[From "Saga," Geneo Soc. of So. Illinois]



                                   "ALIAS JUDGE HARDY"

                   Nathaniel M. Hickman of Washington County

                        Farmer, Felon, Justice of the Peace



	

	When the first Isaac Hickman entered Illinois is unclear, but it appears to

have been prior to statehood. In September 1818 St. Clair County voted for its first

State representatives, and an Isaac Hickman cast a vote. He probably was an

Illinois resident for several years at that point; his son, born in 1810 or 1811,

placed his own birth in St. Claire County. Washington County's Register of

Marriages contains an entry for the marriage of that son, also named Isaac,

which indicates that his parents were named Isaac Hickman and Nancy Morris

Hickman; in the 1880 census the son stated that both his parents had been born in

Virginia. (That state has several lines of Hickmans dating to the 17th century, one

of which contains many Nathaniels, but no link has been documented).

	Isaac and Nancy had at least three children. Mary W., born in 1802,

married a John Darter. Charles F. married a Mary Eason. Isaac Hickman, Jr.,

the middle child, sired the line discussed here. Isaac, Sr. apparently died before

1850. The Washington County census for that year shows Nancy Hickman, age 82,

living with John and Mary Darter, next door to Isaac, Jr.

	The 1860 and 1880 census entries for the younger Isaac Hickman suggest

he was born in 1810 or 1811 in Illinois; his civil war pension papers indicate a

birth in St. Clair County. Washington County realty records show him

purchasing land there in 1836 and again in 1852.

	On 7 February 1862, Isaac enlisted as corporal of 60th Illinois Infantry, a

new unit being formed by Col. Silas Toler. He was upwards of fifty years of age;

the cut-off for volunteer enlistments was 45. Like many would-be soldiers, Isaac

simply adjusted his age to meet the requirements. The muster-in roll shows his

age as 40. Isaac soon discovered the reason for the age restrictions: even young

men found difficulty withstanding camp diseases, twenty-mile summer marches,

and a diet of hardtack and salt pork. Isaac applied for a disability discharge, this

time revealing his true age, which  was granted on Jan. 12, 1863. He returned to

Washington County, where he served as a minister in the Methodist church and

was elected Justice of the Peace. His 1880 census return shows occupation as

"Justice;" his great-great-granddaughter, Joan Hickman Degenhardt, has found

Washington County records of marriages he performed as a Methodist minister

over the period 1866-1878, and as a J.P. over the period 1878-79. He apparently

farmed outside of Nashville; a son's Civil War pension application puts his place

of birth as "3 mi. S.E. of Nashville P.O."

	Isaac married Rachael Anderson (1813-1878); after her death he married

Annis Coffel (1821-1897), whose name is variously spelled Coffil or even Coppil.

According to Annis' declaration for a widow's pension, she was widow of veteran

Jesse Coffel, who had died in 1876. Rachael bore Isaac seven children; the eldest

six are shown in the 1850 census of Washington County, while the 1860 census

reveals the youngest four still living with him.

	Of the eldest child, Mary D., little is known beyond her birth in 1832, and

her marriage to John Gibson.

	Isaac's second child, John D., was born June 27, 1839 and died on October

23, 1913 in Mountain Home, Arkansas. His application for a Civil War veteran's

pension reveals that in 1869 he moved to Arkansas, where on March 5, 1871 he

married a Mary Jane Norman, and that they had five children: Ella (Sharlott) (b.

1871), who married a Mr. Suther; Charles J. (b. 1874); William C. (b. 1878); James

R. (b.1880) and Robert L. (b. 1890).

	The third child was Nathaniel Morris Hickman, whose migrations and

career will be discussed below.

	Nathaniel's younger siblings included Thomas, (b.1847); Sarah A.,(b. 1849),

who is known to have married an Andrew Woodrome, and Charlotte, (b.1852) who

married Spencer Woodrome and later Edward Nichols.

