The Yuma Territorial Prison As A Beacon Of Civilization

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The Yuma Territorial Prison is one of the main pillars in the growth of Arizona as the wild west was tamed. Its existence served not only as a beacon of civilization but that of consequence for those who resisted human expansion’s natural progression. As it existed many thought of it as a joke giving those inside the easy life or the likes of a concentration camp but in the middle of civilian held war, the prison stood toward the future. From near modern advances to holding those refusing to be held and even continueing on helping those of Yuma for years to come. This paper will use sources explaining the history of the prison and be about the experience, conditions, and personality of many of the prisoners along with major events in the prisoners lives explaining how the prison evolved during and after their stay.

The prison, opened in 1876, was started by seven prisoners who built the first few cells. As more cells were build more prisoners were taken in and more manpower was available to build bigger, better, and faster. There were 3,069 prisoners, 26 of them female, through the 33 year run of the prison at 350 a time, most of them having crimes ranging from rape to murder and many more in between. No matter how cunning or dangerous the criminals were they didn’t have much chance to escape. Armed guards, deadly heat, spanning desert, the already secure structure, and rapid rivers that held no hope for any prisoner were all topped off by a Lowell gun which was superior to the Gatling gun at the time. Manufactured by the Ames Mfg. Co. it could fire up to 1000 times a minute and was said to be accurate up to 1000 feet under certain conditions making it fearsome to any prisoner dreaming of a false freedom.
However for those that...

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...from stories of the time. While many sources say that they argue with the wild perpetuation in their first paragraph they then maintain an indefinite description of the prison and attempt not to give a detailed look at the components and history of the prison before it lost life when shutting down aside from those stories describing how wild the west was. With this I was also not able to talk to any true experts of the prison, nor visit the prison or those surviving the ones who lived there on either side of the law causing my knowledge and research to be limited to the web, which as before mentioned is limited by lack of fresh or widely varied information. Had there been more sources that went into detail about the prisons other features aside from its capacity I would have been able to give more than an educated, generalized guess on how the some of the prison was.

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