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Arizona Attraction Video

When you were young growing up did you want to play cowboys?  Perhaps you wanted to be the bad guy rather than the hero wearing the white hat.  One of the places you certainly heard a little about was the Yuma Territorial State Prison.  Here the “really bad guys” were taken to serve out their time in prison. Not only were they prisoners but they were also required to build their own prison blocks!

The detention facility opened for prisoners on July 1, 1875 with seven inmates.  Those seven had been the individuals building the prison.  Now, the prison was not picky about who was there, because there were also twenty-nine female prisoners that were detained at the prison.  TB was a medical problem for the prisoners, one-hundred-eleven died during their incarceration in Yuma Territorial Prison.  Not someplace that was healthy to stay under any circumstance.  The prison also was not perfect.  During it’s operation twenty-six inmates escaped.  Of the three-thousand that were incarcerated over the years that is a very low number but definately not one that looked sharp on reports or to the nearby cities.  If they attempted to escape and did not succeed they got the horrid ball and chain to prevent them from trying again.  Not a particularly comfortable way to try to walk around.

So, while you are checking out vacation in Arizona offerings, consider when you dreamed that you wanted to be the bad cowboy – I bet you did not know all that stuff.  You probably thought that you could ride into a city on your prancing horse, knock over a bank and then ride out again and go stay at someplace nice and rich and spend the money.  Not so.  Normally the horses that the bandits had were pretty skanky, no ability to feed them well and groom them, too rushed staying ahead of the law.  To rob a bank you had to have a pretty good plan and might very well get shot or killed.  If you were caught you were shipped to Yuma (or worse.)  Living it up with the money, if you got away, probably wasn’t in the cards either because where would you go that there would not be thought about how a unemployed trail rider had the money.  There are some that did not fit that mold, but probably not many.  Not the style of life you probably really wanted to live.

The Yuma prison did accomplish some positive things with some of those living there.  Quite a few of the prisoners learned to read and write during their imprisonment.  The prison actually had a public library and the prisoners received medical care, such as it was at the time.  Enjoy this Arizona Tourism Video:

The prison was operated until 1907 (for an entire thirty-one years) before it became too small, overcrowded and eventually turned over to other uses.  It has now continued life as a school; free housing for hobos and families who became homeless by the Great Depression. Although it wasn’t someplace you would long to live in, it was absolutely better than having no place to go for shelter.  Some of the local Yuma people decided that it was a low cost source for building materials and thus over the years some of the buildings were essentially destroyed and so are not part of the historical park today.

Today the Yuma Territorial State Historical Park is used to host several special events throughout the year including the Gathering of the Gunfighters in January which you should consider attending.  It will be a lot of fun.  If you arrive at another time of year you may want to experience one of the Haunted Tours during October.  There are also Old West re-enactments done each Sunday from October through April.