By the middle of the 1880s, the American West was filling fast. Although the game of gold had not yet crossed the Atlantic, California was prospering through its fourth decade of statehood. The boundaries of states and states-to-be of the nation largely were scribed. The boundaries of states where in American exceeded ten stories, but the Brooklyn Bridge was nearing completion, and well over a hundred thousand miles of railroad stitched together a union of fifty-five million Americans. Geronimo, symbolic of aboriginal resistance, had not yet surrendered.  Already there were a million and a half Texans, and the population center of the United States was traversing Ohio, hurrying to Illinois.

On a four-color map ambitiously published as a companion to the leather-bound Elliott’s History of Arizona Territory 1884, the cartographer dutifully located literally hundreds of places of occupation:  the territorial capital of Prescott, the Spanish pueblo of Tucson, the fabulous silver strike dubbed Tombstone, and the paddle wheel steamship port called Yuma. And not so obviously, the map maker also entered a dot for each and every tiny Charming Dale, Fort Defiance, and Chloride City.

Yet, in all the expansive watershed of Cherry Creek and other drainages associated with Pleasant Valley and Tonto Basin, in a stretch of country encompassing some five thousand square miles and more--not one settlement was deemed worth of inclusion in the map of 1884.  Not one.

Even the minute names tucked into the perimeters of the Tonto country were tentative:  Green Valley then, to become Payson later; Robinson’s Grove, doomed to be drowned by another generation’s irrigation reservoir; Forest Dale, not even to appear on a future official map of Arizona. This was the arena of the bloodletting that would begin as the Graham-Tewksbury Feud and end as the Pleasant Valley War.

On a enormous scale, the setting was mindful of a geographical poker table:  a horizon-wide sensuous green circle around which growing communities of gigantic ambition pulled up chairs for no-limit jackpot. Globe could have tossed in the first ante from its tall stacks of silver and copper chips ("...in 1886 the camp bragged that all the copper coins minted by the United States Government were being made from bullion extracted at Globe.") Phoenix was more adept at dealing docile desert Indians out of their water rights; Prescott, wise to the worth of fawn skin sacks of gold dust, knew more of price than value of humanity; into another seat slumped Holbrook, reeking of cheap whiskey and cheaper perfume; most of St. John created wealth from communal sweat, but one element got rich financing at a premium a government purposely balanced on the brink of bankruptcy.  The economic stakes were enormous for Tonto Basin, of greater area than some Atlantic states. By the time the last hand was dealt, the gamble attracted distant players--Albuquerque and Salt Lake City and Tucson and Los Angeles, for example--and kibitzers even farther off like San Francisco, Tacoma, Dallas, Boston, and Washington.

Pleasant Valley was settled late for good reason. The broad, open avenues easily sprawled east-west across Arizona, north-south travel would remain comparatively adventuresome even into an era when men frolicked on the moon. When Kearny’s dragoons dashed from Santa Fe to San Diego in 1846 to secure the Southwest for America, they descended the west-flowing Gila River. When surveyors sought ways to turn wheels between California and the national middle, an attractive option was a vast chord of the Colorado Plateau that forms the northern one-third of Arizona. Again, the gentler natural grades extended east and west. Those back-and-forth sweeps, difficult though they were, were the logical routes for troops, forty-niners, mule-skinners, camel-drivers, and track-layers.

Not so easy was travel aligned with the compass needle. Beaver trapper James Ohio Pattie called Grand Canyon "horrid." He wanted to get across. The two-hundred-fifty-mile-long abyss so thwarted explorers, the Colorado River through the Inner George wasn’t navigated by white boatmen until after the Civil War. The other grand-scale geographical feature oriented east-west was the abrupt southern edge of the Colorado Plateau. The Mongolian Rim confronted travelers not only with its own series of immense canyons, but with rocky ramparts extending nearly from Arizona’s Grand Canyon deep into central New Mexico. Little wonder that Coronado, testing a northward path through Arizona in 1540, called it "a way worse than ever."

