Sharing Bed and Board: Cohabitation and Cultural Difference in Central Arizona Mining Towns

Abstract

By the spring of 1864, nineteen-year-old Juanita Bachichia was well situated in a large, sturdy cabin on Lynx Creek, at the heart of central Arizona's burgeoning gold districts. She arrived only five months before, following close on the heels of the first prospectors. A native New Mexican, Bachichia cast her lot with George Clinton, a twenty-four-year-old miner and hotel keeper from New York, and their cabin became a boarding house where miners ate for $2 a day. They were making final preparations for the new enterprise when the Reverend Hiram Walter Read approached the camp at Lynx Creek. Like many of the first settlers, Read did double duty during the early months of the gold excitement. As postmaster of the newly organized Territory of Arizona, he assumed responsibility for the census returns in the Third Judicial District. But Read, formerly a missionary in New Mexico, more than census taking on his mind: At Lynx Creek he fell in with George Clinton and Juanita Bachichia and a wedding was the consequence. The miners were quickly summoned, and the affair was conducted in an off-hand and truly Western manner. George was in his shirt sleeves and Juanita in her morning gown. Territorial Secretary Richard McCormick witnessed the bilingual ceremony and remarked to the groom afterward that he had as soon expected an earthquake as a wedding in the gulch. The newspaper account of their wedding sheds no light on what Bachichia may have expected of the cohabitation. But the new husband seems to have been