The Father of Arizona Deserves A Better Hat

 September 6, 2024

   I am finally covering the Willie B. Rude vs. raiding Apaches and their fight just south of the Canoa Ranch in the Santa Cruz Valley in 1861. It's a crazy affair involving a mesquite thicket and an estimated 30 to 100 attacking Apaches. The leader of the posse who came to rescue Rude was led by the one and only Charles Poston. All my life I have known about "The Father of Arizona" even playing against Poston (the school south of Parker along the Colorado River named in his honor) but I never knew all that much about him. The history books always run the same banker shot of him looking sour and semi-distinguished.

Charles Debrille Poston

(1825-1902)

   Then—fast forward—we get this weird shot of him in Phoenix looking almost like a homeless character, which apparently he had all but become.

Colonel Poston & Outfit at 2nd St. and Washington in Phoenix, Arizona in the 1890s

   So, what happened between those two photos? Well, hang on, Poston led one amazing life. In addition to being the leader of the Sonoran Mining Expedition near Tubac which was capitalized with a $2 million secured investment and proceeded to produce an alleged $3,000 per day. Poston was known as "the Colonel" and he printed his own money and officiated marriages and divorces and baptisms of children and he was the acting promoter and mayor of the place (see quote below) until Bishop Lamy in Santa Fe came to investigate. Allegedly, a payoff, I mean—a donation!—of $700 sanctified the unions. Poston also surveyed the townsite of Colorado City (later Yuma) and sold it for $20,000 before returning to San Francisco. He then bounced from coast to coast, raising capital and meeting President Lincoln, who Poston lobbied hard to make Arizona a territory. In turn Lincoln signed the Arizona Organic Act and in 1863 Poston was appointed superintendent of Indian Affairs. Following that he was elected as Delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1864 and Poston submitted bills to establish Indian reservations along the Colorado River. After that stint ended, Poston gallivanted all over Europe spending quality time in London and Paris and then he wrote a travel book, Europe In The Summertime, not long after Poston was sent by the U.S. Secretary of State to deliver the Burlingame Treaty to the Emperor of China and ended up studying irrigation and immigration in Asia. From there he landed in Egypt in 1869 then back to Paris and London where he worked as an editor of a London newspaper and acted as a foreign correspondent to the New York Tribune. He wrote a couple more books including "Building a State In Apache Land" which was subsequently serialized by Overland Monthly in 1893.

   Before all that he was a campaign worker for Samuel J. Tilden who ran for president in 1876. He thought he would get a consul position in London, but instead he was made Registar of the United States land office at Florence, Arizona where he became interested in building a temple on a hill but he ran out of money and tried to get the Shah of Iran to invest and when that failed Poston was treated by the locals as a crank and an eccentric. So he moved to Tucson and tried to survive as a lecturer, mining promoter and writer. Then he got a gig as consular agent in Nogales, followed by a civilian military agent in El Paso and finally as an employee of the U.S. Geological Survey in 1899. From there he fell into obscurity and we see him on the streets of Phoenix (see, above) but then the Arizona Territorial legislature awarded Poston a pension of $25 a month, increasing it to $35 a month in 1901. He died of a heart attack on June 24, 1902.

   He didn't live long enough to see Arizona gain statehood ten years later in 1912, but Arizona didn't forget him and ultimately deemed him "The Father of Arizona." And, so that photo of him all dolled up in the suit will not do and I decided I needed to give him a worthy hat to wear from now on.

Daily Whip Out:

"Charles D. Poston, The Founder of the Feast and The Father of Arizona"

“We had no law but love, and no occupation but labor. No government, no taxes, no public debt, no politics. It was a community in a perfect state of nature.”

—Charles Poston, the King of the Santa Cruz Valley