	The youngest child of Isaac and Rachael was James I. Hickman, born in

1856. The Register of Marriages of Washington County shows that in 1878 James

married Margaret Coffel (b. 1862); it further shows that she was the daughter of

Annis Coffel, who thus was to become both James' foster mother and his mother-

in-law. The couple had four children: Edgar (1880-1958), who married a Minnie

(1880-1960); Lowell; Jessie (b. 1865), who married a Mr. Duke; and Chauncey

(1887-1957).

	Chauncy Hickman married Litha Gray (1889-1916) and, after her death,

Bess Clark. He and Litha had four children; Everett (1909-1990); Bertie C. (b. 1913,

presently living in DuQuoin, Ill.) ; Verdie Lee, who died in childhood; and James

Elmer (1911-1989). James E. married Alberna Arbeiter, presently living in

Vergennes, Ill. While reading the list of new members of the Geneological Society

of Southern Illinois, I found the name of James and Alberna's daughter, Joan

Carol Hickman Degenhardt. It is Mrs. Degenhardt's research which allows us to

fill in the descendants of James, and which also documented the life of the first

Isaac Hickman. 

	In January, 1862, John and Nathaniel Hickman enlisted in Company F,

49th Illinois Infantry, captained by John A. Logan. The new unit was quickly

introduced to combat. Six weeks after the regiment was mustered, it lost 51 men

in the assault on Fort Donelson. Two months later, it was thrown into the fighting

at Shiloh, the bloodiest battle thus far in the war, and where it lost 17 killed and 99

wounded. In three months' service, nearly one man in five had fallen in action.

	According to his later pension application, John was one of those who fell at

Shiloh, with a rifle bullet through the right shoulder. After three months of

hospitalization, he returned to the regiment but was soon given a disability

discharge. His application for a pension notes that he was "partially paralized

[sic] in the right side and completely disabled."

	Nathaniel soldiered on as the regiment moved on to fighting in Arkansas,

Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi. The casualties taken by the 49th Illinois

were high even by Civil War standards. Of the 141 men who served in Company F,

30 died and another 26 were discharged as disabled. Seven of the company's

original eight corporals, and three of its four sergeants, were killed or disabled in

the line of duty.

	Nathaniel survived the war, and returned with the regiment to Illinois,

where it was mustered out in September, 1865. From there his trail essentially

vanished, leaving no trace on census or public records.

	A half century later the Bureau of Pensions received a most unusual

application. The petitioner was one Charles W. Hardy, of Yuma, Arizona. Mr.

Hardy had been one of the early settlers around Phoenix Arizona, married a

wealthy widow of the town's first Justice, and became a prosperous rancher and

mine owner. In 1890 he was elected the first Justice of the Peace of Cave Creek, a

mining town north of Phoenix. Judge Hardy's pension application must have

raised a few eyebrows:



Nathaniel M. Hickman, being first duly sworn, on his oath states: That he

is known as C.W. Hardy; that in the year 1872 he changed his name to C.W.

Hardy, by which name he has ever since been known; that his reason for

said change of name was that affiant understood he had been charged in

the State of Colorado with some criminal offense; that affiant expects to be

able to prove that he is the identical Nathaniel M. Hickman who served in

Co. F, 49th Ill. Infantry during the Civil War, by the evidence of affiant's

brother, James I. Hickman, of Poplar Bluff, Mo.; of affiant's sister, Sarah

A. Woodrum, 724 So. Spring St., Belleville, Ill.; of the Captain of the said

Co. F, viz., John A. Logan, of Ashley, Ill; of James Alexander, a comrade of

Co. F., of Mount Vernon, Ill; that affiant has a knife scar extending from in

front of his left ear to the left corner of his mouth, which was inflicted in a

fight with a Southerner at Paducah, Ky. in 1865....



