Georgie Digs!
As I had previously written, Annie Forbach was the daughter to James W. Brandenburg who had settled along Aravaipa Creek in 1888 with his wife and four older children before Annie was born there in 1891.
According to Annie’s memoirs, numbers of Indians from the San Carlos Indian Reservation would ride horseback to Aravaipa Creek in the summers, and they really enjoyed the creek water where they would spend days washing and bathing and having a good time. They evidently did lots of work gathering the wild black walnuts, mesquite beans, and the saguaro and prickly pear fruit.
Annie also mentioned what she named as an Indian Reserve that was located twelve miles down the Aravaipa from the ranch of her parents, and where the Indians farmed the land. She also stated “An old Indian who was a kind of Chief lived at the Reserve, and his name was Chiquita”.
According to my research, the Chiquita that Annie mentioned had to have been Capitan Chiquito Bullis who died in 1919, after which ownership of the one hundred-sixty acres allotted for him by the United States Government went to his heirs in 1920. In 1920 his son, Elin Chiquito Bullis, was allotted one hundred-sixty acres adjoining that Allotment just upstream, then in 1921, one hundred-sixty acres just upstream of the Elin Chiquito Allotment was allotted to John L. Bullis, another son to Capitan Chiquito Bullis.
The story about those allotments and what happened to them is included in my published book, A CREEKSIDE STORY – FROM BUCKBOARD DAYS TO ECOTOURISM.
Georgianna Wood, author of “A Creekside Story”