Pete Kitchen was the connecting link between savagery and civilization in Arizona. He was a rough charcoal sketch of a civilized man. He came to Arizona in 1854, and farmed rich, broad acres on Potrero Creek near its junction with the Santa Cruz. During the bloodiest days of Indian warfare his name was a household word among the white settlers, and to the wild Apache he was "more terrible than an army with banners." His hacienda, situated on the summit of a rocky hillock overlooking the valley in every direction, was as much a fort as a ranch-house. On their raids through the valley the Apaches passed by it both coming and going. Kitchen was almost the last settler to hang on after the withdrawal of the troops in 1861. His ranch was the safest point between Tucson and Magdalena, Sonora, and during the darkest days of Apache warfare, miners, settlers, and travelers made it sort of a rallying point. Thomas Casanega, who lived on a nearby ranch in the early days and who married a niece of Pete Kitchen, told me that there were more men killed between Potrero and Magdalena than in all the rest of the Apache territory. He said that so many men lost their lives between those two points that if their bodies laid side by side like railroad ties, they would make a track from Nogales to Potrero.
- From "Pete Kitchen" in Pioneer Portraits by Frank Lockwood
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