POKING FUN AT ARIZONA TERRITORY

Newspapers Poke Fun at Arizona Territory

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, panning Arizona was the thing to do, almost a national sport for newspapers on both coasts and some in between.

Editors and writers, then as now, were not independent thinkers. They reflected majority opinion, so when wild tales of the Territory were written and spoken-once, twice, a hundred times-they were accepted as true.

The slander not only twisted the truth, but took the most blatant lies and published them as news. If the article was about Arizona, it seemed, newspaper readers would believe just about anything. For example, The New York Tribune, in its day one of the nation's most influential papers, published a lengthy article describing a gunfight in Big Hat, Arizona, which is not, the paper stressed, "one of those places which tries to ape the effete ways of the East." The article described two prominent citizens meeting to settle a dispute: "Pulling their weapons, each principal seized a Chinaman by the pigtail, got behind him and holding him securely in position, blazed away. A dozen shots were exchanged, but neither combatant was injured."

The body of the Tribune story, published March 26, 1893, consisted of various editorial comments and satirical speculations about the reported gunfight. The New York reporter wanted to know if Chinamen are so numerous on the streets of Big Hat that they're always within reach if someone decided to open fire? What about the deplorable situation of a large man so unfortunate as to get hold of a small man for protection?

The reporter concluded by wondering if Big Hat hadn't been settled by Eastern misanthropes tired of being victimized by the "big hats" sitting in front of them in the theater: "Here [in Big Hat, Arizona] they may have formed a sort of colony, named their town after the common curse which brought them low, and now are engaged in trying to kill one another off."

How clever. Imagine the typical reporter of the day, sitting amid the chaos of a New York newsroom, wearing spats and a noisy tie. Blue cigarette smoke curls in front of his pasty face. He yanks a pocket watch from his vest, calculates the time remaining before deadline, hears the desperatefor-copy roar of his editor, so loud it makes the scribbler's straw hat vibrate, and he begins to form his story.

He fills it with commonplace racial nonsense and even works in the local angle. The boss will love that, he thinks, as he dumps the finished pages on His editor's desk, and off he goes for a boost at the tavern downstairs, never giving a second thought to the fictional incident he has created.

That's right. Big Hat, Arizona, never existed, and no such gunfight ever took place. Some readers might have figured that out, some not. The newspaper story played the hoax straight as a renegade's arrow.

The trashing of Arizona Territory often happened just that way-capricious, arbitrary, based on whim and stereotype by men who probably had never been West and couldn't find Arizona with a lantern.

Once formed, the wave was unstoppable, and what essentially was the same story was told again and again, only with different characters and circumstances. Such an approach was much easier than thinking.

Adapted from the book Rattlesnake Blues: Dispatches From A Snakebit Territory, volume 8 in the Wild West Collection published by Arizona Highways Books.