mexico. For the
last century, the Upper Gila has been a magnet to people of
Mediterranean and Southern European descent. And like much of the
Southwest, a slow but steady trickle of Arkansans and Oklahomans in
particular has flavored the region’s cultural mix.
If you look along the treeline on the
north bank of
the Gila River in Duncan, you’ll see the distinctive slim
spire
of the Latter Day Saints (Mormon) house of worship. LDS culture has
long been an anchor of the town’s prosperity and stability.
How
some of the area’s first Latter Day Saints came, by way of
Mexico where they had fled to practice their religion and family life
undisturbed by authorities, was a direct result of the Mexican
revolution. One of
those stories is told in Carmen Duarte’s Mama’s
Santos: An Arizona Life.
Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor
Justice O'Connor grew up near Duncan on the Day family’s Lazy B Ranch, which straddles the Arizona-New Mexico border. Her book Lazy B: Growing up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest is in our hotel library. The Duncan Pride Society has raised funds to create the Justice Sandra Day O’Connor Walk along a section of Highway 70 at the west end of town.
The Coronado Trail
No
survey of the Upper Gila
Valley’s history would be complete without reference to the
legendary explorations of gold-obsessed Spaniards for “El
Dorado” and the “Seven Cities of Cibola.”
In 1540
Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and his men made their
historic
trek through the mountains of what is now Southeastern Arizona,
memorialized by innumerable books, articles, and now web sites. The
“Coronado Trail” highway from the San Francisco
River into
the White Mountains is the relic of that history most often dangled
before tourists to the region. Clifton and Morenci, Duncan’s
closest neighboring towns, are on The Trail.