Hard to get to. That was the reality of nineteenth-century central Arizona. The tablelands perched at five, six, seven thousand feet, with peaks above twelve. The escarpment of the Mongolian Rim here and again plunged fifteen hundred feet. Passes were few. Pleasant Valley--pristine and prime--was positioned almost dead center in the transition zone from rim to the low-lying Sonoran Desert.

In a day’s ride, a horseman experienced the climate change from Mexico to Canada: cacti to conifers, roadrunners to snow geese, sand dunes to cinder cones, dust devils to driving blizzards, putrid pot holes to springs nectarous as chill wine, buried firewood to mile-high seashells, day lit desert mirages to magnified nighttime starscapes. In such a topographical spectrum, one could make a list of two hundred species of bird and six hundred kinds of plants. Included in forms of life would be a rat that never drinks, a dwarf cactus sitting atop a hundred-pound bulb, a giant cactus that sucks a ton of water from a summer shower, a toad that sleeps a year, a poor will that hibernates with bated breath and heartbeat, a lizard that blows up like a balloon, and symbiotic moths and lilies.

Yet another extraordinary life form worked its will through Pleasant Valley as late as the 1880s. While foreign players shuffled themselves hands in the Tonto Basin play, the wild card for a while remained the wily, wiry, whimsical Apache. They were not a chivalrous enemy. When the Christian Cline family drove in one of Tonto’s first cattle herds from California, they passed the startling figure of a white man, quite dead, lashed to a tree, his penis amputated and stuffed in his mouth.

The Apaches themselves were relative newcomers--southwestern people for only a few centuries. Of Athabascan lineage, the Apaches drifted down from the north and appropriated as hunting grounds the upland home of less aggressive tribes. Evidence of human occupation for thousand of years, prehistoric ruins dotted the cliffs and vales of Pleasant Valley.

Ceding of lands by Mexico to the United States meant nothing to the Apaches. "No Indian had more virtues and none has been more truly ferocious when aroused." Apaches knew every arbor and gulch of their broken, varied range. They were as at home on the desert floor as in the "steepest, highest, rockiest mountains where one would not believe a bird would dare to fly."  By the time Americans moved in, the Apaches represented the most effective human resistance form West Texas to Central Arizona, from Colorado to Chihuahua. Few homelands were as highly prized by the Apaches as the Eden white men began to call Pleasant Valley.

How was Pleasant Valley named? The conventional assumption: "descriptive".  Perhaps, although no shred of written record seems to survive to support that theory. There does repose in the National Archives a map of one of the early United States cavalry sorties from Fort McDowell, September 27-October 6, 1866. This bold invasion of Apacheria crossed to the eastern drainage of Tonto Creek and pushed due east from "North Masatzal Mtn.," probably Mount Ord. The scale and geometry of the hand-inked map suggests a penetration of thirty or forty miles beyond Tonto Creek along such long-forgotten landmarks as "Bedrock Creek" and "Mt. Titty" and curiously, "Crescent Cr." running through the large "Crescent Valley."  The smudged and scratchy script of the anonymous army chart maker at some official level may have been misread as "Pleasant" instead of "Crescent," a supposition at least as valid as the wholly unsupported claim of "descriptive" for Pleasant.  For Pleasant Valley was also crescent-shaped, and as long as the Apaches held title, the valley was not particularly pleasant for white squatters.

Consider the agonies inflicted upon the Meadows and Middleton ranches.  Neither family was first in Tonto Basin, but they both tried to take possession of a corner of Apache land before the original tenants were permanently evicted.  The dire results made only minor footnotes to the larger saga: for three decades an Apache nation of five thousand disrupted the expansion of a nation of fifty million; toward the end of one of humankind’s classic guerrilla wars, a few hundred Apache braves were tying down one-half the combat troops of the United Sates. A general newly in command of these troops reported to Washington: "A more terror-stricken class of people than the citizens of these territories I have never found....

