Frontier Merchants: Lionel & Barron Jacobs and the Jewish Pioneers Who Settled the West Hardback - 1998

As in his acclaimed books on the Dust Bowl, the Second World War, and the Industrial Revolution, Jerry Stanley brings this story to life by individualising it. In this instance, he tells the story of Lionel and Barron Jacobs, who in 1867 set out from California for Tucson with a wagonload of canned goods. After 2 months trek across the desert, they arrived in Tucson -- then a lawless, one street, Wild West town -- and set up shop. Within a week they had sold out their canned goods and ordered more from their father in California; within two years they had established a prosperous merchanting business supplying Tucson with a variety of goods -- barbed wire and boots for the region's ranchers, tools for the silver miners, provisions for the army garrison -- and even luxury items such as birdcages and sheet music for Tucson's growing middle class. As Tucson grew, so did Lionel and Barron's business, expanding first to money exchange and loans and finally into the Arizona Territory's first formal bank -- which still exist today, as Arizona's Valley National Bank.

From its gritty beginnings crossing the baked Sonoran desert on an open wagon to their eventual role among Tucson's wealthiest andmost influential citizens, Jerry Stanley tells Lionel and Barron's story with his characteristic vigor and eye for period detail. He sets it in the context of the history of the American West -- the Gold Rush, the Indian Wars, the building of the railroads -- and illuminates the often forgotten ethnic diversity of towns like Tucson, where Irish, German, Italian and other European immigrants to the America's mixed with Spanish, African American, and Jewish settlers.