In the 1876 General Land Office map of Arizona there are only five settlements listed in the Cochise County area. One of those is Fort Bowie, another, San Pedro, was likely a deserted Spanish settlement. By the 1887 map there are 33 settlements listed. Fort Bowie is joined by Fort Huachuca as a military reservation and a military camp Fort Wallen is also listed. A vast majority of these new settlements follow the line of the new railroad.

The largest town in Cochise County during this period was Tombstone. Mines were established there in 1877 and it almost instantaneously became a major western city. Estimates of its population in the early 1880s range between 10,000 and 15,000 inhabitants. When Cochise was established as a county in 1881 Tombstone became the county seat. This boom was short-lived however. The claims started drying up in 1882 and soon the town lost most of its inhabitants. By 1890, according the the Federal Census, the entire county had just 6,938 people with the largest town, Bisbee, having 1,535 of those.

One major hinderance to the early settlement of Cochise County was that some of the most desirable land was claimed by owners of Spanish and Mexican land grants. Many of these claim had been in dispute for decades. After the Mexican-American War and the Gadsden Purchase, the United States had agreed to honor Mexican landholders property rights. Determining the validity of these land claims was difficult.

The surveyor-generals in New Mexico and later Arizona were given the task of reviewing the claims and deciding their validity. In 1875 the commisioner of the General Land Office complained that that it had been "more than twenty years since the surveyor-general of New Mexico commenced the examination of claims in that Territory" and "less than one hundred and fifty claims" of the "more than one thousand" pending had been sent to Congress for approval. Of these, "Congress has confirmed but seventh-one!"[1]

A considerable number of the towns listed on the 1887 map fall within one of the three Mexican claims. Most of the claims when they finally were adjudicated were held to be much less land than claimed. However, certain land ownership was unheld. In the San Juan de las Boquillas y Nogales claim for example, when the courts established the ownership, the entire towns of Fairbank, Contention City and Charleston were transferred to private owners.

Footnotes

1. Annual Report of the Commissioner of the General Land Office for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1875 (Washington: Government Printing Office), p. 44.