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Published: March 31st 2015
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PRISON CEMETERY
The prison opened for business on July 1, 1876. Jack would have been one of the first of its merry inhabitants to die while in custody there. Burial records for the cemetery do not exist, but it should not be terribly difficult to find out where the first graves were dug. His grave deserves recognition. JACK SWILLING Jack passed away on August 12, 1878. He died in his cell at Yuma Territorial Prison from complications arising from morphine addiction. He was buried the same day in an unmarked grave in the prison cemetery and quickly forgotten. He wasn’t even convicted of a crime. He was just being held on charges of robbing a stagecoach up near Wickenburg. Local authorities there wanted to charge him under the federal jurisdiction to avoid the expense of prosecution, and Yuma was what passed for a federal jail. As it turned out the real stagecoach robbers were apprehended a few days later. It was a tough break for Jack though. He deserved better. John W Swilling was born on April Fools’ Day in 1830 at the Red House Plantation near Anderson, SC. Somewhere along the line folks started in calling him “Jack” and that is the moniker that stuck. At the age of 17 Jack and an older brother joined a Georgia militia outfit and rode off to fight in the War with Mexico. The brothers wound up serving in a Texas cavalry regiment under the command of Colonel Jacob Snively. In 1852 Jack got married to the lovely and charming Mary Jane Evans in Tekumba, AL. A little daughter named Elizabeth joined them in 1853. Mary’s family was perhaps somewhat less charming than Mary was where Jack was concerned. They shot him in the back and fractured his brain pan in response to some perceived misdeed that Jack had committed against them. They were injuries that plagued him until the end of his days and took him into morphine addiction and a never ending fondness for snakehead whiskey. In 1856 for some uncertain reason Jack decided to turn his back on the whole Evans clan and head west by himself; to be heard from in Alabama nevermore again. Jack made his way as a teamster to Mesilla and then continued on to California as a passenger on the Butterfield. Along the way he bumped into Jacob Snively at the Gila City station. In Los Angeles he got a look at the Pacific Ocean, but soon lost his savings in a mining promotion. He returned to Gila City to help Snively manage the gold operation there and work for the Butterfield. Snively was the station agent at Gila City. While there Jack was elected captain of the rag-tag Gila Rangers and went off with some friendly Maricopa to chastise some Apaches who had been stealing livestock and killing anyone who didn’t like it. The expedition was not a fountain of success but it was his first look at the Bradshaw Mountains in the central Arizona highlands. The mineral potential up there looked promising but it was still far too dangerous to stay. When the gold placers played out at Gila City both Snively and Jack headed for the diggings at Pinos Altos in New Mexico. Mining was booming there, but the Apaches didn’t like it and the miners were in constant peril of attack. Jack operated a saloon there and got himself elected as a lieutenant in a group of bold fighters called the Arizona Guard. They were a tough, fearless outfit and after the federal army abandoned Arizona for the Civil War were all that stood between the angry Apache and white civilization. When their captain, Thomas J. Mastin, was killed in a brutally tough fight in defense of Pinos Altos Jack Swilling was elected to fill his shoes. By then the Confederacy had captured Mesilla, declared that Arizona was a Confederate Territory, and swallowed up the Arizona Guards into the Confederate Army. They were ordered to Tucson to join Captain Sherrod Hunter’s company. Hunter had been a resident of Mowry City at the Butterfield Crossing on the Mimbres River and had seen service with the Arizona Guard himself. Jack became his second in command. As such he managed the delivery of gunpowder to Sylvester Mowry for the defense of the Mowry Mine. He was in command of the men who skirmished with the federal advance at the Stanwix Station on the Butterfield Trail and burned the hay being stored there for use by the California Column. He and his men then captured the federal officer, Captain James McCreave, at White’s Mill. He escorted McCreave from Tucson to Mesilla and learned there that the Confederate forces had been defeated at Glorieta Pass and were in a headlong, scrambling retreat back to Texas. He resigned from the Confederate army and joined up with the California Column as a civilian dispatch rider for Colonel Carleton up the Rio Grande. That duty brought him into contact with officers like Edward Canby, Kit Carson, and Colonel Chivington of the First Colorado. Tom Jeffords carried the dispatches between Mesilla and Tucson and would later become the mail agent between Mesilla and Tucson for the Jackass Mail. Jeffords was the fellow who was so instrumental in bringing about an end to the Cochise War. After the Confederates were no longer a threat to New Mexico Chivington, that rat, went back to Colorado and Carson led the campaigns against marauding Navajo and Apache. Jack joined Carson as a scout. After that he joined the Joseph Walker Expedition to the Bradshaw Mountains and founded the Pioneer Mining District a few miles south of what would become Prescott. The claim that he founded Prescott is a bit of an exaggeration. After leaving Walker’s outfit to their success he joined an expedition with Paulino Weaver and Abraham Peeples that resulted in the location of the Rich Hill deposit. The partial ownership of Rich Hill assured him financial security. In 1864 he moved to Tucson and in partnership with Charles Hayden operated a grist mill. While in Tucson he married a seventeen year old Mexican girl named Trinidad Escalante and started in raising a family that eventually grew to include five daughters and two sons plus two adopted Apache orphans. Jack quickly grew tired of the Tucson summers and moved his family back to Yavapai County. He continued to prosper with more mining, milling, and farming ventures and then had the inspiration of starting the Swilling Irrigation and Canal Company in Wickenburg. That led him to the resurrection of the Hohokam canal system in the Salt River Valley. The claim that he founded the town of Phoenix is not an exaggeration. He built a fine home there for Trinidad and the kids that came to be known as Swilling’s Castle. He became the first postmaster of Phoenix and the first justice of the peace, but when the “original town site” of Phoenix came to be located three miles east of his property he lost interest and moved up to Gillet near Black Canyon City. He was living there in the spring of 1878 when his health began to fail. When his old pal Snively got himself killed by Apaches up on the Picacho Blanco Mountain near Wickenburg Trinidad encouraged him to go recover the body of his friend and give him a decent burial. That is what he was doing when the stagecoach was robbed. The robbers were described as being a party of three men, one large, one medium sized, and one small man. Based on that flimsy evidence Jack and his two friends were charged with the robbery and taken to Yuma.
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