	Other documentation submitted indicated that, after leaving Washington

County, he had "freighted and trapped" from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to

Denver and thence to Fort Lyons, Colorado, and that in 1872 he suddenly relocated

under his alias to Arizona. He could not, he explained, furnish his papers: "My

original discharge certificate I lost when Indians burned my camp near Bowie,

Arizona, 1873." The location is significant: Cochise's favorite winter camp was

just outside Fort Bowie, near the New Mexico border. A search of Colorado

newpapers for 1872 does not reveal Hickman/Hardy's offense, but does show

constant reporting of Apache attacks around Fort Bowie and, on one occasion, an

attempt to storm the fort itself. During the middle of Arizona's worst Indian

wars, Hickman had deliberately moved into the middle of no-man's-land. He

must have had reasons to prefer Cochise to a Federal Marshall as a neighbor!

	The fugitive landed on his feet. After a few years of dodging Apaches (and

perhaps lawmen) he relocated to Cave Creek, where on November 5, 1879 he

married Sarah Elizabeth Caroline Young. Sarah was the widow of James Ansley

Young, first J.P. of Phoenix. Her late husband, a Tennessee native, had been one

of the area's earliest pioneers: an article in the Weekly Arizona Miner for

January 20, 1872 mentioned him as one of the first seven men on the "Vulture

Lode," whose 1864 discovery began the rush into central Arizona. The Weekly

Arizona Miner for April 26, 1868 reported that Young had sold his interest in the

Vulture for $15,000, a princely sum when a cowhand earned a dollar a day.

	Young invested his returns in frontier land. Realty records of Maricopa

County show that when Phoenix was first surveyed the Youngs purchased a full

quarter-section of the city. In 1870 James Ansley Young was appointed, and later

elected, as the county's first Justice of the Peace. Unfortunately, he lost the post in

1872 after shooting a man in a gunfight and becoming a fugitive. The Weekly

Arizona Miner for September 28, 1872 reported that he had been indicted for

assault with intent to murder and that J.R. Darroche had been appointed J.P "in

stead of J.A. Young, who has left the country." (It is doubtful if he fled that far, or

had to hide very long. Maricopa County realty records show him selling realty in

Phoenix on December 13, 1875; the deed is witnessed by William Hancock, who

happened to be a judge of the Superior Court. The Carl Hayden files on early

pioneers, kept at Arizona State University, contain an unsigned note referring

"an amusing incident" when Phoenix's first J.P. shot "an Indian" in a street

argument, and then had to hide "until the incident was forgotten, more or less.")

	Jame's wife Sarah was a western pioneer in her own right. Family

tradition has it that she was a full-blooded Indian, a tradition borne out by

photographs. But she came from no western tribe; her census returns indicate

birth in Texas or the Carolinas, and her death certificate indicates an April 1848

birth in Texas, with father named James Shaw. The Hayden files contain a 1947

letter from a daughter in law, Addie Young, in which Addie mentions that her

mother "came over in the covered wagon from Kansas," and told of circling the

wagons for security against Indian attack.

	Sarah Young does not appear on the 1864 territorial census, but must have

entered the new land soon after her husband. Their eldest son, Thomas Marshall

Young (October 11,1866-April 21, 1932), was described in a 1909 newspaper article

as the first Anglo born in Yuma County; he married Addie Champie, of another

pioneering family, by whom he had a son, Ralph (who recently passed on in San

Diego, CA) and a daughter, Mary E. Smith. Sarah Young next bore James (1871-

1934), who is one of the three contenders for the first Anglo born in Phoenix;

Caroline (b. 1869); Mary (b. 1874); and James Ansley (b. 1880). Of the last three

little is known; Addie Young's 1947 letter states that both daughters had passed

on and that James Ansley was "killed in the K. [Kennecott?] Copper Mine." James

Ansley Young, onetime J.P., died on December 4, 1877 of "lung fever" and is

buried in the neglected "Cross Cut" or "Williams" Cemetery, off McDowell Road in

Phoenix. The Weekly Arizona Miner of December 31 1877 reported his death and

cryptically noted that he "leaves an interesting family to morne his loss." 

