January 2019 20 EARLY PIONEER - FALSELY ACCUSED - DIES IN YUMA PART 2 By Bill Roberts — Reprinted from The Traveler Trinidad Interviewed Trinidad Swilling was left a widow with seven children and two adopted Indian children when Jack died at Yuma prison August 12, 1878. She supported herself and her family as a seamstress in Phoenix until she married Henry Shumaker in Phoenix in the late 1880’s. Shumaker died in 1892. Trinidad again worked as a seamstress to support the three sons born of her second marriage. She was interviewed in a recorded statement on March 2, 1923, at her home. One Mile West of Central Ave. on the South Side of the Salt River by C.W. Gandy and J.D. Adams was the result. E.E. Johnson was the stenographer. Trinidad died in Phoenix in 1925. She had seen a lot of hardship in her early years in Arizona Territory as Mrs. Jack Swilling. Her first home after being married in Tucson in 1864 was in Walnut Grove where Jack had a claim on Weaver Mountain. Grizzly old mountain man Pauline Weaver lived with the couple in their camp. The Swillings soon left Walnut Grove, reporting there was too much water in the area to work their claim. In 1865 the couple was in Wickenburg. In 1868 Trinidad found herself in Black Canyon in a sturdy stone cabin on the old Black Canyon freight and stage route from Prescott to Phoenix and Tucson. In her 1923 statement, she recalled: “It was right there at the edge of the road coming from Phoenix; there was a house on one side within a hundred feet of when you go down to the bank of the river, and that was my house and my first house…” Trinidad lost a daughter, Matilda, while living in that house. Matilda was born in 1876 and died three years later. The child was buried in a small graveyard near the cabin where a man whose name is lost in history that got killed and an Indian also were buried, along with the bones of Jack’s old friend Jacob Snively. Snively had been killed by Indians seven years before the fateful day Jack and two friends set out to dig up his bones in the Bradshaws and bring them to Swilling’s place on the Agua Fria for a decent burial. Trinidad recalls in her 1923 statement of finding the arrowhead that killed Snively inside his skull when Jack returned with the bones. Despite declining health from the effects of his wounds and his addictions to drink and morphine, Jack Swilling’s last five years of his life in Black Canyon were active, adventurous and filled with risk-taking that apparently motivated him always. He started a new farm on the Agua Fria and put in irrigation ditches. Always involved in mining, Swilling took part in the founding of Gillett near the famed Tip Top mine. In 1873, Swilling and partners Frank Morehouse and William Kilgore found an old and rich mine that had been worked in the early years until the Apaches wiped out the miners. That was in August. September found Swilling laying out a new wagon road through Black Canyon to Camp Verde and Prescott. During 1874 he worked to develop his new mining claims on the banks of Black Canyon Creek where he had made several discoveries. It was in 1874 that Swilling brought Trinidad and the children to the Black Canyon cabin. By New Year’s, 1875, Jack had rented out his mine on shares and was building up his farm, putting in a vineyard and planting crops. He also then owned the Valenciana Mine, according to press reports. Summer brought a crop of corn, a field of sorghum, and his vineyard was reported as “extensive.” Swilling was prospering by the standards of the day. The next summer, in 1876, he discovered rich silver lodes some 10 miles from his farm, whereby then he was running 115 head of cattle, plus horses and mules. By the first of 1877, however, the tables had turned on Jack. The Miner reported him in “very feeble health.” Jack began selling off his mining properties. He sold a mill site he had bought a mill for and the mill as well. He began hauling wood in the fall out of this site known as Tip Top. In January 1878, he moved from the Agua Fria cabin to Tip Top or Gillett. He and his family joined a group that was settling on the Verde River, but his health would not let him remain. He brought his family back to his Agua Fria farm. The Frame Up Jack was getting bad and Trinidad knew it. He was drinking almost constantly. Worried, she talked to George Monroe and Andrew Kirby. The three came up with a plan to entice Jack to go recover the bones of his old friend Col. Shively, at rest where the Indians had dropped him some seven years before up in the Bradshaws about 35 miles from Gillett. Trinidad told Jack he should bring his old friend’s bones home to their ranch for a “Christian burial.” Jack liked the idea and he, Monroe and Kirby set out to recover Shively’s bones. They did and returned with them. The site where Shively had been killed was some 60 miles through some of the most treacherous mountains in the Territory, the Bradshaws, to Wickenburg, as the crow flies. There were no direct trails. While they were on this expedition, three men robbed the stage between Prescott and Wickenburg. Swilling, always irreverent and joking when he was drunk, told the boys at the Gillett saloon when hearing of the robbery to have a drink on him, that it was Swilling, Kirby, and Monroe that held up the stage. According to Monroe, continued on page 22