Freighters

Freighting is one economic activity that Mexicans from Tucson and Sonora enjoyed a monopoly over for several decades. For more than two hundred years, Hispanics traders and packers, the arrieros (mule drivers) and the mayordomos (wagon masters) had navigated the ancient roads of the Southwest. Bartlett mentioned an encounter with three Mexican packers who had brought goods from Tucson to trade with the Gila River Pimas. In the mid-nineteenth century, independent Mexican freighters and merchants transported most of the goods across Arizona until the arrival of the railroads. Dozens of teamsters hauled grain to stations between Tucson and Yuma. In Tucson, trains of government wagons were always heading east or west, to the Rio Grande or to Yuma. In the 1860s, Tucson became an important trade center. Olives, oranges, lemons, cigars, and silver coins were imported from Sonora; clothing, shoes, and groceries were taken back on the return trip, and from Magdalena, a prosperous town of about 1,500 people, American dry goods were distributed out to the Sonoran mines. Because of the scarcity of gold on the frontier, the Mexican peso, or "'dobe dollar," was used as a medium of exchange. Hispanic freighters hauled provisions to mining camps and army forts across the territory. They also supplied army posts with locally produced wood, hay and beef, and brought hides to Yuma for export. James H. McClintock claims that as late as 1883, long trains of ox-drawn, wooden-wheeled carretas from Sonora were still bringing fruit, panocha, and serapes to Tucson and Phoenix. Much of the freighting business in Arizona was eventually dominated by Anglo entrepreneurs who established mercantile companies in the 1860s, but old firms, such as Tully, Ochoa & Company, and Contreras & Amabisca, continued to prosper.

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