	According to his pension application, by that point Nathaniel Hickman,

alias Charles Hardy, was already in the Phoenix area. Five years later he

married "Widow Young." Maricopa County records show him staking mining

claims (not necessarily for mining: staking a claim was a useful way to obtain

realty and water rights) in Cave Creek from 1882 onward. His prominence in the

mining community rose, and when Cave Creek was established as a J.P. precinct

in 1890 he was elected its first Justice, holding court at the Phoenix Mine a few

miles north of the present town. The times were dangerous; the mine itself

recently been the scene of a confrontation between two armed bands fighting for

control. Still more threatening was the Pleasant Valley War, the bloodiest range

war in the State's history, where the Tewksberrys and Grahams battled with rifle

and rope, and a third, unnamed, faction set out to kill off  both parties. (The war

began when the deputy assigned to Hickman's precinct killed a Graham; it ended

years later when the last surviving male Tewksberry killed the last surviving

male Graham). Cave Creek was just south of Pleasant Valley; the Tewksberry

herds wintered not far from Hardy's land.

	Dangerous times called for dangerous lawmen. There are two clues as to

how Hardy may have meted out justice. One is that, while the State Archives have

records from other Maricopa County  precincts in 1890, none remain of Hardy's

court. The other clue is found in the autobiography of a territorial doctor, Ralph

Palmer. Dr. Palmer speaks of meeting a rancher named Hardy north of Phoenix,

and of his remarkable skill with a .45. He adds that at one resting place "we

listened to blood curdling tales of what happened to horse thieves and others. A

local rancher, Mr. Hardy, was one of the mainstays and had plenty of stories to

tell." (The doctor makes clear that Hardy's recollections were convincing: when

he killed one of Hardy's calves by accident he dragged it into the mountains,

fearing he would be murdered in retribution. Years later Hardy revealed that he

had quickly discerned that the doctor was responsible, but kept his discovery a

secret because the doctor was so visibly terrified when the loss was discussed.)

	The Hardys and Youngs left Cave Creek sometime after 1890, probably in

the wake of a long drought which drove many ranchers out. (An alternate, but

improbable explanation: Hickman/Hardy might have taken his alias from a

prominent resident of Salt Lake City, a Charles W. Hardy who was also born in

1842. The widow of the real Hardy, with son likewise named Charles W. Hardy,

moved to Phoenix around this time. Might the man who borrowed his name have

encountered too many questions after their arrival?) The 1900 census shows the

Hardys and Youngs living in Moyer District, many miles to the north; by 1900 the

family had moved to Yuma, far to the west. Charles Hardy died in Yuma on 

February 22, 1915; Sarah died there on November 29, 1916. Prior to his pension

application in 1914, there is no indication that Nathaniel Hickman revealed his

true name to anyone. Only in his cattlebrand, registered with the State, Arizona,

was there a wry hint: the knife-slashed rancher known as Charles Hardy chose to

register "N/H"--pronounced "N-slash-H."

	Charles and Sarah Hardy had two children: Jesse (1883-1941) and Mark or

Marcus (1887-1941). Jesse married Frances Snyder, whose family ran the

"Bumble Bee Station" in northcentral Arizona, and had six children; Mary (b.

1910), Lenard W. (b. 1912), who discovered a process for stabilizing soft turquoise

and founded the Hardy Turquoise Company; Frank B. (b. 1913), Richard S. (b.

1916), Edward B. (b. 1919) and King Woolsey (named for maternal uncle King

Woolsey, a famed fighter of the Apaches) (b. 1921). Jesse died in 1941 and is buried

in the cemetery in Buckeye, Arizona.

