By John Mason Glen, Ph.D., for the Western Heritage Foundation
When Capt. Nathaniel Pishon led a small column from Santa Fe to the rich gold findings in the Bradshaw Mountains of Central Arizona in the summer of 1863, they camped along Granite Creek. There they happened upon a solitary white hunter named Pauline Weaver.
As a result of the encounter, historian Sharlot Hall later dubbed Weaver the “first citizen of Prescott.”
A trapper, mountain man, Army scout and guide, prospector and rancher, Weaver can truly be called a “man of the West.”
Born in Tennessee around 1797 to a white father and Cherokee mother, Weaver, as a young man, honed his skills as a trapper for Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada. In 1829, he was recruited by Capt. John Rogers to join a trapping party that would spend time in the Rocky Mountains, and as part of that group he traveled from Taos, New Mexico to California to purchase horses.
It was probably around that time that his given name “Powell,” difficult for local Mexicans to pronounce, was altered to “Paulino,” later anglicized to “Pauline.”
Weaver’s group traveled through the White Mountains, south to the Salt River, then west along the Gila River to Yuma Crossing, thence to California, still part of Mexico.
In the mid-1840s he served as a scout for the Mormon Battalion — a 500-man military regiment composed entirely of volunteers of the Mormon religion — leading them on a 2,000-mile road-building expedition from Iowa into New Mexico, down the Gila River, west to Yuma Crossing and finally to San Diego, arriving in January 1847.
These efforts were especially valuable after James Marshall discovered an enormous gold deposit near Sutter’s Mill, which opened the flood gates for thousands of miners.
Following the cessation of hostilities in the Mexican American War, Weaver operated a ferry crossing of the Colorado River near Yuma, and later led a group of about 10 prospectors led by A.H. Peeples into the Bradshaw Mountains where they discovered gold in Peeples Valley in the lowlands below the Weaver Mountains, near present day Yarnell.
Prospectors are said to have harvested in excess of $100,000 worth of gold there, using at times jackknifes to pry the nuggets loose.
See part two next month.
Visit the Western Heritage Center at 156 S. Montezuma for more information on the West. Free admission.