In the 1880s, banished to reservations headquartered at hot, dry San Carlos and high, lonesome Fort Apache, the once free-roaming sub-tribes chafed under the often-conflicting orders of the civilian Indian agents and military commanders, restricted movement, a demeaning dole of marginal rations, corrupt white management, loss of choice lands, and forced residency with traditional Indian enemies.

Usually all it took to incite rebellion was a tiswin (intoxicating native drink) party, a hopeful dream of a medicine man, or an Anglo’s bad administrative judgment. All three factors--plus the heady power of several thousand rounds of stolen army ammunition--put Nan-tia-tish on the warpath through Pleasant Valley in the summer of 1881.

Six years earlier, on a small tributary of Canyon Creek near the western boundary of the White Mountain Apache reservation, William Middleton built a small log cabin with a shake roof and shuttered, unglazed windows.  Middleton’s herd of milk cows from California may have been the first sizable herd in Pleasant Valley. For the Middleton butter-making enterprise, a log dugout milk-house anchored an angle of a fenced back yard.

Of twelve Middleton children, six younger ones still lived at the ranch. On September 6, all hands were busy with chores--rounding up horses, nailing together butter cartons, churning cream.  Two young neighbor men, George Turner and Henry Moody, rushed in from Globe with news that Indian raiders were on the loose after a battle field with soldiers, followed by an assault on Fort Apache.  Though forewarned, most of the Middletons resumed work after their midday dinner.  A few Indians appeared.  Peaceful conversation ensued: a wish to borrow a cook pot, a request for food.  Mrs. Middleton was obligingly handing a loaf of bread through the milk-house window when one of the braves yelled, "Now!" and a volley of rifle fire raked the yard.

Turner, walking to get a cup of buttermilk, fell dead.  Moody, seated on the porch, also died instantly, a bullet in the eye.  Father William Middleton and son Willis, thirteen, scampered from the milk-house to the main cabin.  Eighteen-year-old Henry Middleton grabbed up the family’s only weapon, a rifle, and was looking for a target when another Indian fusillade peppered the cabin.  A bullet zipped through a crack in the log wall and smacked Henry in the shoulder above the heart.  Now Mrs. Middleton and the rest of her children fluttered across the courtyard through another volley and miraculously tumbled unhurt into the cabin.  For the Middletons, there followed an afternoon of blistering battle, a harrowing night hiding in brush, a brutal hike to Globe.  The raid cost the Middletons seventy-five good horses.

Late next spring, Henry Middleton’s shoulder was about healed when Nan-tia-tish again bolted the reservation, raided here and there, and again beset the Middleton Ranch, this time not only stealing the Middleton horses, but unmounting a heavily armed troop of the irregular Globe Rangers.  That was enough for the Middletons, they moved to town and sold the ranch to George Newton and J.J. Vosburgh.

Now well mounted, Nan-tia-tish and company thundered through Pleasant Valley.  They stole more horses from the Tewksbury and Rose families.  They surprised and slew prospectors (Charles) Sixby and (Louis) Houdon on Haigler Creek.

..."and attacked Bob Sixby as he was entering his cabin with a bucket of water.  He was shot through the lungs but managed to bar the door and brace himself up against one of the gun holes of the cabin, put up a desperate resistance--pools of blood indicated that he killed no less than a dozen of the renegades".

Sixby survived, not so much by his grit than by pure chance.  A trooper on the trail of Nan-tia-tish wrote in his diary:

"...the Indians rushed the cabin and set it afire. Instead of coming out, Bob Sixby clambered up inside the large fireplace chimney.  H. Troop, also on the trail of the erring Indians, happened along and sighted the smoldering ruins of the cabin. The Indians had gone, thinking their victim had perished in the flames".

