The Ghost of Apache Creek

Historical Note

Cholera was an ever-present danger in Western cow towns, where outhouses and cattle pens were often situated too close to the water supply.

The great Asiatic cholera outbreak of June and July 1867 killed three hundred people in booming Ellsworth, Kansas, and helped hasten the town’s demise as a major cattle center.

Wagon trains were particularly susceptible to the disease. In bad years, two-thirds of the emigrants on the Oregon Trail succumbed to cholera, a greater mortality rate than from any other cause.

There was no cure and people could go from healthy to dead in a matter of hours.

Sometimes the pioneers received a proper burial, but many were simply abandoned in their beds by the side of the trail, to die alone.

Emigrant John Clark later described such a scene: “One woman and two men lay dead on the grass and some more ready to die. Women and children crying, some hunting medicine and none to be found. With heartfelt sorrow, we looked around for some time until I felt unwell myself. Got up and moved forward one mile, so to be out of hearing of crying and suffering.”

To prevent the disease, emigrants were advised to “carry a small bottle of tincture of camphor and a few lumps of sugar in your pocket . . . and when you have any pain or disorder in your bowels, take three or four drops (of the camphor) on sugar.”

Of course, by the time you had “pain or disorder in your bowels,” you were already dead.

The Mormon settlement of Snowflake, Arizona, was established in 1878 by William J. Flake and Erastus Snow. Hence the name Snowflake.

In the 1880s, serious overgrazing in Texas resulted in catastrophic cattle losses and range deterioration. This is what drove ranchers like Beau Harcourt into the previously unexploited grasslands of the Little Colorado River Basin.

Unfortunately, by the turn of the century, the Texas experience had been repeated in Arizona.

Today, despite modern range management, the entire basin is seriously overgrazed.