	Jesse may also have had a foster son. In the 1970's, newspaper articles in

Cave Creek and Phoenix related the story of a Jim Hardy, reportedly the oldest

man in Cave Creek. Jim Hardy stated that his real name was James Routh; that

he was born in Phoenix in 1875, and ran away from home at age 13. On the road to

Bumble Bee Station he met a Jesse Hardy, who eventually adopted him in a

proceeding before a J.P. in Moyer, Arizona. The story cannot be entirely fictional:

Jesse Hardy indeed lived on the Bumble Bee road, while Charles Hardy lived in

Moyer in 1900. There was an early Phoenix settler named James Routh (the State

Archives show him being arrested for assault in 1877 by Sheriff Behan, later of

"Gunfight at the OK Corral fame). Yet the children of Jesse Hardy have no

recollection of a foster son, and if Jim Hardy indeed was born in 1875, then he

would have run away in 1888, when Jesse Hardy was less than a year old! We can

speculate at one possible explanation: if Jim Hardy in the 1970's was inflating his

age for the sake of his reputation as the oldest man (and he does appear

remarkably spry for a man a century old), he might have run away when Jesse

was in fact an adult, and his senior. Jesse's first child was born when he was 26,

leaving room for adoption of a teenager who could have moved on before before

Jesse's children were old enough to remember. The truth may never be known;

Jim Hardy took the secrets to his grave in 1979, at the asserted age of 103.

	Jesse's brother Mark married Margaret Bogard in Yuma in 1915.

(Margaret was descended from the Bogards, Bartons, and Phillips families of

Boone County, Mo; the families had moved to Fresno during the gold rush and

later moved to Yuma). By her Mark had two sons: Earl (1916-1941), and my father,

Albert David Hardy, now in Tucson, Az. The family split up soon after Albert's

birth, and Mark disappeared. His sons located him only months before his death

in Tucson, on April 10, 1941. He may have given some family information to Earl

(who reported on Mark's death certificate that Mark's father was named Calvin

Hardy), but that was lost when Earl himself died shortly thereafter. The total

family information that remained was a recollection of Mark's statement that he

had a brother named Jesse. As a result, the trail of his father "Charles Hardy"

remained hidden until a few years ago. Then the family ascertained the name of

this first known ancestor and requested the death certificate of Judge Hardy--only

to find that it read "Nathaniel M. Hickman--known as C.W. Hardy!"



SOURCES

1860 Census, Washington County, Ill. p. 755

1870 Census   "        "                " 		 p. 108

1880 Census   "       "                "		 pp. 86, 383



Civil War pension files (National Archives): John I. Hickman, 49th Ill. Inf. (Cert.

No. 336984); Nathaniel Hickman, 49th Ill. Inf. (App. No. 1412539); Isaac

Hickman, 60th Ill. Inf. (App. No. 288289).



1882 Census Enumeration, Maricopa Co. Arizona Territory

1900 Census, Yavapai County, Moyer Precinct A.T. p. 38A

1910 Census, Yavapai County, Bumble Bee Precinct, A.T., p. 19B

"               "	  Yuma County, Justice Precinct 2 1/2



Marriage Records of Maricopa County, AZ, reel 1, p. 50.

Probate Records of Maricopa County, No. 28 (James Ansley Young)

Realty Records of Maricopa County, reel 1



Ralph Palmer, M.D., Doctor on Horseback pp. 12-13.

Frances Carlson, Cave Creek and Carefree Arizona, pp. 70, 82.

Livestock Sanitary Bd., Brands and Marks p.137 (Phoenix, AZ 1908)



Weekly Arizona Miner, Oct. 26, 1864, p. 1.

Weekly Arizona Miner, Sept. 28, 1872, p.1. 

Weekly Arizona Miner, Dec. 31, 1877, p. 3.

Weekly Yuma Sun, Oct. 15, 1909, p. 4-1 (reporting return of Marshall Young)

Black Mountain News (Cave Creek AZ) October 10, 1974, p.1

Phoenix Gazette Jan. 22, 1978 (obituary for Jim Hardy)

 

Carl Hayden pioneer files, Arizona State University (James and Marshall Young)