According to Merrill, on March 26, 1879, the sick and sorry settlers went into the Huachuca Mountains to summer, but, "the wind blew so much that we moved back to the river, near where Hereford now is, rented some land and put in some crops." This location is just about where the members of the Mormon Battalion, in 1846, had their memorable fight with the wild bulls. A Merrill report, rendered March 16, 1881, was far from hopeful and asked that the writer be relieved of his responsibilities. On the Route of the Mormon Battalion This office has been unable to find any reference connecting Merrill's later experiences in the San Pedro Valley with the time when he was an officer of the Mormon Battalion, though it can be imagined that his later associates had the benefit of many reminiscences of that period of the march just prior to the taking of Tucson. The San Pedro Valley is a historic locality. Down it passed Friar Marco de Niza, in 1539, and the Coronado expedition of the following year. The waters of the stream were a joyous sight to the Mormon Battalion, when it passed that way during the Mexican War. The country then had been occupied to some extent by Spaniards or Mexicans, who had established large ranches, with many cattle, from which they had been driven by the Apaches, years before the Battalion came. The country once had been the ranging ground of the friendly Sobaipuri Indians, but they too had been driven away by the hillmen and had established a village on the Santa Cruz, near their kinsmen, the Papago, almost on the site where Tucson was founded as a Spanish presidio in 1776. The river, when the Merrill party came, was found usually in a deep gully, in places twenty feet below the surface of the silty ground. Naturally, difficulty has attended the attempts to dam the stream. Chronicles of a Quiet Neighborhood St. David was named by Alexander F. Macdonald in honor of David W. Patten, a martyr of the Church, who died at the hands of the same mob that killed Joseph Smith. Its first mail was received at Tres Alamos, sixteen miles down the river. A postoffice was established in 1882, Joseph McRae in charge. When the Southern Pacific came through, Benson was established, nine miles to the northward. Tombstone lies sixteen miles to the southeast. In May, 1880, the present St. David townsite was laid out. John Smith Merrill built the first house. The following year an adobe schoolhouse was built, this used for public gatherings until shaken down by an earthquake, May 3, 1887, happily while the children were at recess. Much damage was done in the town. The settlement had little or no trouble with Indians, though for nine years Apache bands scouted and murdered in the nearby mountains and committed depredations within the San Pedro Valley, both to the northward and southward.