What we're looking at
In a news release, the League of United Latin American Citizens said Phoenix's founder was a White man married to a Mexican woman.
"In 1868 Phoenix was founded by a white man married to a Mexican woman. They settled in Phoenix looking to build a future after the Mexican-American war ended in 1848."
Media release sent on May 15, 2012.
LULAC sent the release after construction workers unearthed some grave sites and caskets, which may contain the remains of some of Phoenix's earliest settlers, at the site of a Maricopa County jail that is under construction.
Phoenix's founder is widely cited to be Jack Swilling, a Confederate Army veteran who dug the first modern canal leading water from the Salt River into what is now Phoenix. He was born in South Carolina, according to Republic reports.
While the city of Phoenix's history website says the city was founded in 1868 and Jack Swilling was "one of the founders of Phoenix," the page does not mention Swilling's wife.
But many other sources have pointed to a Mexican woman, Trinidad Escalante, as Swilling's spouse. These include a report in the Arizona Memory Project, an online effort to put Arizona history on the Internet, as well as a 1925 article in The Arizona Republican reporting her death.
In the obituary, the paper said Escalante was born in Hermosillo, Sonora. She married Swilling in 1864 at the age of 17 during a ceremony in Tucson. Trinidad survived Swilling, who died in the late 1800s of complications of his dependency on narcotics and alcohol. Trinidad lived to be 78. The Arizona Republican article says that she was "one of the best-known pioneer figures of the Salt River Valley."
Bottom line: Several historical sources cite Jack Swilling as Phoenix's founder. Several sources also confirm that he married Trinidad Escalante, who was born in Mexico, after the Mexican War and before his founding of the city.
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AZ Fact Check: Keeping Arizona Honest
AZ Fact Check is a service of The Arizona Republic, 12 News and the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. It is not affiliated with www.FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.