Building a State in Apache Land

Charles D. Poston arrived in the Arizona Territory in 1856, when the land beyond the Gadsden Purchase was still largely unmapped, ungoverned, and deadly. This memoir, written four decades later but drawing on journals from his active years, captures the raw turbulence of building American civilization in one of the most dangerous corners of the frontier. Poston was surveyor, mining promoter, politician, and reluctant diplomat to the Apache peoples whose lands he and his fellow settlers were quietly consuming. He witnessed Cochise's raids, negotiated (often badly) with Geronimo's relatives, founded towns that sometimes survived and sometimes didn't, and maneuvered through the baroque politics of territorial government when Arizona was still a distant appendage of New Mexico. The book is not a neutral history. Poston believed in Manifest Destiny with the unselfconscious conviction of his era, and his portraits of Apache culture, while sometimes sympathetic, are filtered through the assumptions of a man who saw indigenous peoples as obstacles to progress. This makes it a valuable primary source, but also a discomforting one. The prose has the rough energy of someone who lived these events rather than studied them, and the book remains essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how Arizona was made.