Many people living in Gold Canyon today believe that it was the King family, the family whose name lives on in the form of the Kings Ranch Road, who were among the original non-native settlers to call the Gold Canyon area their home.
In actual fact, it was a different family – the Barkleys – who were among the first non-native settlers in this area and whose ties to this area began long before the Kings arrived.
As a boy, William Augustus Barkley, “Tex” to his friends (even though he was born in Tennessee), arrived in Arizona when his family moved to the Gilbert area in the late 1880’s.
Finding work as a cattle hand, Tex worked his way up to foreman of the Diamond Ranch near Sunflower and in 1897 helped drive 8000 head of cattle to Phoenix for shipping. He married Gertrude Anderson, an Arizona pioneer herself, on 22nd of May 1905 and went on to establish three separate ranches around the base of the Superstition Mountains, living in one until his death in September of 1955.
Local historian Tom Kollenborn (1938 – 2018) wrote in 2010 that … “if you live in Gold Canyon today then you are probably living on some portion of the old Barkley Ranch”.
The Quarter Circle U Ranch was the Barkleys home ranch for many years before the 3R’s Ranch became their main home ranch. The stone ranch house of the 3R’s Ranch was near to the site of what became the Apache Land movie studios, ie off to the right as you head north along Kings Ranch Road, roughly between where the new Estates at Kings Ranch development is going in and the older, Mountain Whisper development to the north.
The old stone coral of the 3R’s Ranch was still standing in 2010 but appears to have been lost to history since then.
William & Gertrude Barkley had two daughters and one son and indeed a granddaughter of William Barkley is recorded as still living in Gold Canyon in 2010, however, for the privacy of the family we will end our look into the history of the Barkleys of the 3R’s Ranch at this point in the timeline.
Anyone interested in further reading and insight into the history of the Gold Canyon and Superstition Mountain area should take a look at the Tom Kollenborn Chronicles:-
http://superstitionmountaintomkollenborn.blogspot.com
(c) 2022 Courtesy of the Apache Junction News and Apache Junction Public Library