"In rummaging through the debris of the cabin we saw a movement in the fireplace and, on closer investigation,we saw that it was a man wedged in the chimney.  Only his feet were visible. We pulled him out with some difficulty.  He came out fighting but soon heaved a sigh of relief when he saw that it was us rather than the Indians".

"...The Indians' next stop was a ranch, owned by a Frenchman on Tonto Creek.  The owner saw the Apaches coming and escaped to a hiding place on a nearby mountain side.  He watched the savages set the buildings afire and saw all his belongings go up in smoke.  He was lucky."

"...We found Houdon and (Charles) Sixby alongside the trail, about a mile from the Frenchman’s ranch...both men were naked, lying face up, and bore many marks of torture inflicted on them before they died.  Their feet and hands were burned.  One had a large rock on his stomach.  The other had been hacked wide open...."

And so on. Nan-tia-tish could afford his own losses.  By some official estimates he led as many as two hundred fifty adults on his rampage northward through Tonto Basin.  The route of the raiders then aimed directly for the homestead of the John Meadows family near a Diamond Point some fifteen miles northeast of Payson.

More prudent Rim Country settlers had by now heeded the army’s advice and retreated to Fort McDonald, a flat-topped hillock abutting the hamlet of Payson.  But assuming the danger past, Meadows took his wife, four sons, and daughter, and even a young woman house guest, Sarah Jane Hazelton, back to the Diamond Point ranch on July 14.  Hard to believe, the Meadows family possessed perhaps only one and no more than two reliable firearms.  Next day, according to Mrs. Meadows’oft-told account:

"It was early in the morning and we heard the dogs barking.  My husband said, "My dogs are baying a bear, I’ll take my gun and go over there and kill it."  I saw him pass that bare spot (a bit of open ground) and just as he entered those vines on the other side, the Indians opened fire.  I saw him fall.  He kept up one continuous war whoop and a continual rain of bullets were falling on the house and yard.  The boys rushed out with guns to save their pa.  The kicking up of the sand around them showed how thick the bullets were falling.  I could not see how they got back to the house without being shot all to pieces.  (Henry), the oldest, always directed all the works.  He had us pile up sacks of flour or any other sacks in such a way as to furnish protection from any stray bullet".

":...During that time I was so excited...but I noticed that the boys looked pale.  John came to me and said, "Ma, can you get me some splints"?

"Yes, what’s the matter"?

":My arm is all shot to pieces."

...A little later Henry came to me and said, "Ma, have you a pair of scissors"?

"Yes, here they are."

He made a quick movement and I saw something fall to the floor.  It was part of his entrails. He said afterward that he knew he could not live long, and that he wanted to save his mother and the children before he passed on."

Thanks to a neighbor’s alarm, Payson learned of the siege at about the time another son, Charley, arrived on the Globe stage.  Charley joined forces with Marion Derrick, veteran Tonto freighter and Indian fighter, and several other local men, including Carter Hazelton, to ride to the rescue.  They reached the cabin about simultaneously with the cavalry, sixty loyal Apache Indian scouts, and their famous and infamous leaders, Al Sieber, Tom Horn, and Mickey Free.

Now in pursuit of Nan-tia-tish a formidable army converged.  Feeling invincible, the defiant Indians dawdled along, but soon fifteen troops of cavalry were about to drum down upon them "like a lead storm".  By the sixteenth of July, soldiers from five Arizona army posts pressed the renegades up the Tonto Rim on the Old Navajo Trail.  Suspecting a trap at an ideal defensive position near General Springs, the soldiers set one of their own.  With Major Adna R. Chaffee as battle commander, the troops on July 17 baited the Indians with a column of cavalry on white horses, and then outflanked the distracted natives.  In the ensuing close-quarter Battle of Big Dry Wash, the last significant pitched struggle of the Arizona Indian wars, Apache Fatalities numbered about twenty-two.  On the army side, one Apache scout was killed and several soldiers wounded.  Had a severe, high-country thunderstorm not obscured the battlefield for twenty minutes, Indian losses surely would have been greater.

