‘Mother of Phoenix’ was force in Valley
Escalante Swilling came from Sonora
It’s well known that John William “Jack” Swilling is one of the founders of Phoenix, for his work building the canal system that brought crops and people to the Valley. But many overlook the integral role of his wife, Mexican immigrant Trinidad Escalante.
Trinidad Escalante Swilling was born in Hermosillo, Sonora, in northern Mexico. There is conflicting information about the year she was born, sometime from 1847 to 1849.
Not much is known about Trinidad’s childhood.
According to Christine Marin, a researcher of Arizona Latino history and a retired Arizona State University professor, her father was settling into the Tucson area and planned to move the family north, but then her father died. Her mother decided to move them to Tucson regardless.
Trinidad arrived in Tucson in 1864, according to an Arizona Memory Project document written by Marin. This is where Trinidad, who was between 15 and 17, would meet the former Confederate soldier Jack Swilling, who was 34.
According to Trinidad and Jack’s last living daughter, Harriet Swift, Trinidad saw Jack the same day they arrived in Tucson.
She saw a group of men ride up close to her wagon. They stared at her so intently that it embarrassed the young Trinidad. Harriet Swift goes on to say that Jack told one of the men he was with that he was going to marry that girl.
Jack Swilling was born in the
South but made his way west to find opportunity in the mines. Marin called him “a frontiersman, a sort of entrepreneur.”
“They marry in Tucson in that beautiful Augustine chapel,” Marin said, referring to what is now called the St. Augustine Cathedral but at the time of the wedding in 1864 was a small two-room house. “They come to the valley of what we call Phoenix.”
The Swillings move to the Valley
After they were married, they traveled to the Salt River Valley, arriving in 1867. The area that is now Phoenix was just a small desert town.
“It was so diverse because there were Native Americans already living here and there were campitos already developed by Mexicanos who came and settled. They were farmers. They were agricultural workers,” Marin said.
Jack started the Swilling Irrigation and Canal Company in Wickenburg to build canals with the hope to sell crops to miners in the area. He enlisted the labor of Mexicans to revitalize the canals.
“Mexicanos came, developed those irrigation canals and brought forth opportunities for people to come and settle because now there was water. There was water for producing fields and different ways to help people come and settle,” Marin said.
With water flowing into the Salt River Valley, Phoenix began to develop. According to the city of Phoenix’s website, the city was officially recognized May 4, 1868.
Jack modernized the canal system of the early Hohokam natives, allowing water to flow into the Valley and begin the development of Phoenix.
This is why Jack Swilling is often called the “Father of Phoenix,” making his wife, Trinidad, a Mexican woman, the “Mother of Phoenix.”
In an oral history from 1923, Trinidad addressed debate over whether she was the first white woman to live in Phoenix. She denied it, saying, “I don’t claim that, because I don’t claim to be white.”
“I was the first one here but they don’t call Mexicans white; I came from Sonora, and they call me Mexican.”
Uniting white and Mexican settlers in Phoenix
“Trinidad Escalante Swilling and Jack Swilling then become involved in bridging the gap between Anglos and Mexicanos through religion,” Marin said.
According to Marin, there were contentions between the two communities because there were disputes over who owned the land and who had rights to the water.
“It was really the Salt River that was the life of the town, of the communities, of all up and down the river,” Marin said.
According to the U.S. census in 1870, the total population of Phoenix was 240 and 52% of them were Hispanics.
One of the stipulations of Trinidad and Jack’s marriage was that Jack had to convert to Catholicism.
Trinidad’s home was the site of the first Mass celebrated in Phoenix for local Catholics. At the time there was no standing church.
According to the Hispanic Historic Property Survey by the city of Phoenix, Trinidad’s home, built in 1868, was the first permanent standing home in the Valley. Her home, Dos Casas, would have been located near 36th and Washington streets.
She was likely a patient and kind woman, considering she was married to a known drunk.
According to an Arizona Republic article from 1978, “she bore his children and endured, as did his good friends, his bouts of morphine — and alcohol — induced insanity.”
Two of her kids with Jack died as children. She also looked after at least two Apache children. While it is unknown if she ever adopted the children because records are sealed to researchers, she did care for them, Marin said.
She then began to develop a way for her children to learn Catholicism.
Trinidad was “helping to develop schools, church schools or Catholic schools or small little buildings that were called school buildings, or ways for children to learn Catholicism through schools. So she was involved in the history of building early education and the concept of education in Phoenix,” Marin said.
She taught out of the St. Mary’s Church building.
Trinidad’s life after Jack
According to archives at the ASU library, Jack Swilling was accused of a stagecoach robbery. He died while in custody awaiting trial in Yuma on Aug. 12, 1878, at the age of 48. Fifteen days after his death, Trinidad sold their property in the Black Canyon area and moved back to Phoenix.
After Swilling’s death, 31-year-old Trinidad worked as a seamstress to support her children until she remarried, to the German immigrant Henry Shumaker. With him, she had three more children. She outlived him as well. He died after nine years of marriage. She would also bury two more of her children.
According to an Arizona Republic article from Dec. 28, 1925, her son Charles, a naval volunteer and World War I veteran, died in service in 1918. Another son, Robert, was killed in a “Sonoran tragedy,” according to the article. She was not able to recover from the loss.
Trinidad died in 1925 at the age 76 or 78. The Republic covered her death on the front page that day with the headline “Pioneer Woman of Early Valley Period Dies Following Illness.”
Her funeral services were held on a Tuesday morning at St. Mary’s Church, and she was buried next to her son Charles at St. Francis Cemetery in Phoenix. The cemetery was the first Catholic burial ground in the Valley.
Trinidad’s grave went without a marker for decades until the cemetery’s centennial in 1997. Cemetery officials realized the injustice and donated $200 to create a marker for the Mother of Phoenix, Trinidad Escalante Swilling Shumaker.
To Christine Marin, Trinidad’s story is the story of Phoenix.
“It’s part of the fabric of the history of Arizona.”