CHAPTER VII
A MODEL RANCH
Any one who has been in Arizona and failed to visit the Sierra Bonita ranch missed seeing a model ranch. Henry C. Hooker, the owner of this splendid property, was born in New England and is a typical Yankee, who early emigrated west and has spent most of his life on the frontier.
He went to Arizona at the close of the Civil War and engaged in contracting for the Government and furnishing supplies to the army. It was before the days of railroads when all merchandise was hauled overland in wagons and cattle were driven through on foot. He outfitted at points in Texas and on the Rio Grande and drove his cattle and wagons over hundreds of miles of desert road through a country that was infested by hostile Indians.
Such a wild life was naturally full of adventures and involved much hardship and danger. The venture, however, prospered and proved a financial success, notwithstanding some losses in men killed, wagons pillaged and cattle driven off and lost by bands of marauding Apaches.
In his travels he saw the advantages that Arizona offered as a grazing country, which decided him to locate a ranch and engage in the range cattle business.
The ranch derives its name from the Graham or Pinaleno mountains which the Indians called the Sierra Bonita because of the many beautiful wild flowers that grow there. It is twenty miles north of Willcox, a thriving village on the Southern Pacific Railroad, and ten miles south of Ft. Grant, that nestles in a grove of cotton trees at the foot of Mt. Graham, the noblest mountain in southern Arizona.
The Sierra Bonita ranch is situated in the famous Sulphur Spring valley in Cochise County, Arizona, which is, perhaps, the only all grass valley in the Territory. The valley is about twenty miles wide and more than one hundred miles long and extends into Mexico. Its waters drain in opposite directions, part flowing south into the Yaqui river, and part running north through the Aravaipa Canon into the Gila and Colorado rivers, all to meet and mingle again in the Gulf of California.
Fine gramma grass covers the entire valley and an underground river furnishes an inexhaustible supply of good water. In the early days of overland travel before the country was protected or any of its resources were known, immigrants, who were bound for California by the Southern route and ignorant of the near presence of water, nearly perished from thirst while crossing the valley.