The proximate cause of catastrophe is seldom anticipated.  Neither are good times predictable.  But gradually people realized that the days of Indian depredation were about done, and that Pleasant Valley again promised paradise.  A few hardy individuals and families took the chance and did well.  Then, word of the valley’s seemingly inexhaustible grass and timber spread.  Settlement accelerated.

David Harer may have been the first to acquire a trouble-free Apacheria meadow of his own, in Greenback Valley in 1875.  He went to the Indians, made friends, promised to share his fruit and beef at harvest time, and kept his word.  The Indians let him be. "Old Man" Gentry went Dave one better...married an Apache woman and gained the whole Athabascan race as in-laws.  William Burch, in putting down roots in 1876, was so remote in the Payson area that his brand served as the only place name for a while.  Not long afterward, David Gowan was hunting horses when he stumbled onto quite a rock formation: Tonto Natural Bridge, the largest travertine arch in the world.

The Gordons came, froze out, and moved to a warmer clime, but their name remained on a canyon. L.J. Horton’s rhapsodic recollection of Pleasant Valley’s early days literally sings of a land of grapevines and black walnuts, acres of wild iris and pools of watercress, flowing milk and free honey--and unflagging, neighborly dairy folks peddling butter at a dollar a pound and bee nectar at a dollar a quart to the well-paid miners of Globe.  Dutch bachelors Louis and William Naegelin put their name on a rim-like mountain which would never be famous--yet taller than the highest elevations of thirty-six of America’s eventual fifty states.  Lost in the Tonto country, Naegelin Rim, at 7, 117 feet above sea level, would qualify as a national park if it had occurred in New York.

Florence A. Packard earned his first Tonto Basin pocket money hunting mountain lions--for which the government paid him twenty dollars bounty each.  George Allen, near the mouth of Tonto Creek, raked wild hay into windrows, and he milked a herd of Devonshire cows.  Revilo (Oliver spelled backward) Fuller, as early as 1877, freighted off the rim into Tonto Basin by dragging a braking log on a chain behind his wagon.  Christopher C. Cline, his five sons, and four hundred cows from San Diego caused a population explosion of both bovines and humans on the lower Tonto.  Andrew and Samuel Houston, six miles east by north of Payson, felt bad when Old Man Star died, so when they fenced Star Valley they made sure the grave was on the cienega side and wouldn’t be trampled by livestock.  Levi Berger had two partners at his spread on Little Green Valley: his brother-in-law, and a bull brought all the way from England.  William O. St. John, at his mining claim south of Payson caroused with his old army buddies, and built up a herd of goats to five thousand.  J.H. Baker went up on Aztec Mountain, raised twenty-two tons of potatoes one summer, built a trail over a mountain range to Silver King, and sold the spuds for half a cent a pound.  Ike Lothian, a Missourian, didn’t have any cattle in 1877, but he had two mules and a horse, so he plowed the virgin Strawberry Valley, brought off a bumper crop of corn, fed it to his hogs, butchered them, cured the meat, and packed it off for sale to several army posts.

La Tereatte, January, McDonald. The names of the Tonto were the roster of America. Roundtree, Freeman, Randall.  They were English and everything else.  Pyeatt, Haught, Nebuchar.  The names went upon the peaks, and down the draws. Clark, Willis, Sanders, Gowan, Packard.  Lemmings on the rebound from California, gone broke Oklahomans halfway to the Promised Land. Ashur, Sears, Mullen, Booth, Connelly. Many were Mormons far from a temple; some were Roman Catholics even farther from a cathedral. Conway, Protero, Boyd, Lawler. They’d drag all of their possessions to a clearing, raise a tent, and call it home forever. Dudley, Felton, Watkins. Some had a belly-full of the war between brothers; other just wanted a Second Chance. Craig, Hicks, Weber, Vogel, Griffin. They had the peculiar courage to put down a dug well, straight side, and stand at the bottom staring up forty feet to daylight. Hazelwood, Armer, Crouch, Church, Drew, Nash, Haigler. Women brought rose canes, tomato seeds, and Kentucky pole beans in a sack marked hope.  Cole, Chase Higden, Hill. Kids went to school by horse, with maybe a pistol in a saddlebag. Fisk, Stahl, Robbins, Donohue, Christopher.  "The cowards stayed home," they’d laugh about their Eastern forebearers. "And the weak died on the way." Coler, McCliintock, Chilson, Lazon, Fain.

