When Nellie May Trent’s family moved to Mesa in 1893, they lived in a tent. The 5-year-old worked alongside her mother washing other people’s clothes and shelling almonds in a factory. Her dresses were made from flour sacks.
To earn her way through Tempe Normal School, now Arizona State University, she milked cows before class. Through the years, she taught school, ran a hotel, started a water company and electric utility, piloted a riverboat and an airplane, and climbed one political ladder after another.
Born Nov. 29, 1888, in Cedar County, Missouri, Nellie learned early in life to shape her own destiny. After earning her teaching certificate in 1908, she taught in Mesa and Glendale before marrying trolley car conductor Joe Bush on Christmas Day 1912.
In 1915, Joe bought an interest in a ferryboat business shepherding passengers and freight across the Colorado River from the small community of Parker, Arizona, population 35. Nellie arrived in Parker six months pregnant to encounter unpaved roads, no electricity or running water, and only one telephone line for the entire town.
Life was not easy along the muddy Colorado River. As her due date approached, she hocked her wedding ring to afford a train ticket to Phoenix, where Wesley Bush was born on Sept. 11, 1915.
Nellie taught school in Parker and briefly stood in as principal. She also served on the Parker School Board.
In 1917, she and Joe built the Grandview Hotel. To lure people to their establishment, they bought a Model T Ford bereft of its top and windshield. Nellie drove down dirt roads posting signs advertising the small lodge, frequently stopping to fix a flat tire.
When the engine died and she discovered a broken timing spring, she plucked a wire from her corset to fix the vehicle.
It was the ferryboat, however, and the unpredictable Colorado River that sometimes brought Nellie to her knees. She earned the first riverboat pilot license issued to a woman in the United States in 1920, and did her share of navigating the rough waters.
“Waves sometimes would be over 8 feet high,” she said. “Often when we were caught on the river in a storm, we’d have to throw overboard some of the ore. Many a time when the sailing was dangerous and I thought about my baby in the pilot house, I’ve uttered a little prayer, ‘Now if you’ll just let me get this kid off of here alive, I’ll never bring him back on board again.’ But you forgot about that after the danger had passed.”
By now she was also serving as Parker’s Justice of the Peace and in 1920 she was elected Yuma County delegate to the Arizona House of Representatives.
To better serve her constituents, Nellie and 6-year-old Wesley moved to Tucson in 1921 so Nellie could attend the University of Arizona School of Law. Wesley would tell people, “Mother and I are both in the first grade.”
The professor ordered Nellie out of the classroom if a rape case issue was discussed, as he did not believe women had the constitution to hear such traumatizing issues. Nellie challenged the professor, asking if he had ever heard of a rape case that did not involve a woman. The professor let her stay.
She never graduated but was admitted to practice law in Arizona in 1923. Once her term in the Legislature was over, she set up practice in Parker and counted the city of Parker and the Southern Pacific Railway Co. among her clients.
In 1926, she was again elected to serve Yuma County in the House of Representatives. She proposed a bill to create a home for mentally challenged children and over Gov. George W.P. Hunt’s veto, she succeeded in establishing the Children’s Colony near Coolidge.
Nellie and Hunt often faced off across the aisle even though they were both Democrats.
“I never considered myself ‘his person,’” she once remarked, “and when it was necessary I stood up to be counted against him.”
She served on a joint Senate and House committee that investigated the Highway Department, which was found to be the governor’s personal political machine.
The Los Angeles Times called her a “thorn in the side of Gov. Hunt,” and she knew he threatened to “get me out of the Legislature one way or another.”
In 1931, teenager Wesley acquired an interest in aviation. Mother and son headed back to school to earn their pilots’ licenses and build Parker’s first airfield. After that, Nellie took to the skies when on the campaign trail.
She attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1932, expecting to nominate her friend, U.S. Sen. Isabella Greenway, as a vice presidential candidate, but was disappointed after support was thrown to John Nance Garner.
In 1934, Nellie was successful in her bid for a seat in the Arizona Senate but storm clouds were hovering over the Colorado River. Serving on the Arizona Colorado River Water Commission and later as a member of the Colorado River Basin States Committee, she was smack in the middle of controversy when Gov. Benjamin B. Moeur, objecting to California wanting more than its share of river water, proclaimed martial law along Arizona’s shores.
Moeur recruited Nellie and Joe’s steamers to ferry National Guard troops across the river to halt construction of Parker Dam.
The media exploded with news of a war between the two states. A photograph of Nellie at the helm of one of the boats appeared in newspapers across the county labeling her “Admiral of the Arizona Navy.”
Nellie announced her candidacy for a seat in the U.S. Senate when Isabella Greenway retired in 1936. “Vote for Nellie T. Bush, the best ‘man’ in the race for Congress,” proclaimed her campaign signs.
Losing in the Democratic primary, she returned to the Arizona House of Representatives in 1940.
Nellie died on Oct. 27, 1963. She won more elections than she lost, but was not above admitting her defeats. As she often said, “I always bounced back.”
