St. Johns, Arizona

This quiet town at the edge of the Colorado Plateau has been a crossroads since the Spanish era. Mexican settlers knew the Little Colorado River crossing here as El Vadito, the little ford. A trader named Solomon Barth won enough money in a poker game in eighteen seventy-three to buy cattle and land, shifted the name toward San Juan, and the Anglo pronunciation eventually became St. Johns.

Apache County was carved from Yavapai County in eighteen seventy-nine, and the county seat moved from Snowflake to Springerville before St. Johns became the seat in eighteen eighty-two. Mormon settlers arrived in the early eighteen eighties under Ammon Tenney, and the town developed around the friction and accommodation between the established Hispanic community and the arriving Latter-day Saint colonists. St. Johns has served as the Apache County seat ever since.