Irvin M. House began prowling the Tonto country in 1876 in search of valuable minerals--and indeed he discovered the Golden Waif Mine four miles southwest of Payson. But his strangest assignment was surveying a Globe-Flagstaff railroad that put down thirty-five miles of track before the scheme went broke. Pyle, Gibson, Thompson. Al Fulton was a cowboy, just passing through, in September, 1888, and up on the Rim at Lake Number One he was shot and killed for no known reason. Folks buried him decent, and put up a marker at Al Fulton Point. At least they remembered that he lived, and that he died. Peach, Gray Colcord. S. A. Haught said, "I started May 1, 1885, for Arizona from a point fifteen miles east of Dallas City, and was driving a hundred fifteen head of cattle. The Texas Panhandle had a quarantine on cattle south of the Texas and Pacific Railroad and I went through Indian Territory, thence through no mans’ land to New Mexico, crossed the Rio Grande River at Albuquerque, then to Holbrook and Tonto Basin. It was four hundred fifty miles out my way...but I never lost a cow." Belluzzi, Packard, Boardman, Bonacker. They arose before daylight and made fire and fetched water and slopped hogs and mended fence; they hitched teams, trapped wolves, fought fires; they filled lamps, carried ashes, scrubbed clothes; they watched their children die of diseases without names. Robbins, Webb, Bowman, See. They also experience autumn in the Southwest, about a mile high: seemingly overnight the aspen turned flaxen, sumac to scarlet, oak to russet, bulbous pumpkins and dry pole beans; chill mornings and shirtsleeve afternoons; goodbye white-wing doves, hello Oregon juncos; split cedar, smoked pork, apple butter. Isadore Christopher twice was burned out by Indians, and he rebuilt with logs chinked with clay and hog’s hair. Franklin, Hilligas, Hise, Callahan.  If life became unbearable, there was Pieper’s Dance Hall, an adobe saloon complete with gunports.

And if it should happen that you were Thomas Beach taking the hand of Maggie Meadows, and Charley Cole marrying Julia Hall, in the middle of an August day in Payson, and your new brother-in-law was the irrepressible Arizona Charley Meadows, he would announce to the wedding parties as they filed from the office of the justice of the peace:

It is my pleasure to offer, as my present to these newlyweds, that if all the parties in attendance will saddle up with their lariats and ride over my ranges, the brides and grooms can have any of my unbranded calves you can catch.

Eehah!   Bridal bouquets and wish book neckties were flung aside in favor of Stetsons and spurs. And away Payson rode in a twenty-mile calf scramble. By dusk, thirty-six head of Charley’s doggies were roped and branded as starter stock for the newlyweds.  Then Payson whacked the dust from its britches and powdered its sun burnt cheek, and danced the night away. Any wonder that the first organized cowboy tournament, or rodeo, occurred at Payson to be repeated as the August Doin’s every year without fail for the next century and more?

When they came into the Tonto country, there were no subdivision plats, or boundary markers. Most of the convoluted panoramas would not be surveyed until after the turn of the century; not an acre of Pleasant Valley could be tired to civilization’s cornerstone:  legal title to land.  Newcomers attached to a relative or ally, looked about, espied an appealing dell, and moved in. Possession.  Nine-tenths. By habit and handshake, metes would come together at three-hundred-year old oak trees, and bounds would take angle from Polaris, and length would derive from men’s paces. A corner could be a boulder in a creek subject to flood, or--where no natural feature existed--a spot of soil blackened by a huge bonfire.

