Mormon Settlement in Arizona / A Record of Peaceful Conquest of the Desert

by James H. McClintock

Colonel Cooke for a while was in command of the southern half of Alta California, incidentally coming into a part of the row created when Fremont laid claim upon the governorship of the Territory. In this his men were affected to a degree, for Fremont's father-in-law and patron, Senator Benton, was believed one of the bitterest foes of the Mormon people.

Cooke resigned as lieutenant-colonel of volunteers, effective May 13, 1847, he thus leaving the Battalion before the date of its discharge. He accompanied General Kearny on an 83-day ride eastward, returning to Fort Leaven worth August 22. With them was Fremont, arrested, charged with mutiny in refusing to acknowledge the authority of Kearny in California. He was found guilty, but a sentence of dismissal from the army was remitted by President Polk. Fremont immediately resigned from the service.

Cooke, in 1857-8, led the cavalry of Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston's expedition to Utah and there is a memorandum that, when his regiment marched through the streets of Salt Lake City, the Colonel rode with uncovered head, "out of respect to the brave men of the Mormon Battalion he had commanded in their march to the Pacific." In the Civil War he was a brigadier-general, with brevet of major-general in 1865.

Lieut. A. J. Smith, whose disciplinary ideas may have been too severe for a command that started with such small idea of discipline, nevertheless proved a brave and skillful officer. He rose in 1864 to be major-general of volunteers and was brevetted major-general of regulars for distinguished service in command of the Sixteenth army corps, under General Thomas, at the battle of Nashville.

Lieut. George Stoneman in 1854 commanded a dragoon escort for Lieut. J. G. Parke, who laid out a railroad route across Arizona, from the Pima villages through Tucson, much on the line of the present Southern Pacific. He was a captain, commanding Fort Brown, Texas, at the outbreak of the Civil War, in which he rose to the rank of major-general of volunteers, with fame in the Virginia campaign as chief of cavalry of the Army of the Potomac, in which he later was a division and corps commander. In 1870 and 1871 he commanded the military department of Arizona, during the time of the Old Fort Grant massacre, and his name is still borne by the Stoneman Grade, above Silver King, a trail built by him to better command the Indian-infested mountains beyond. He was Democratic Governor of California from 1883 to 1887. A son, Geo. J. Stoneman, for years resided in Phoenix.

Lieut. Edw. F. Beale, who helped save the Kearny expedition near San Diego was a member of a party that had been sent from San Diego to meet the dragoons. The following March, he and Carson carried dispatches east, taking the Gila route. In August, 1848, again in California, he was made the naval messenger to advise Washington of the discovery of gold in California. In 1857 he made a remarkable survey of the 35th parallel across Arizona, using camels, and he repeated the trip in 1859.

The camels had been brought from Syria. They carried three times a mule load and were declared ideal for pioneer transportation uses. But Beale was alone in their praise and the camels eventually were turned loose on the plains. He was minister to Austria in 1878.

Both adjutants of the Mormon Battalion later became permanent residents of Arizona. Geo. P. Dykes for years was a resident of Mesa, where he died in 1888, at the age of 83. Philemon C. Merrill, in 1881, was one of the custodians of the Utah stone, sent from Salt Lake, for insertion in the Washington Monument, in Washington. He and his family constituted the larger part of the D.W. Jones party that founded Lehi in March, 1877, and it was he, who, soon thereafter, led in the settlement of St. David in the San Pedro Valley, on the route of the Mormon Battalion march. He died at San Jose, in the Gila Valley, September 15, 1904.

Pauline Weaver, the principal guide, was a Frenchman, who had been in the Southwest at least since 1832, when he visited the Pima villages and Casa Grande. In 1862, while trapping, he was one of the discoverers of the La Paz gold diggings. The following year he was with the Peeples party that found gold on Rich Hill, in central Arizona. Thereafter he was an army scout. He died at Camp Verde in 1866.

Antoine LeRoux, the other guide named, was with the Whipple expedition across northern Arizona in 1853. His name is borne by LeRoux Springs, northwest of Flagstaff, and by LeRoux Wash, near Holbrook.