Tobi Lopez Taylor
The tiny
border town of Naco, Arizona, made the news some years ago because a historic
cemetery there was slated to be destroyed in advance of construction of an RV
park. In 2006, I was doing research on Naco for an upcoming issue of Archaeology
Southwest Magazine when I happened upon a list of the people interred at
the cemetery that had been compiled by historian Robert Silas Griffin. To my
surprise, one of the names matched that of my maternal great-great-grandmother,
Trinidad Lopez, about whom I knew little at the time.
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| Trinidad’s daughter, Clara R. Acton, with her son Edward, 1904. |
Trinidad was born and baptized in Ures, Sonora, in 1850. By
1864, she and her younger brother, Rafael, were living in Tucson with some of
her mother’s relatives, the Heredias. Around 1867, she married Ramon Leon, of
Ures, and with him she had at least four children.
Sometime before 1885, Trinidad became involved with John Rhodes, a cattleman from Texas who fell in with the brothers Ed and John Tewksbury, two of the major players in Arizona’s Pleasant Valley War. This feud—also known as the Graham-Tewksbury War, lasted about a decade and was responsible for the deaths of dozens of men. It has been called the bloodiest range war in U.S. history.
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| John Rhodes in 1916. |
Trinidad and John do not appear to have ever married or even
set up house together, but between 1885 and 1888 they had three children in
Tucson: Juan Francisco (John Frank) Rhodes; my great-great-grandmother, Clara
Ernestina Rhodes; and William Robert “Billy” Rhodes. The elder two children
were baptized at San Agustin Church in Tucson. There is no record of Billy
Rhodes having been baptized.
In December 1888, about a year after some members of the
Graham faction killed John Tewksbury, Rhodes married his compatriot’s widow,
Mary Ann Crigger Tewksbury. At some point in the next few years, Rhodes
traveled from Pleasant Valley to Tucson and demanded that Trinidad turn over
the three children to him. Juan, Clara, and Billy, who were bilingual, were then forbidden by their father to speak Spanish again. (Many years later, one
relative recalled hearing Clara speaking in Spanish with her cousin, rancher
Antonio “Tony” Lopez, in Winkleman, Arizona.)
In 1892, Rhodes and Ed Tewksbury ambushed Tom Graham (the last of the Graham men) in Tempe, less than a mile from the still-standing Niels Peterson House. Rhodes was arrested and put on trial for murder. While in the courtroom, Rhodes was nearly killed when his victim’s widow, Annie Graham, attempted to shoot him. One witness—named Rafael Lopez—who corroborated Rhodes’s claim that he was nowhere near the scene of the crime, may have been Trinidad’s younger brother. Rhodes was ultimately acquitted.
After the trial, Rhodes seems to have become a
more-or-less model citizen: he signed up at age 56 as an Arizona Ranger, and in
1907, he became a Pinal County Livestock Inspector. He died in Phoenix in 1919.
His widow, Mary Ann, lived until 1950.
Trinidad died in Naco in 1920, perhaps either while coming
back to Tucson or going to visit relatives in Ures. Her son Juan Francisco
Rhodes was killed in 1911 during construction of the copper mill in Hayden,
Arizona. Her only daughter, Clara, married Frank Acton—son of George Acton Sr.,
who co-owned a butcher shop in Benson—and they raised their children on the Acton
Ranch near Mammoth. Clara died in 1968. Billy Rhodes worked for Edward M. Joyce
on the Carlink Ranch, near Redington, and in 1924 witnessed Joyce intentionally
kill his employee, Jess Whiteley. In 1930, Billy married Rosa Ronquillo, the first postmistress of Redington, Arizona. Billy died in
1971, and Rosa passed away in 1982.
It’s ironic that it took the potential destruction of the Naco Cemetery to bring so much attention to the people who have been interred there for so many decades. Thanks to the residents of Cochise County and other interested parties, the individuals in the cemetery continue to rest in peace—que en paz descanse.
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