Biography of Andrew Vinson Gibbons (1849-1932) Part 6—St. Johns

The San Juan Bautista Catholic Parish was established in St. Johns in 1877
The church building was completed in 1881,
About the time A.V. and Elizabeth Gibbons arrived in St. Johns

Biography of Andrew Vinson Gibbons (1849-1932)

Part 1—Childhood

Part 2—Santa Clara
Part 3—St. George and the Muddy Mission
Part 4--Glendale and Marriage
Part 5--Arizona
Part 6--St. Johns

By Andrew Smith Gibbons, III, Ph.D.

ST. JOHNS 

St. Johns was not many years old when A.V. Gibbons arrived to visit his and father-in-law. As part of the Mormon colonization movement toward the South, several LDS colonies were formed along the Little Colorado River during the late 1870's and early 1880's. St Johns was one of them. 

As early as 1873 an advance party conducted a brief survey of the Little Colorado for the LDS church but found no habitable areas there. The next year a similar party tried again to identify spots for settlement. Reports of an Indian uprising turned them back, but not before they could see enough of the Little Colorado Valley to return a favorable report. Evidently following up on this good news, a third party of about twelve members, headed by James S. Brown, followed the Little Colorado and found good locations for settlement with abundant grass, good farming land, and timber. Elder Brown reported this welcome news back to Salt Lake City immediately (January, 1876). Without delay settlers to make up four colonizing parties were called from all parts of Utah, though mainly around Salt Lake, and were instructed to report to Kanab, the assembly point. The four parties, headed by Lot Smith, Jess O. Ballenger, George Lake, and William C. Allen, had reached the settlement area by March of 1876 and settled Allen's Camp (later St Joseph), Sunset, Obed, and Sunset Crossing (a few miles from Winslow). 

The newly established towns grew and in turn sent out their own feelers for habitable usable land for colonization. Settlers from Allen's Camp helped settle Heber and Wilford, in the direction of Flagstaff, and to operate a sawmill and a dairy to the south and east of Flagstaff. Show Low's first LDS settlers were from Allen's Camp, and many small settlements in and near the White Mountains were populated only a few years after the first Little Colorado settlements of 1876—by families from those same settlements. 

Erastus Snow

As well, site-surveying trips to the Little Colorado directed by the Salt Lake City church headquarters continued. Apostle Erastus Snow was notably active in this work. It was later said of his work that it "would require a separate volume to follow Apostle Erastus Snow on his journeying through the Southwest, where he appears to have served as a veritable inspector-general for his church". 

The number of LDS colonies on the Little Colorado and in the White Mountains and in neighboring river valleys increased quite rapidly because of this vigorous colonizing effort from 1876 to about 1881. Thereafter the sizes of the colonies experienced continued spotty growth as the wave of colonization swept on south toward the Salt River Valley (Mesa, Lehi, Phoenix) the Gila River Valley (Safford, Thatcher) and on toward Mexico. 

St. Johns, which sat directly in the path of this tide of colonizing, had been originally settled as a gentile town, named after Senora Maria San Juan Baca de Pedilla, the town's first female resident, some time before the arrival of the LDS settlers. One writer called St. Johns "one of the most remarkable Arizona [LDS] settlements" because of its stormy history, and because it eventually became a place where determined peacefulness, quiet influence, and industry established a permanent successful LDS colony in the face of overwhelming natural and social odds. 

When the LDS site inspector Ammon M. Tenney visited St. Johns in 1877 he found that the business enterprise of a collection of New Mexican cattle and sheep men had brought several Mexican settlers to the valley. These had established a town site and had constructed a dam and some irrigation ditches, resulting in the farming of a few hundred acres. Tenney may or may not have been aware that the deed to the town (later found out to be only squatter's rights) had been won in a card game sometime in 1875 by a Prussian emigrant, Solomon Barth, who with his brothers Nathan and Morris had settled in St Johns to head the several thousand head of sheep that had been won in the same game. 

Perhaps due to Ammon Tenney's favorable report on the town, a colonization decision was reached. In January 1879 Jesse N. Smith arrived in Snowflake to assume duties as President of the Little Colorado Stake. One of his very early acts was to travel to St. Johns to tender Barth an offer for land for an LDS settlement. The offer was refused, but a second attempt by Ammon M. Tenney late in 1879 was successful. A given amount of St. Johns land and three claims at "the Meadows" was sold to the LDS settlers for 770 head of American cattle. The story of driving these purchase cattle to St Johns by A.S. Gibbons, D. K. Udall and others is one of the very interesting chapters in the pioneer Gibbons' life story as told in Saint and Savage. These cattle were church-furnished from the Pipe Springs herd except for 100 cattle loaned by W. D. Flake, a notable and generous LDS pioneer active in much of northern Arizona.