1877

Estevan Ochoa was a man who believed in things.

I tell you this because it is important, and because I want you to understand it before I tell you the rest.

He had built Tully & Ochoa into the largest freight operation in Arizona Territory, which required the particular combination of intelligence and stubbornness that makes a man either successful or insufferable, and he was both. He served in the Territorial Legislature. He built roads. He believed in Tucson’s future with the sincerity of someone who had invested everything in a proposition and then, somewhere along the way, had begun to believe in it simply because it was true. That is the harder kind of belief. I respect it, which is not the same as being unable to use it.

In 1877 I needed someone to introduce the Southern Pacific Railroad bill in the Territorial Legislature. The bill that would permit the Southern Pacific to lay tracks across Arizona. The bill that would make Tucson the rail junction I had been building toward since 1854. I needed a man with standing and conviction and enough goodwill in the chamber to carry a bill that would render his own freight business obsolete.

I needed Estevan Ochoa to ruin himself for Tucson.

I will not tell you precisely what I did or did not do in the conversations that preceded his decision. I will tell you that I am very good at what I do. I will tell you that the line between persuasion and compulsion, in my world, is sometimes thinner than the person being persuaded finds comfortable to examine afterward.

He introduced the bill. It passed.

In 1880, when the Southern Pacific arrived in Tucson, Estevan Ochoa stood on the platform and presented a silver spike to mark the occasion. He stood there and cheered for the thing that had ended Tully & Ochoa, and he did it not as performance but as conviction; because he believed it. Because he had always believed in Tucson’s future more than his own fortunes. Because that was the kind of man he was.

Or because he had come to believe it.

Or because it was easier to believe it than to examine the other possibility.

The silver spike is still the proof I return to, when I consider that night in 1877. A man who had been coerced does not stand on a platform and cheer. A man who believes he chose freely does. He kept the dignity. He kept the conviction. He stood there with the spike and his reputation intact and his business in ruins and he called it Tucson’s victory.

I received that sacrifice. I called it civic progress.

Neither of us is lying exactly. That is the thing about certain arrangements: the truth is distributed between two people and neither of them carries all of it. What she did and what he chose are not the same question, and we have never been in the same room long enough to ask it.

He was embraced in 1888. Eleven years later. We are Elders of the same city now, and the debt from 1877 sits in the room between us every time we meet, unspoken by agreement.

A man with a debt is a useful man. This is a principle I have applied more than once.

He knows it. I know he knows it.

Neither of us has said so.