Adaline Amerilla Riggs

The Riggs and Hamblin Frontier

Adaline Amerilla Riggs was born in 1879, the daughter of Charles Hamblin Littlefield Riggs (1846-1932) and Nancy Marie Babbitt (1854-1949). Her father's middle name tells a story all its own: the Hamblin connection, passed down as a naming tradition through the Riggs line, linked the family to one of the most significant figures in Arizona's settlement history.

Charles's mother, Adeline Amarilla Hamblin (1823-1895), carried the Hamblin name directly, and Charles passed it to his own children as a middle name. In the Arizona Territory of the 1870s and 1880s, the Hamblin name was a form of social currency. Jacob Hamblin had walked the same ground decades earlier, negotiating with the Navajo and Hopi, establishing the ferry crossings and wagon routes that made settlement possible. Families who could claim kinship with the Hamblins advertised it, because it signaled something specific: a lineage of people who survived the frontier through diplomacy rather than violence. The Riggs family settled in the same network of LDS communities that the Hamblins helped establish, farming the arid valleys of central Arizona where irrigation ditches cut through alkaline soil and summer temperatures could kill livestock.

Charles Hamblin Riggs lived to eighty-six, an extraordinary span for a man who spent most of his life in the desert Southwest before antibiotics, before paved roads, before air conditioning turned Phoenix from an outpost into a metropolis. He outlived his son-in-law Lafayette Dana by two decades.

The Babbitt Line and Plains Violence

Through her mother Nancy Marie Babbitt, Adaline descended from Almon Whiting Babbitt (1813-1856), a figure whose life and death captured the full brutality of westward expansion.

Almon Babbitt was an early convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and served in a series of political and diplomatic roles during the 1840s and 1850s. He acted as a territorial delegate, a negotiator, and a courier carrying official documents between Salt Lake City and Washington, D.C. The overland trail between those two points was among the most dangerous corridors on the continent. In September 1856, Cheyenne warriors attacked his party somewhere on the Nebraska plains. Babbitt and at least two companions were killed. He was forty-three years old. The attack came during a period of escalating conflict between Plains tribes and the wagon trains that cut through their hunting grounds, a collision of civilizations playing out in real time across the grasslands.

Nancy Marie Babbitt, Adaline's mother, lived to ninety-five. She was born in 1854, two years before her father's death on the plains, and she died in 1949, the year NATO was founded. That single lifespan bridged the era of covered wagons and the dawn of the Cold War. She raised Adaline in the same pattern of LDS frontier domesticity that defined her own upbringing: hard work, community obligation, and the quiet expectation that women would hold families together regardless of what the land or its dangers took from them.

Marriage to Lafayette Dana

Adaline married Lafayette Dana (1876-1912), and together they started a family in the Arizona Territory during the years when statehood was still a political question, not a fact. Arizona would not join the Union until February 14, 1912, the same year Lafayette died.

He was thirty-six years old. The cause of death is not recorded in the surviving genealogical data, but thirty-six was young even by the standards of early twentieth-century Arizona, where tuberculosis, mining accidents, and simple infections killed men in their prime with grim regularity. Whatever took Lafayette, it left Adaline a widow at thirty-three with young children, including Leona, who was born in 1908 and was only four years old when her father died.

Widowhood in 1912 Arizona was an economic crisis as much as a personal one. There was no Social Security (that would not arrive until 1935), no welfare system, no reliable life insurance infrastructure in rural communities. A widow with children depended on extended family, on the LDS ward's informal charity networks, and on whatever labor she could perform herself. Women took in laundry, sewing, and boarders. They sold eggs and garden produce. They moved in with relatives. The options were few and the margins were thin.

Raising Leona

Adaline raised her children through the 1910s as a single mother in Arizona, a state so new it had barely printed its own letterhead. The infrastructure that would later define the Salt River Valley, the canals, the highways, the sprawling citrus operations, was still being built. Daily life revolved around subsistence: growing food, preserving food, hauling water, mending clothes that had already been mended twice.

Leona Dana grew up in this household, the daughter of a widow, learning early that women managed alone when they had to. In 1922, at fourteen years old, Leona married Earl Ellsworth. The age is startling by modern standards, but the pattern was common in rural Arizona's pioneer communities: girls from families without fathers married young because marriage offered economic stability that a widow's household could not always provide. Earl was nineteen, a farmer's son from another LDS pioneer family, and the match connected two clans rooted in the same territorial soil.

Whether Adaline saw Leona's early marriage as a loss or a relief is unknowable at this distance. Likely both. She was giving away a fourteen-year-old daughter, but she was giving her to a family with land, with standing, with the Ellsworth name behind it. In a community where survival depended on networks of mutual aid, the Ellsworth connection was as good as any widow could hope for.

Legacy

Adaline Amerilla Riggs lived to seventy-two, dying in 1951. She outlived her husband by thirty-nine years. In that span she watched Arizona transform from a territory of ranchers and miners into a modern state with military bases, a growing Phoenix, and the beginnings of the suburban boom that would reshape the desert. She saw her daughter Leona raise seven children with Earl Ellsworth. She lived long enough to know her granddaughter Earlene, who married Dr. Clifford James Goodman Sr. in 1940 and bore the first Goodman grandchildren.

The pattern of early widowhood that defined Adaline's life repeated itself in the next generation. Earlene lost Clifford Sr. in 1962, at forty, leaving her to raise eight children alone. Adaline did not live to see that echo of her own story, but the resilience she modeled, the capacity to hold a family together without a husband, without a safety net, became the inheritance she passed to her daughter and her granddaughter. Three generations of women in this line faced the same test. All three held.