Shortly before her marriage to Erickson on January 24, 1887, Peterson purchased a log cabin from a local pioneer named Ja Hu Stafford and filed for a 160-acre homestead in Tucson, Arizona.

[1][2] The log cabin was located fourteen miles southeast of Fort Bowie in Bonita Canyon, a gorge in the Chiricahua Mountains.

It was never used; apart from a scare in 1890, when the Apache warrior Massai stole a horse from the Ericksons' neighbor, Stafford, there were no encounters with hostile Indians in Bonita Canyon.

It wasn't until July 1903, when Erickson became the first park ranger for the new Chiricahua National Forest, that he was able to move back to the ranch.

He spent about half of each year working from home and the rest at various ranger stations or the district headquarters in Paradise, on the other side of the Chiricahua Mountains.

[1][3] Between 1899 and 1915, Erickson and his family built a two-and-a-half-story ranch house with adobe and board-and-batten walls to replace their original log cabin.