1870s Arizona diary: Taking wild rides, dining on fried beavers' tails

In November 1872, Dr. Corbusier was ordered to Prescott. Pregnant with her second child, Fanny sold most of their belongings before the trip since the Army only allowed a small baggage allowance.

The Corbusiers boarded the steamship “Newbern” to sail down the California coast and up the Colorado River.

“There were many sandbars on the Colorado,” Fanny wrote in her diary, “and as we approached one of them, we always listened to the man at the bow of the boat call out the depth of the water after he had measured it with a graduated pole. When he called ‘mark twain’ (two feet) we listened more attentively, as he would then begin to call off the inches. The boat would go on very slowly until there would be eighteen inches of water or less and then would usually run aground.

“Then the Captain would send some of the deckhands, who were usually Yuma or Mojave Indians, with a hawser [a thick rope] to tie to a tree, and the other hands were set at work at the capstan [a rotating machine that wound the rope allowing the wheel of the boat to be reversed]. As the sand was washed from under the flat bottom of the boat we would be dragged over the bar. Sometimes a spar would be set upright in the sand near the bow of the boat and that would be raised while the wheel washed the sand from underneath.”

One day, to her delight, Fannie reported, “We saw a trapper coming down the river in a canoe; the Captain called and asked him if he had any beavers’ tails. He had, so the Captain laid on a supply and the next morning the ... cook served them fried, along with buckwheat cakes; they were delicious and somewhat like pigs’ feet, only better.”

Arriving in Ehrenberg, the party started for Camp Date Creek on New Year’s Day 1873.

They arrived at the post shortly before baby Harold showed up on Jan. 14.

Camp Date Creek closed later that same year, and Fanny’s husband received orders to relocate to the Verde Indian Reservation, considered an undesirable and unhealthy expanse at the time. Fanny decided it was time to take her children back to a more civilized environment.

She arrived in Ehrenberg expecting to board a stagecoach that would take her down the coast to Yuma. Instead, she found her carriage consisted of a single-seat buckboard.

Placing her 2-year-old son next to her on the front seat of the buckboard and cradling her 9-month-old in her lap, Fanny settled in for a long day.

Before the driver swung himself onto the wagon, he wrapped a leather strap around Fanny and the children to keep them from falling out, forerunner of today’s seatbelt. As the driver headed out, Fanny noticed the man’s hands were inflamed with cactus spines. He explained he had fallen into a cholla cactus just a few days before, and it wasn’t long before he could no longer hold onto the reins.

He passed the straps to Fanny to lead the horses the rest of the way. For 40 miles to the next stage station, Fanny maneuvered the spirited horses while keeping a close eye on her two children now under the driver’s care.

As they pulled into the station, she reported that the driver “complimented me on my driving and told everyone how much pluck I had.”

Her young son thought it was an exciting ride.

“The driver and I talked of Arizona,” Fanny said, “and what it might be in years to come, when there was water with which to irrigate the land, as he knew there would be.”

Separated about a year, the family was reunited in Colorado in the fall of 1874. From there, they headed for the Rio Verde Reservation near Fort Whipple where their quarters “consisted of a hospital tent in front, framed and floored and provided with a board door and a large fireplace and chimney, a smaller tent at the back, and connecting was surrounded by a bulletproof adobe wall to protect the children and me if there should be any trouble with the Indians.”

The Indians, however, lauded the treatment given them by Dr. Corbusier and presented the family with a bounty of gifts consisting of “rats that had pouches, birds, young coyotes, colored stones, and other gifts. They made bows and arrows for the children, and one of them took from his neck a perfect quartz crystal that he had sewed in buckskin and wore as a charm and gave it to me. … An Indian whose son [had] been thrown from a horse sustained a very bad wound of one of his legs, which Father [Fanny called her husband Father] had treated until it was well, in gratitude brought his daughter as a ‘Iowah’ wife. And when Father said he already had a wife, the Indian said, ‘Have two. One white and one Apache, good.’ Father at length got rid of him by saying that the two would not agree and get along together, and he went away laughing.”

In October 1884, the family spent about a month at Fort Bowie before being ordered to Fort Grant, where they remained for the next four years.

According to Fanny, “We always planted something wherever we went and left a post richer by trees, shrubs, and various other plants.” At Fort Grant, she grew a successful crop of peach trees.

The Corbusiers left Fort Grant in October 1888 and continued their nomadic life until Dr. Corbusier retired in 1908. Part of Fanny’s original diary was burned in the 1906 San Francisco fire, but she rewrote much of what was in the initial version.

Fanny died in 1918 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.