Peter Rainsford Brady
Peter Rainsford Brady (August 4, 1825 – May 2, 1902) was an American military officer, surveyor and politician.
Following a short service in the United States Navy he joined the Texas Rangers, where he served during the Mexican–American War and along the western frontier.
From Texas he moved westward where he became an early settler and political office holder in Arizona Territory.
Modern attempts to deal with his naval service are similarly confounded; notably, Texas Ranger handbooks and sites claim various things, that he graduated from the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, in 1844, and after a year's service resigned from the navy, or that he served as a midshipman, but not at the Academy.
Originally student naval officers, or midshipmen, began their careers in a more practical vein aboard a sailing ship of war.
The rank of Ensign as it exists today was not created until the Civil War, when it was resurrected from an earlier use.
Time spent at the Naval School and on voyages counted; thus the Academy was able to have graduates one year after its founding.
The Army and Navy Chronicle of April 18, 1844, reports the departure of the USS Plymouth to join the Mediterranean Squadron, then patrolling the Mediterranean to serve United States interests and prevent the re-institution of piracy along the Barbary Coast.
She was with the Mediterranean Squadron until October, 1846, too late for Brady to have been in the Class of 1846, if he was with her the whole time, which is questionable.
In 1846, Peter Brady, an urbane citizen of the nation's capital, well-educated and well-travelled in the Mediterranean region, left the United States Navy and the capital to travel to the desert country of West Texas, full of hostile Native Americans, never to return to the east, and never, in essence, to travel anywhere else except Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.
The Texans, needing a quick build-up of population, were offering free land in a large slice of West Texas.
It was the hunting grounds of a division called the Penateka Comanches, then understandably hostile to intrusion.
In despair, the new state sold the land to Adelsverein, a quasi-altruistic private company whose product was the facilitation of settlement of North Europeans in Texas.
John James Giddings (1821–1861), founder and owner, was one of a family of brothers from Pennsylvania who specialized in civil engineering in rough-and-ready circumstances on the frontier.
He had no training in working from a horse, roughing it in the wilderness, or fighting with a Colt .44 or Bowie knife, but he seems to have been popular with his companions.
[7] At the end of the war he lived for a short time in Jalisco, Mexico before returning to Texas.
During November of the same year, Lt. Col. Peter Hansbrough Bell recruited him to serve in a Ranger company protecting Texas' western frontier.
[6] When the team disbanded the next year in San Francisco, he formed the Arizona Mining & Trading Company and returned to the Gadsden Purchase, settling Tucson.
[7] With the outbreak of the American Civil War, Brady found himself one of the few Union supporters in the area.
[1] At the end of the war he returned to Tucson where he served as an Indian interpreter and two terms as sheriff.
[6] Later the same year he ran for Territorial Delegate to the United States House of Representatives but was narrowly defeated by Richard Cunningham McCormick.
The same year, he was appointed a special agent by the United States Department of the Interior to help with investigation of James Reavis' land grant claim.