Not until 1884 did Payson qualify for a post office, and that was a hard, two-day ride by horseback from Pleasant Valley. Fifteen miles northwest of Payson was the nearest law: a lanky Missouri pig farmer and magistrate only marginally literate. The railroad along the Southern Route did not enter Arizona until 1880, was not completed until 1882. Several years later, far to the north the Atlantic & Pacific’s steel tracks energized four towns of note: the Holbrook shipping center, the Winslow railroad maintenance burg, the Flagstaff lumbering town, and the St. Johns county seat. Between, on faith and sometimes flawed vision, the Saints from Utah designated their agricultural villages:   Snowflake, Woodruff, Eagar, Shumway, Taylor. Mormon influence at St. Johns was a sometimes-thing, for adjacent Concho made headquarters for gentile sheep men and Hispanic herders. For some years after the railroad went by, the main street of St. Johns doubled as a demarcation--Mexicans to one side, Texans to the other, and God help a Mormon caught in the middle. The cattle-ranching Greer family fought its own range war with sheep interests funded from New Mexico.

The convoluted trek of James Dunning Tewksbury to his Pleasant Valley was both unique, and typical of late nineteenth century-westering.  Perhaps of English or Welsh birth around 1823, and assuredly with a quintessential old English name, Tewksbury was a Bostonian who may have married his lissome Shoshone Indian bride when she was a student in an Eastern school. More likely, he was a bachelor Argonaut--maybe a forty-niner over the Oregon Trail, or as he told one man, one who came to the West Coast by sailing vessel via Cape Horn. In Oregon, a staircase of dark, clean-limbed, striking Tewksbury children were born. By certain recollections, the elder Tewksbury brought west his passion for breeding and racing fine horses. The Tewksbury family in Oregon were considered propertied, wealthy, solid citizens, and were well-liked.

But Tewskbury’s foot itched. He cashed out in Oregon, and sought elsewhere his western dream. In San Francisco, Tewksbury, a devoted Mason, maintained membership in Mt. Moriah Lodge Number 44 from 1854 to 1866, when he withdrew and presumable moved on. He was a charter member in 1876 in a lodge in Battle Mountains, Nevada, where he listed his occupation, "miner." A man who knew the Tewksburys at the Western Pacific Railroad junction of Battle Mountain in 1872 was struck by the beauty of Mrs. Tewksbury and the handsomeness of the children: John about fourteen; Edwin, about twelve; James, about ten; and Elvira, about eight. A younger son was Frank. Tewksbury and his older boys were regulars at the horse races, where they entered some of their own steeds.

Absent evidence, the cause of the Indian mother’s death is left to latter-day speculation. When grown, three of her children would die prematurely of tuberculosis--possibly she breathed into her offspring not only life, but death. Tewksbury seemed never to mention his first wife’s demise, but death set him drifting again, this time to Prescott, Arizona, in 1877. His children accompanied him.

No doubt his horses did, too. According to descendants, "James D. Tewskbury first saw the Pleasant Valley from the Mongolian Escarpment when he and a group of men were following a herd of stolen stock.  Tewksbury’s party stopped there, deciding not to pursue the cattle. The stock would have been scattered among the trees, in the direction of the White Mountain Apache Reservation.

