ArizonaRealCountry.com 19 June 2019 PRESCOTT – FROM THE ASHES Agentle breeze cooled the crowd of miners, cowboys, politicians, and businessmen in downtown Prescott the evening of Saturday, July 14, 1900. On the fringe of downtown, families enjoyed the coolness of the evening on large porches or on lawns that graced the homes huddled around the downtown area. Many could hear the Saturday night crowd on famed Whiskey Row or Montezuma Street enjoying the evening in the gambling halls and saloons that was the main attraction of downtown Prescott on a summer Saturday night in those days. Suddenly, the quiet of the balmy evening was shattered. The bell on the brick courthouse tower began to ring. Three pistol shots were fired into the air. The steam whistle on the old power plant wailed. All were dread signals in a mostly wooden clapboard frontier town such as Prescott. All meant a fire underway. It seemed to have started in a rooming house next to the Scopel Hotel on the southwest corner of Montezuma and Goodwin streets. The breeze from the south that had cooled the July evening now fanned the flames across Goodwin and into the row of mostly wood buildings making up Whiskey Row. The flames licked their way slowly from saloon to gambling hall to restaurant to hotel until they reached Gurley where they consumed the old Burke Hotel where the St. Michaels now stands. The fire then swept across Gurley to the north side of the street and westward, then across Montezuma to consume the Bashford-Burmeister store and on eastward towards Cortez. The fire raged for five hours, into the early morning of July 15th. Damage Great The weekly Journal–Miner, its offices heavily damaged by the flames, managed to get a paper out on July 19 giving its assessment of the fire. It placed damage at somewhere between $1 and $2 million. It was reported that the fire started on south Montezuma where a man was lying in bed reading. Tradition has it that the man was reading by the light of a miner’s candle, a candle mounted in a candle holder with a sharp spike beneath it, used to stick in the walls of mines. In this case, the man apparently had stuck the miner’s candle in the wall and somehow it ignited the wallpaper. Hearing the man call for help, according to the Miner, another man ran into the room with a bucket of water and threw it on the flames. It partly extinguished the then small fire. The man ran out to refill the bucket but found the water pressure so low it took considerable time to fill the bucket. By the time he ran back into the room, the fire was burning out of control. It was then the alarm was sounded and firemen raced to the rooming house. They brought hoses into the room to tackle the fire that had not yet made much headway. Unfortunately, when they turned on the water it barely trickled out of the hoses. The firemen then threw down the hoses in disgust and retreated. The flames began to sweep the wooden building. Within a few minutes, they had burst through the roof, where they were fanned by the evening breeze. Soon the flames were leaping from building to building. Downtown Prescott was doomed. Firemen sent for dynamite and began blowing up buildings in the Scopel block in an attempt to starve the fire along its path. The flames merely licked up the flattened buildings as they moved across them to the next clapboard structure. Firemen continued to blow up buildings in between Granite and Montezuma and Goodwin and Gurley fell in the path of the flames. Hope Rested On Hotel Burke Fireman hoped to stop the blaze at the north end of Whiskey Row at the Hotel Burke. This imposing and luxury hotel might serve as a barrier and prevent the flames from jumping Gurley. The Burke merely fed the flames into a greater frenzy, its hulk adding to the intensity of the flames and giving them the force to jump Gurley into the Kelly & Stephens block. Joe Roberts Meat Market between Gurley and the Brinkmeyer Hotel was dynamited. The flames merely raced across the debris of the meat market and consumed the Brinkmeyer. The blaze then jumped Montezuma to the Bashford-Burmeister warehouse, across the alley from the Journal-Miner office. The entire block along Gurley on the north side of the Plaza was doomed. Hundreds of men fought the blaze and worked furiously to remove goods from building’s in the fire’s path. Tradition tells dozens of tales of what was saved from the gambling halls, saloons, tobacco shops, restaurants and other establishments that made up the businesses surrounding the Plaza in 1900. One persistent story still heard is that patrons of the Palace carried the back bar and bar across the street to the Plaza before the flames devoured that historic saloon. With the back bar, it is said, went enough bottles of whiskey to keep the patrons from suffering thirst for several months. The huge back bar reportedly carried to safekeeping on the Plaza is said to be the one that still graces the Palace on Whiskey Row. There were two alarms heard that balmy Saturday night in Prescott in mid-July of 1900. The first was the clanging of the big bell in the old Yavapai County courthouse about 10:30 pm. The second was a dozen shouts that ricocheted along the famed Whiskey Row, calls to “save the whiskey.” This was, indeed, a “two alarm” fire, one that most likely wouldn’t have amounted to much if a series of official blunders had not left Prescott’s four fire companies virtually waterless. As it was, it was the most disastrous fire in the town’s history, one that left vast destruction in its wake and left dozens of witty, traditional tales that rose from the ashes of July 14, 1900. Some of these tales defy confirmation; some are supported by historical evidence. Both were used to draft this article. The fire raged for five hours, into the early morning of July 15th. By Bill Roberts — Reprinted from The Traveler continued on page 20