Nathan Benjamin Appel

 
 

Nathan Benjamin Appel was one of, if not the very first Jew to settle in the Arizona Territory.

Appel was born in the Bavarian city of Hochstadt am Main on April 14, 1828. He came to the United States as a teenager and proceeded to follow a meandering path to the Arizona Territory, briefly staying in New York before arriving in St. Louis, Missouri in 1846. By the time Appel got to St. Louis, the Mexican-American war was underway, and he tried to head out along the warpath with the Army of the West, led by brigadier general Stephen Kearny Watts. Unable to find a horse that was up to the task, Appel was forced instead to sign up as a contracted teamster for an army freight team. This got him to Santa Fe in 1847, a year after Kearny had achieved total control of the city without any bloodshed.

Appel made Santa Fe his home for five years while he made a living trading with Native, Hispanic, and Anglo populations in the city and its environs. He and Victoria Torres, a Catholic woman, married in 1852. The newlyweds left Santa Fe and moved around southern New Mexico. Appel worked in Socorro and Las Cruces before opening up a liquor store with his partner, Charles A. Hoppin, in Mesilla. Hoppin and Appel also became engaged in the dry goods and freighting businesses, the latter of which made expanding into Southern Arizona a profitable business. After hearing that there was another mining boom in Tucson, Appel decided to go visit the Old Pueblo; this would in fact be his second visit to the city, for the first time he had passed through Tucson he found it to be too undeveloped to settle in. By 1858, Hoppin and Appel had stores in Tucson and Tubac, giving them an established presence in Southern Arizona. Tubac seemed to be more profitable than Tucson, thanks to the many silver mines that supported local trade. Appel made Tubac his home. The 1860 census listed him as a resident of that town with a total of $6,500 in real estate and personal property.

Although the Southwest does not frequently appear in discussions about the Civil War, its inhabitants certainly felt its consequences, and Nathan Benjamin Appel was among the many that suffered. The conflict disrupted trade and uprooted most small settlements in Southern Arizona, including Tubac, and Hoppin and Appel was dissolved for good due to Appel’s stringent support for the Union and Hoppin’s Confederate sympathies. Searching for other work, Appel took up a contract to salvage machinery from the Santa Rita Mine, but after he and his team failed to return everything from the mine, he fled to Sonora with his family and made a living by trading. When Arizona was finally rid of Confederate forces, Appel reopened his businesses in Tucson and Tubac. Following the Organic Act, passed in 1863, the Arizona and New Mexico territories became two separate entities, and the following year Appel was elected to represent Southern Arizona in the lower house for the First Territorial Legislature, where he debated laws and presided over the Committee of Enrolled and Engrossed Bills. Although Nathan only served the territorial government once, he found himself involved in governmental affairs again when, while in Sonora for a business trip in March of 1866, he was arrested by Imperial Mexican troops and forced to do sentry duty for several days. Appel sent an appeal to the State Department, but it was never processed.

In the years following this fiasco, Appel remained in Southern Arizona. Throughout the 1870s, he continued to freight goods and even briefly served as Tucson’s deputy sheriff. In 1883, he ceased all of his freighting operations and returned to the police force in Tucson where he held the position of department chief. During his tenure he gained the reputation of being an unflinching enforcer of the law, although not without virtue; a common anecdote recounts that he once was approached by a former opium addict whom he had previously arrested who thanked him for helping him quit the drug and improve his life. In general, opium smoking and public drunkenness or disorderliness were the most common disturbances that Appel dealt with during his tenure.

After thirty-five years of marriage, Nathan and Victoria divorced and split the family. Nathan took the boys with him to California while Victoria took the girls with her to Nogales. Even though he adopted a new state later in his life, Appel continued to work with the police force, overseeing the Southern Pacific River Passenger Station and the Arcade Depot. Unrelenting, he became bailiff of the Los Angeles police court in 1890 and held that position for eleven years until his death on January 5, 1901. Appel’s funeral was well attended and conducted with Masonic rites. Although he married a Catholic woman and conceded to a Catholic upbringing for his children, a rabbi prayed over his grave during the funeral, imprinting an undeniably Jewish tone on the end of this pioneer’s life.


Cholent and Chorizo, by Abraham Chanin

Jewish Settlers in the Arizona Territory, by Blaine Lamb

Photo credits: Bloom Southwest Jewish Archives

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