Not unusual for America and its western region, Tewksbury with a large family of motherless youngsters, was attracted to a widow with a fatherless brood. The union November 6, 1879, of Tewksbury and Lydia Ann Shultes, a native of Wales and resident of Globe, was conducted before a justice in Tempe, where Lydia owned cattle.  Lydia had three children by two husbands now deceased. In time, the offspring could be categorized "his’n, her’n and our’n".  The vaunted Tewksbury reputation for conviviality got a boost from the reporter who not only covered the news, but made some:

Mr. J.D. Tewksbury was married at 4 o’clock p.m. yesterday afternoon to Mrs. Lydia Shultes. The ceremony was performed by Justice H. Dunham. After the wedding the company partook of a fine repast, and then adjourned to the schoolhouse where dancing was kept up until midnight. The Expositor man got into the fun about 8 o’clock and the way he made that schoolhouse floor quake was something new to Tempe’s terpsichorean bands.

For a while, the older couple resided in Tempe. The four Tewksbury boys took the horse herd to Pleasant Valley, and on a Cherry Creek site likely selected by their father, built a cabin and bunkhouse, corrals, a smithy and stables. The romance of the eldest boy, John, and Lydia’s daughter, Mary Ann Crigger, culminated in their marriage in 1882. But for the occasional Indian outbreak, the idyllic life sought by Old Man Tewksbury for his clan seemed within reach. He and Lydia joined the boys at Pleasant Valley. The first of two sons born to James Sr. and Lydia arrived in 1881. The family set out an orchard of clingstone peach saplings. Lydia’s green Welsh thumb nurtured rose bushes that continued to bloom and bristle along fence rows more than a century later. While work reigned as the universal human lot, at Pleasant Valley, a part spirit eased the toil.

James D. Tewksbury Sr., who had lived for many years in California had grown accustomed to the Spanish custom of "Fiestas", and sponsored a yearly Fiesta at his ranch in Pleasant Valley. It was a gala affair, a beef was barbecued, horse races were matched and run, matched roping were the order of the day, dancing, feasting and an all around pleasurable get-together for the settlers of lonely and isolated Pleasant Valley. The men loaded their families in wagons and came from far and near, the women bringing their most prized gourmet dish, and a fabulous time was had by all....

Four tranquil and productive years passed. But according to pioneers G.W. Shute, a fateful meeting occurred in the summer of 1882. Pleasant Valley could be a boring backwoods for young people, and when relief from duties was permitted, the Tewksbury boys, by now in or approaching their twenties, would ride into Holbrook, Prescott, or Globe for a few days’ recreation. On the agenda: drinking and gambling in some of the better saloons. Edwin Tewksbury, lithe and swarthy, on such occasions affected starched shirts, tie pins, and gloves; the man enjoyed being clean and neat.

Ed Tewksbury left his mountain home and proceeded to the little mining town of Globe. Here, while walking up and down the single street that made up the business part of town, he met a tall, handsome young fellow who turned out to be Tom Graham.

Graham told Tewksbury that he was prospecting for a place to locate a herd of cattle. Tewksbury told Graham of a wonderful place where he had his own range with the result that when Tewksbury returned to Pleasant Valley, Tom went with him....

Graham was greatly pleased at what he saw and stayed with the Tewksburys a few days, leaving with a promise to return as soon as he could with his outfit.

This tale "that passed from man to man during and immediately after the trouble" does not differ greatly from that handed down in writing from the pen of Mary Ann, John Tewksbury’s wife. Her version identifies Ed’s visiting Graham as John, not Tom:

...Uncle Ed Tewksbury met John Graham in Globe and Graham was looking for a location as he and his brother wanted to start in the cattle business. Ed told him about Pleasant Valley for at that time there was not many ranchers there. Graham became very interested and came out to see the valley, he liked it so much he went back to Globe and sent for his brother Tom Graham to come on as he had found just what they wanted. They met in Globe, they had some money, not very much, and they bought a small bunch of cows and drove them out to the valley and settled...

And so the Grahams staked a segment of the broad, open inclined main valley, just a mile or two up Cherry Creek from their new friends the Tewksburys. That close-knit clan sized up the Graham boys, helped them build their first shelter, and gave them sound advice in livestock husbandry. The Tewksburys agreed...it would be downright pleasure some, having some new neighbors.